Fergus O'Dowd (Louth, Fine Gael)

——the window cleaner, the person who cleans the Taoiseach's office, the contract cleaner who cleans the windows every day. They have to have tax clearance certificates while inside that building sits a Taoiseach who does not have one. The reason he does not have one goes back to the 1990s. That is the nub of this question and that is what this country is left with and what we are here to debate. That is why we are present and why Members on the other side are absent. The truth is the Mahon tribunal has been inquiring into planning and political corruption for the past ten years.

When we look around this House we see images of the men of 1916 who brought about the revolution that set up this State. I read over Christmas the historic debates in this House on all sides, that included contributions from the likes of William Cosgrave, Eamon de Valera and Tom Johnson who came here, argued and fought and eventually worked together for a true, clean and proper democracy, who built up and handed to us, through our parents an honest and decent Government of all sides. That is what they gave us but that is not what we have had from this Fianna Fáil Party.

We have had Charles Haughey, a Taoiseach for many years, about whom a tribunal outlined line after line and page after page of donations, none of which was declared, all to maintain and sustain a lifestyle which was totally and absolutely unacceptable and anathema to those people who voted for him. We now have a Government led by a Taoiseach who does not have a tax clearance certificate. That is what this is all about.

Who is supporting this Government? Who are the peg-holders of the tent in Ballybrit who are showing the green sign on the road to the tent in Ballybrit in Galway? None but the Green Party. When the Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Deputy Sargent, was leader of the Green Party the information about his life in politics included the information that when he was given £100 by a builder in north County Dublin he went into the chamber of Dublin County Council and when he raised the issue he was attacked from all sides. Sadly, that note has now disappeared from Deputy Sargent's CV. I do not know where it is gone but it certainly was not there tonight when I went looking for it.

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