Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

Perhaps the consequence is the empty Chamber today, as the rest have been banished. Are we meeting our targets at the Department of Defence? The sad truth is that if the NDP was to be the centre piece of the Government's strategy, then it had to do what it said at the outset of the strategy, namely, to manage current spending within the capacity of the economy to deliver. Instead, the Government introduced huge spending programmes on the back of unsustainable property revenues. Now we are right up against EU borrowing limits at a time when Ministers should be bringing forward good projects to take up the slack in our building industry and the slack created by other industries falling by the wayside. We are not in that position. The Taoiseach and his Ministers have sabotaged the capacity of this economy to deal with the economic downturn.

The consequence of all this is clear. More people will lose their jobs than normally should be the case. More old, sick and disabled people will suffer cuts in their public services than should. The reason for that goes back to the shoddy way in which the Government has been managed for years. Ordinary people are paying the price, and not the Ministers comfortably strapped into their Mercedes. When we hit the wall, it will be those vulnerable people who once again will feel the pinch. We have already seen it this year, as older people and people with disabilities have been turned away from services. That is just the start. We will see a continuation of that trend, because this Government does not have a credible medium-term strategy that can get us out of this hole. They keep doing what they have always done, and that is just not good enough.

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