Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

It is the Government's job to manage what is happening in the economy. We now have a very hard landing. It has not come entirely as a surprise because everybody has known that there was going to be a landing of some kind at some stage. For a number of years economists and commentators have been speculating on the prospect of whether we were going to have a soft landing. It was his Government's job to manage the economic affairs of this country so there would be a soft landing, and he did not do that.

On telling us what we said in 2000-01, I can go back further than that. As far back as the late 1990s, when the property market was taking off, when house prices were shooting up and were moving way beyond the reach of working families to afford, the Labour Party put it to Government that what was happening in housing was not sustainable. We argued, for example, for controls on the price of development land and on building land, all of which the Government rejected. The Government continued to keep the party going, to keep it moving, to keep the speculation in building land, to keep the profiteering in housing, to keep driving house prices beyond what they were worth and what people could afford and, ultimately, it ended up driving residential construction way beyond what was needed or what was sustainable. Two or three years ago, people could see what was happening.

One looks around the country. Was it sustainable to build suburban housing estates around the edges of villages? It clearly was not. Was it sustainable to build apartment blocks in places where there was never apartment living and would never be apartment living? The only reason they were being built there was that the owners of them were able to benefit from section 23 relief and to carry that into other properties as well.

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