Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The Minister knows that in our joint constituency, even in a cheap shop, a bag of coal costs approximately €17. He could have acceded to the request of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which works at the coalface, to have at least doubled the fuel allowance, which would have only taken another €6.

Across Ireland, young people have to come to terms with a reality that their parents never thought would return. In the coming five to six weeks, thousands of young men and women and their proud parents will go to graduation ceremonies in universities and institutes of technology all over Ireland. Many will have failed to get jobs since they left college or will have stop-gap temporary jobs. Many graduates of earlier years — engineers, architects, scientists, accountants, surveyors and solicitors — have been let go during the past month. The best brains of a generation will feel as if the dream that so many have hoped for is slowly slipping away.

It has been an interesting three months for the two Brians. It has been interesting to watch both of them respond so belatedly to the new economic reality. They sat on their hands all summer until it was too late. Their first reaction to this crisis was traditional bluster, with the same old tired line over and over again: "The fundamentals of our economy are strong." In the same way, the bank regulator and the Governor of the Central Bank used to say: "The fundamentals of our banking system are strong." Every unemployed worker would love to have a euro for every time he or she heard that dreary slogan all through the spring and summer as jobs were lost and the banking crisis moved inevitably to a long-predicted meltdown.

I have every confidence we can steer ourselves out of this crisis. The whole world knows the Irish are a resilient race. One lesson we should learn is that we cannot steer ourselves out of this situation by heading in the same direction with the same failed policies. I do not fault the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, for all the problems we are facing now, but I fault his delay in waking up to their existence and his tardy response. I fault the economic philosophy the Government has slavishly followed for the past 11 years. It is a philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down. It is a philosophy that says even common sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise. It is a philosophy that lets vested interests — the speculators, the developers and the bankers — dictate our country's economic policy, so it worked for them instead of for our people. Let us be clear. What we have seen in the past few months is nothing less than the final verdict on this philosophy, a philosophy that completely failed the most basic stress test.

A Government less given to vanity and to lecturing the rest of the world on the brilliance of its economic achievements would have seen the dangers and prepared for them. The economy has become seriously unbalanced on the watch of the Taoiseach and the Minister. Basically, after months reassuring everyone that things were under control, the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen, now says the sky is falling and that to save the world we have to do exactly what he says. Why should we respect his word today? I heard his party constituency colleague, Deputy Sean Fleming, state on "Prime Time" last week that the people who led us into this mess are not the people to lead us out of it. He meant the failed bankers, but his words are no less pertinent with regard to the Taoiseach and his Ministers.

This budget is the legacy of the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen, to Irish families. The true cost will hang like a millstone around the necks of our people for years to come. The Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, referred to international events as though the then Minister, Deputy Cowen, was simply the victim of international events rather than being very culpable in regard to matters such as the property bubble. It was bad ministerial judgment, not international events, that created the costly decentralisation fiasco. It was bad ministerial judgment, not international events, that created the HSE fiasco — we are paying McKinsey consultants millions of euro to undo that Micheál Martin monument to bad governance. It was bad ministerial judgment, not international events, that made the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Cowen, continue to inflate the property bubble with tax breaks when every single warning shouted stop. It was bad ministerial judgment, not international events, that made the public finances so utterly dependent on an overheating house building sector.

I want to put one question to the Minister and I hope it will not bewilder him. I am sure he and the Taoiseach would want to be remembered not just for economic success, however elusive that seems in present circumstances, but also for a progressive record in advancing social justice, so let him answer the following simple question. After 12 years in power, why is income inequality still so deep and why is wealth inequality in assets worse than when the Government took office?

The Government has invented more tax breaks in a decade for the rich than their accountants can keep up with. It is a Government which has presided over a widening, not a narrowing, of inequalities of personal wealth. The top 1% now own more of the nation's wealth than they ever did. Property and land speculators have been the biggest beneficiaries of the Government's terms in power but the Government coaxed them on, regardless of the consequences.

I note the Minister reduced the top rate of stamp duty on commercial property from 9% to 6%. In a falling commercial market, there is merit in this but, at the same time, why did he not pay attention to the young couple stuck in their first house but who cannot afford to trade up? Why always go after the commercial interests of the big property developers?

One of the reasons we are not creating more businesses in this economy is the cost of rents. Most major commercial property is owned by the same large group of developers who have dominated Fianna Fáil's economic philosophy. The rents they charge are astronomical, but there is nothing in the budget that insists that property developers begin bringing rents down so that young people who want to start businesses can pay a reasonable and affordable rent.

At the outset, the Minister referred to the bank situation. To recall a phrase uttered by a colleague of his — I nearly said "former colleague" — Boston and Berlin now have one thing in common. They are both nationalising or part-nationalising their banks. It appears inevitable the Government will have to provide some mechanism to allow banks and financial institutions to recapitalise. If that is to be done it must be based on one clear proviso. The people will support decisions made by the Government to salvage the principal elements of the banking system but the Government and taxpayers must get what people who provide capital are entitled to, namely, a share in ownership so that all the gains of a successful rescue plan do not go to the people who made the mess in the first place but back to the taxpayers who made significant sacrifices to calm the situation down and rescue it.

The banks have to be made fit for purpose. We need to take a back-to-basics approach to the banking sector. The reformed financial system, built by the Government and paid for by the taxpayer, needs to be plain and old fashioned. In the United States it is called "plain vanilla finance". The banking system should be restored to its traditional role of supplying credit to the real economy, with as few complications or fancy products as possible. We need a system in which retail banks accept savings and make loans for regular businesses, large and small, and regular mortgages for families around the country, and where the complexity of financial products is strictly limited and subject to the kind of independent safety tests associated with new drugs or cars. That is serious hard-touch regulation and citizens will rightly insist on it as the price of any further rescue package.

Despite the huge rise in the budget deficit and the many spending cuts and tax increases outlined by the Minister, the budget's impact will probably be overshadowed in the next ten years by further tax increases to pay for bank bailouts. The Minister has said the unnecessarily wide-ranging bank guarantee will not cost taxpayers anything. He is wrong and taxpayers will pay the price for his, and the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen's, misjudgments.

The budget brings back many unhappy memories of an era we hoped would never return. One nasty feature of that era, which we only discovered years later through the tribunals, was the hidden offshore accounts. We remember Ansbacher man and his arrogant determination that taxes and sacrifices were for the little people only, while he and his friends lived in splendid luxury as their fellow citizens endured job losses, high taxes and emigration. What measures does the budget have to share the burdens of today? I see very few. There is no doubt the coping classes, people on PAYE earning between €40,000 and €80,000, will pay for the bulk of the measures in the budget. They will bear the brunt of the cutbacks and levies. When they go to an accident and emergency unit that cost will rise from €66 to €100. They will pay and pay. Why then are we not sharing any burdens in the budget? We tolerate the tax exiles who still dominate many sectors of the economy while refusing to contribute their share. We still riddle the tax codes with exemptions and breaks for the super rich, including the very people whose banking practices have brought us to the sorry state we are in today.

Most citizens have braced themselves for sacrifices. I am not at all sure that feeling is shared by our local "Masters of the Universe", who blithely demand cuts in public services to facilitate their unlimited greed and avarice. I wonder if that banker who expressed his desire to see cutbacks just after he had been bailed out will give the budget top marks. He will not suffer but many of the people he recommended should suffer, will. I wish I was more confident the Minister had some of those people in his sights today. All the talk of burden sharing is shallow unless people see clear evidence of it, but there is precious little such evidence in today's budget.

The present crisis bears the fingerprints of the extreme free-market advocates who have dominated economic thought for two decades. What is missing from the budget is a recognition that those two decades of freebooting, unregulated markets are over and that we are turning a page into a new period. The free marketeers always had a naive belief that free markets are always self-correcting and that markets left to themselves will always achieve the best results. They are the ideologues who believe any regulation of private business is fundamentally wrong. They are the ones who have resisted the regulation of financial markets and the supervision of financial institutions. They believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. Some members of Government have done much to undermine the ethos of the public service. They are so hostile to any notion of public service that they appear to forget the vast bulk of teachers, doctors and nurses are public servants. The motto of those ideologues is "Public service bad, private sector good".

When there is a crash the self-same ideologues argue we should cover their losses with the people's taxes. The same people always demand lower and lower taxes for themselves and many pay none at all. There is an alternative viewpoint and it is high time it was heard. It is one that recognises the importance of markets, but also recognises the limitations of markets. It recognises the role of the public good and market regulation. It values transparency, honesty, competition and innovation but does not encourage speculation or reward for merely short-term success. It is a political culture that values profit and productivity achieved through hard work, but does not endorse the ethic of the quick buck or the scheme nobody else knew about because it was in the small print of the tax code as a way of avoiding taxes.

I believe in incentives and rewards. I also believe trust and traditional ethical standards are essential elements of the financial and business system. I believe in the profit motive but I also believe in responsibility to the community where those profits are made. After a decade of so much squandered on the short term, we must encourage a much wider debate in the community on the role values play in economics and business. We need to have a debate on how we assess the long-term values of companies, their executives and their assets against their long-term performance, as opposed to the short-term asset bubbles we have experienced at such a high cost that are now wreaking so much devastation in the economy. This is very much a values debate; greed and mega profits as against a culture that values hard work and thinking about and preparing for tomorrow.

In many ways today is the epitaph of the Celtic tiger. I regret the lack of a universal child care system and the lack of provision for pre-school education. What can one say about the Greens? It is a bit like Norman Tebbit and "On your bike". We welcome the provision of €1,000 to buy a bike once every five years.

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