Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

What all this amounts to is that the Taoiseach wants to take credit for the good times and no responsibility for the recession. The Taoiseach's and the Government's problem over the past several years is not, as they claim, that they did not see the recession coming, but they would not listen. As recently as July 2007, the Taoiseach's predecessor told a conference in Bundoran that he did not know why people who engaged in cribbing and moaning about the economy did not commit suicide. He described anyone who expressed any criticism of the Government's economic performance as a creeping Jesus. The former Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, described anybody who questioned what the Government was doing with tax breaks for property development and so on as left-wing pinkos. He advised the country to party on. The Government partied on and now there is a hangover. It is payback time, but those who are being asked to pay back are the taxpayers. The reality is that no other country has gone from our budgetary surpluses to the kind of deficits we have currently. The Government, led by the Taoiseach, has walked this country into an economic recession and there is no point in trying to blame it on international circumstances.

We know there are international factors, but the economic policies pursued by the Government contributed to the specific problem we have — particularly the over reliance on residential construction in recent years when everybody could see that it was not sustainable. More and more air was blown into the balloon and eventually it burst, which is why we are where we are today. Instead of the bluster we are getting from the Taoiseach and the kind of political slagging——

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