Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

That is what the Minister did yesterday to middle income families. Everywhere they turn there is a tax or levy. They are faced with increased taxation by Fianna Fáil in government. This is a declaration of war on the middle classes. It is also a war on the future. The Minister has driven a stake through the heart of education. The Government went around the country last year holding public meetings where thousands of people turned up. To these meetings it sent Ministers' representatives and letters, pledging to reduce class sizes because it believed in giving parents, teachers and children the best opportunity to provide for the future. The Government has driven a stake through that and its collapse of its commitment to decrease class sizes at a time of pressure like this is contradictory to what has just been said, that the Government wants to build a knowledge future with well qualified, confident young people who are able to stand on their own feet against their peers from around the world. That cannot be done with increasing class sizes and the withdrawal of teachers of English in classes where many students have no English, which Deputy Hanafin was forced to pledge when she was Minister for Education and Science. The Government has made it harder on middle-income and lower-income families and on children in the primary sector, who will struggle even more as they go through secondary school and up to when they must compete internationally.

The claims that the Government wants to build a knowledge economy are not worth the paper they are written on. They are like most other Fianna Fáil promises, broken promises. It was an election winner to say we wanted to become a knowledge economy. The Ministers should go around the country — as many of them do, or are driven around the country — and look at the lack of broadband and communications capacity to do business. They should examine the structure of IT facilities in schools and the reneging on the €252 million in the programme for Government that was to be spent on that. They should look at the divergence of capacity and skill level across the educational spectrum. If the Government bothered to look, it would see that we struggle and yesterday's decision will make it even worse.

Yesterday, my colleague, Deputy Bruton, described the budget as hitting "any family and every family, any business and every business". He is right, just as he was right in recent years when he highlighted the failure to manage soaring Government expenditure, the failure to reform the public sector when the need for reform was clear, the danger of building spending programmes on the back of temporary tax windfalls from an overheating property market and the failure to take hard decisions. Deputy Bruton pointed those out. Yesterday I read his critique of the 2002 budget. It is very similar to the present position, except this situation is even worse. Similar warnings came from the IMF, the OECD, the ESRI and the Central Bank. Anybody could have seen these warning signs. Ten years ago in County Clare a young economist, Mr. David McWilliams, predicted seven years of plenty followed by a period of bust when five principal elements would apply, such as breaking the growth and stability pact, the destruction of the housing sector and the collapse of the banks. The Government and the Taoiseach did nothing about it. The Taoiseach did laps of honour when his predecessor left and he was entitled to some lap of honour on taking up office. He took the ball from European business and his speech here about being at the heart of Europe is very far from Fianna Fáil's effort in that campaign last summer.

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