Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

She has had the brass neck to call on everyone to share the pain of public spending cutbacks to finance her friends in the private health care industry. Shame on the intent she has driven with the support of Fianna Fáil throughout all of these years. This hypocritical approach to our public deficit has led to the collapse of the partnership talks and has resulted in the Government imposing cutbacks in health, education, transport and other vital public services.

Given the Government's almost complete obsession with cutting back on public spending, not a single thing has been done for workers or small and medium sized firms in this jurisdiction over the past six months. In the past four weeks we have seen Dell announce 1,900 job losses with a further related 4,000 jobs to go. A total of 400 workers have been made redundant in Dundalk and, only last Monday, it was announced that 750 workers in Ulster Bank will join the growing queues at our social welfare offices. We have a crisis in Waterford Crystal that the Government has done almost nothing about and our SMEs are still being strangled by the credit drought due to the Government's failure to put pressure on the banks.

A crisis is still developing with our mortgages and, despite calls from economists and examples of a number of other countries launching initiatives to help struggling mortgage holders, the Government has yet to come up with a single concrete proposal. We are willing to provide the Government with ideas to tackle the deficit in our finances if it is willing to listen. Only last week I outlined a number of possible steps in the House but to date I have been given no response by the Minister because the Government's attitude to this Dáil and the voices in this Chamber from the Opposition benches is, "We will go through the motions. We will not listen and we will not heed. We will do it our way", as the Taoiseach indicated last week. He will do it his way and nobody else's opinion matters.

However, it is not simply a question of balancing the books; it also about producing proposals to get the economy moving again and, thereby, raise additional revenue. There is a need for a job creation strategy, as I have repeated, and there is a need for the State to take a real lead role in our telecommunications infrastructure and our gas resources, given the failure of private companies to enhance our economy in those areas one whit. The real front line in this economic crisis is not here in the Dáil or in the partnership talks. It is in the workplace where workers face cuts in income, if they are lucky, and redundancy, if they are not.

I take this opportunity to express solidarity with the workers occupying Waterford Crystal and to support their demand that this flagship Irish industry be saved. Government intervention is needed and deserved. This is one immediate example of the type of leadership the Government is expected to give. People are watching and they will, unfortunately, continue to watch while the Taoiseach trundles out the type of medicine he has offered this afternoon as his response to the current crisis. Get real and look at the way this can be addressed. A job creation strategy is the only way to do it.

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