Kathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)

There is not a person reaching maturity in Ireland who is not terribly worried about the situation in which we find ourselves, and that is as it should be. We really do not know how or when we will come out of this, but we know what brought us here and it is important that we analyse that aspect.

Recently I visited another country in severe weather. That country did not stop and I envied its transport and health systems. This is a country at which, I suppose, the Minister of State, Deputy Mansergh, and I would look at and say thank God it has joined the European Union because that will bring it on and it will benefit in the same way as Ireland. That country had better transport, health and education systems than Ireland, and it had a better social and moral fibre, yet it is a country which we looked on as being not as developed as Ireland.

The question we need to ask ourselves, which everyone is asking and which the Labour Party has been trying to get the Government to answer for a number of years, is what we did with the money generated during the boom. What we did with that money is what brings us to this point. We gave away that boom money and had a party, which brings us to Charlie McCreevy. We encouraged people, by way of tax reductions and incentives, to drive on an economy that was based on one single aspect. We did not put in place a good transport system and no matter what money we threw at our health service, we did not improve it. God help us with our education system, which is worse than it has been in the past 20 years.

When the economy took a downturn, what did we do? First, we attacked the elderly, the very people who had ensured we had the wherewithal to have a boom in the first place, but we rowed back on that. Next we attacked people with a disability. We decided that they would no longer be entitled to the disability allowance at 16 and would have to wait until they were aged 18, but we rowed back on that. The next target was children with special needs in school, but we have not rowed back on that. Those children, the ones who need the type of expertise we can provide to ensure they have some quality of life in the future, must now survive in classes bigger than we originally intended — 27 on average — with no special needs class.

Our next target is the public service and the Civil Service. No one in this country does not realise that we must do something because we are in serious trouble. However, what these people say, and what we agree with, is that it is deeply unfair. It is the unfairness of scapegoating one sector in society that creates the anger. The attacks on the Civil Service and the public service did not begin in the newspapers. They began with politicians demanding that they be brought to heel as if in some way they had run riot in the country when we all know that is not true.

We need to take hold of what is happening in this country. The Government, still deeply affected by the influence of the Progressive Democrats, who, I remember well, insisted on light-touch regulation and lower rates of tax and also insisted that we privatise our health service, must take hold of the situation and deal with it in an equitable fashion.

I think it was Abraham Lincoln who stated that there are only two certainties in life, death and taxes. There is only one equal system that should apply, which is taxation. With taxation comes all of the protections. One cannot tax people on low incomes, because they are outside the net, while people who are in the system have protection regarding health expenses, if they can claim them back, and mortgage relief. It is the unfairness of what the Government is doing that creates the anger. This country — it has done it before on several occasions — is prepared to accept pain and that every one of us must put our backs to the wheel, but there is only one mechanism to do so, which is fair taxation.

Another matter has brought us to this point. I heard the exact same arguments ten years ago about the employment of women as I hear now about appointments to boards, that there simply were not enough qualified candidates. That is utter rubbish. It was a little golden circle. When government becomes that involved and embedded in industry, and when it becomes part and parcel of the golden circle, then there can be no result other than what we see today.

We need the Government to start clearing out those boards and people to start having trust in them. One would not trust a bank that did what these people have done with the few bob one saved all one's life on which one must rely as a pension, and one is quite right not to trust them. Share prices dropped again today. This is because, basically, the markets do not believe what the Government is saying. The boards should be cleared out. There are enough talented people out there in the world who could take those positions. It is not rocket science. Given the salaries they were paying themselves, applicants will be queuing up at the door.

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