Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)

The reason the Government is discovering on a daily basis that new issues about which it has not heard are appearing over the horizon is simply that the full impact of the global crisis has not been felt in Ireland yet. What we are experiencing is the effect of what was done by the Government. Despite all of the lectures from the other side of the House, before the rainbow Government left office in 1997 it was creating 1,000 jobs a week, inflation was low and the prospects were good. What did we get instead? We were ridiculed from the other side of the House because we were not generous enough and it was stated we should have given more and more. That is what the next Government did. It revved up the economy and ran it into the ground. What is it stating now? It is blaming the eurozone — the euro is to blame. Perhaps the planet is to blame. Everything is to blame, except the Government.

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