Tommy Broughan (Dublin North East, Labour)

-----and indebted our people for decades and perhaps generations? Was the Department of Finance on the bridge when that happened? How can I accept its predictions when it has been wrong year after year on so many issues, including tax returns and gross domestic product? Will the yield, for example, be a great deal higher than it predicts? We had the balance right when we were in the territory of 40% capital taxation, whereby people who had made serious gains were required to give some of that super-normal profit back to the people, the community and the State. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Ahern, the former Tánaiste, Deputy Harney, and former Deputy McCreevy dismantled all that during their great 11-year regime. They ran the budget on a phoney basis, relying on the property bubble. That is the central problem we experienced. Today we are told, and we will be told over the next week, that working families on €40,000 or €50,000 and much less will be paying for this for the rest of their lives. That is what the Minister has done in his pay-back budget, and the Government will be paid back on 5 June - it had better believe it.

I do not know where Deputy Varadkar has been over the past year and a half or two years, but his Milton Friedman-Chicago school economic system has collapsed. It has fallen apart; it has failed.

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