Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Yet again, the banks have not been cleared out. The boards and the executives who created this mess are still in place. There are 200,000 more people on the dole since the last general election but the top bankers keep their jobs. They are even resisting the salary restrictions which the Government belatedly imposed. This is astonishing. It would not happen in any other country. The Minister for Finance says he is going to tour the world telling people that Ireland has gotten its act together. He is going to repeat the fiasco of his London trip, when he managed to get the words "Ireland" and "crony capitalism" onto the front page of the Financial Times. Does he not think that international investors will want to know whether the banks he is saving have new management? Might I suggest he would be better off to actually deal with the problem, so that he might have some credibility in the matter.

This was never going to be an easy budget, but it could have been a far better and fairer one. Some weeks ago, the Government sought the co-operation of the Opposition parties in its construction. I made it clear to the Government that we were ready to engage constructively with it, not because we want in any way to preserve this Government, but because we want to preserve the country. We stood ready to act in the national interest, but the Government decided to play politics instead. Our offer of co-operation was treated with contempt. Over the weeks it became clear that the Government was not serious about engaging with the Opposition.

The Taoiseach's actions in this matter have been ill-considered and deeply unwise. It is a dangerous precedent for a Government to seek co-operation from the Opposition at a time of national crisis and then to play political games when that co-operation is forthcoming. Had the Taoiseach been willing to listen to us, we would not be faced with this appalling mess of a budget.

On 3 March, members of the Cabinet were told the bad news about the February Exchequer returns. Apparently they were taken by surprise. Their immediate reaction was to declare to the world that they stood by their deficit target of 9.5% of GDP. We were treated to stout declarations about the importance of this target to their credibility and to the international markets, and how the Government was determined to stick to that target come what may. That has all gone now, however, because as the Labour Party pointed out at the time, sticking to that target was impossible. Even the 10.75% target means inflicting extremely harsh medicine on an economy that is already on life support.

What those robust declarations of early March show is a Government that did not have the first idea of what it was talking about. The Government has repeatedly made the wrong judgment calls on the economy and was willing to guarantee €440 billion in bank liabilities in the same vainglorious attitude.

There are positives in this budget. Many of the ideas the Labour Party has advanced have been embraced, if only half-heartedly. We were the first to call for a multi-annual approach to the fiscal crisis and for new direct measures to protect jobs. We called for more to be done to promote high-tech start-ups. We have campaigned for years for pre-school education for all our children. We campaigned against the super-private clinics and, at last, it seems that these have been dropped, although only as a by-product of the ending of tax relief for investment in them. Some of our ideas have been acknowledged; the boxes have been ticked, but only half-heartedly.

Ireland is a great country. We had a thriving economy and we can have one again. We can have a better, fairer society. We can create new jobs and new industries. We can work our way through this crisis as one Ireland and we remain one Ireland, but this budget will achieve none of these things. In the end, the Government that brought us to the economic morass will not get us out of it.

Two days ago, the Taoiseach asked all his Ministers of State to resign their offices on 21 April. I wish each of them well personally, but the honourable thing for the Taoiseach and his Government to do is for all of them to resign. This would give the electorate an opportunity to decide who should now be governing this country. It would provide a new mandate for a Government to get to grips with the country's serious problems. It would give the country a fresh start politically with a new Government, so we can make a fresh start to solving this country's serious economic problems.

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