Liz McManus (Wicklow, Labour)

This budget is exerting a terrible price on working families. The people who are rearing their children, paying their taxes and trying to do the right thing are paying for the sins of Fianna Fáil. The rainbow coalition Government gifted Fianna Fáil a growing, successful economy and the first budget surplus, thank to the work of the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Ruairí Quinn. In the intervening years, Fianna Fáil destroyed a successful economy built on exports and the innovation and hard work of our people.

Fianna Fáil and the Green Party are not content with the burden now pressing down on families. Like a shoal of marauding sharks, they will come back in the next budget to tax children's allowances, impose a property tax and increase the tax burden. The most serious aspect of this budget is not its unfairness but the fact that it is merely an accounting exercise. It contains nothing that is constructive. We desperately need a jobs strategy but this budget means thousands more will join the dole queues. In Bray, the town where I live, unemployment has risen by 150% in 12 months. That is unsustainable. The county in which I live has 4,000 small and medium enterprises. If each was encouraged and supported to employ one additional worker, an enormous difference would be made. If a portion of the €21,000 required to keep someone on the dole was spent on delivering a job in the private sector, we would deliver value for money and help to rebuild the economy. While few of the country's 170,000 small businesses are in the high-technology sector, many could expand if given State support to take on workers.

Even in the public sector, the decisions made by this Government are hurting people badly. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Deputy Gormley, has instructed local authorities not to renew temporary contracts. This has led to a ludicrous situation whereby my local recycling centre is threatened with closure and its six staff are facing unemployment. The Bray recycling centre won an award for the best centre in the country thanks to the dedication of its excellent staff. A Green Party Minister who lectures the rest of us about recycling is presiding over this disgraceful decision. It begs the question of what the Minister is for. He sits in his office while local authority staff are clearing off their desks and signing on the dole. Administrative staff, road sweepers, building workers and, now, environmental staff are losing their jobs. Have Green Party Members been reduced by their Fianna Fáil masters to cannon fodder to make up the numbers and take the blame for the loss of recycling facilities, disabled persons grants, local authority houses and cuts in water schemes and road improvements? That may be not the reason why the Green Party entered Government but it is clearly what it has become.

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