Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

That is the tragedy in which we find ourselves. Catastrophic policy failures have put us in the hole we are in. Anyone who seeks to deny that is engaged in self-deception, my constituency colleague not least among them.

The truth is that far from containing the property bubble, the Government stoked it. The truth is that far from regulating the excesses in banking, the Government turned a blind eye. The truth is that far from protecting export competitiveness, which is vital to our long-term survival, the Government created inefficiency in wide ranges of the public sector. Ours became the highest costs for electricity, waste and virtually all other services delivered by government. The Government destroyed jobs. Far from ensuring sustainability in our public finances, the Government created, as it now admits, a structural deficit that is 8% to 10% of GNP. "Structural deficit" means it was created by Fianna Fáil. It was created by bad Government policy decisions that had nothing to do with the state of the economy. That is what the Government created.

These are policy problems to which the Government is unwilling to face up. Far from creating the sort of public service that would reform, deliver excellence and efficiency, the Government undermined our public service. The Government introduced benchmarking that had no regard to delivery of reform. It introduced decentralisation that had no regard to the capacity of the public services to be cost effective and deliver in a coherent way. It was all about political strokes.

The Government introduced the HSE, which was not about creating a lean and mean machine to deliver health services but which was involved in a huge, super command and control bureaucracy where the Government, led by the Taoiseach, decided that all administrators in place would stay in place. The primary rationale for a HSE, which was to strip out layers of bureaucracy, was abandoned by the Government on the first day.

If Fianna Fáil speakers came in and stated that the Government managed the property bubble well, managed the banking situation well, managed public service delivery well and managed the public finances well, there would be some sense in them saying the public had confidence in them, but they cannot make any of those statements. When the warnings that this is unsustainable came from international bodies from which the Government now seeks to find succour, the Government dismissed them contemptuously. The former Taoiseach stated those people should be thinking of committing suicide. That was the mindset that Fianna Fáil had created in government. It was a mindset that saw buying out problems instead of resolving them as the way to go. It meant that the powerful people were protected from scrutiny, whether in the banks, in high places in public utilities or wherever. It meant hot air strategies that failed such as the failed health strategy, the failed climate change strategy, the failed decentralisation strategy and the failed e-voting strategy. No one took responsibility for any of those failures. That is the culture Fianna Fáil created and that culture has created an unprecedented crisis in this economy. That is the legacy the Government brought to the electorate.

Fianna Fáil and Green Party speakers look around at the fallen warriors in the battlefield, the Fianna Fáil and Green Party councillors who have been devastated. Almost 100 of their number are gone, between the two parties. What does the Government see? It thinks these were tough decisions that the people did not understand. These great international authorities, the Taoiseach tells us, are now stating that Ireland is wonderful and is facing up to its problems. Yet, the Irish people, Fianna Fáil thinks, are so foolish they cannot understand this wonderful strategy that Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have adopted. Ministers should get real. If they think that the Irish people do not see what is going on, they are sadly disillusioned and inadequate in their response.

People understand what is happening out there. They get it. The Government does not get it. They see their jobs going up in smoke. They see their mortgages way beyond their house prices. They see their pensions having disappeared because the stock markets have collapsed in the economy mismanaged by the Government. That is what they see. They get it all right. They understand why we are in the hole we are in. Just as the ESRI stated a substantial part of this responsibility lies with the Government, it understands that these catastrophic policy failures were made on the Government's watch.

Minister after Minister comes in here and states that people do not understand the tough decisions the Government is taking. The Ministers should get real, wake up and smell the coffee. People understand. They get it and they want the Government gone because they know also that the Government does not understand. The Government does not get it. The Government does not get the change that must now happen in this community. That is what is wrong. That is why the Government parties were defeated. It was that legacy of policy ineptitude but also the denial in which the Government continues to be.

Why do people say about bankers that those who led us into this banking crisis must go and cannot lead us out? It is partly because there should be accountability and responsibility, and those who have failed us should take the knock. There is another reason. It is because of the emotional attachment to the failed systems those who were in control when things went wrong continue to have. They are continually on the defensive trying to pretend that nothing really went wrong, that with a little tweaking here and there, everything would have been all right.

Everything will not be all right for Ireland if the Government continues in that mindset. Everything that I have heard, from the Taoiseach down, in this debate tells me that the Government still holds to that mindset and does not understand that this country is facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions, the likes of which we have not seen in a generation. This crisis will rob our people of 500,000 jobs - which some would say is a conservative estimate if policies continue as they are - by the time it is over, leave pension funds in a shambles across the State, and leave many families unable to pay their mortgages and facing repossession. It is time for Ministers to face up honestly to their role in the creation of that problem and to how we get ourselves out of this.

Fine Gael has a good reason for seeking this debate. It is the very same reason Ministers say bankers should no longer continue to run the banks that brought us into this crisis. It is because those who have brought us in are not the ones to take us out. They do not understand what it takes. They do not understand, and are unwilling to face up to, the changes we as a community need to make.

What are the traits of a Government in which we could have confidence? First among them would be honesty and the willingness to accept when policy was dramatically wrong. Decentralisation, the creation of the Health Service Executive and the management of public finances and bank regulation were wrong. We must first understand that the system is broken. The House is broken, as no proper scrutiny of public expenditure is carried out within it, a position that the Government continues to defend. Honesty and the realisation that something is wrong comprise the first trait.

Second, there must be accountability so that, when something fails, a Minister must acknowledge it and accept responsibility. However, Ministers are not willing to do so. We also need courage if we are to face up to necessary change when inept Ministers must go. We need the courage to restructure agencies and to close non-performing programmes. We must face up to the fact that we need a different approach to the management of the public service. Managers who fail and cannot hack it must ship out. This type of thinking is foreign to Fianna Fáil. It must change in this respect, but it is unable to do so.

We need some sense of vision instead of Fianna Fáil's tribal response to this debate, that is, everything stated and proposed by Fine Gael and Labour is, ipso facto, nonsense and magic. We are in this hole because of such responses. We need radical change, but the Government has not discussed it. Nor has it discussed the concept of new politics or how the Dáil could change to confront the problems and crises that we face. There is no talk of a new social contract on helping workers who are going through this extraordinary maelstrom to manage the risks more effectively and to make the ordeal easier for them in terms of access to training, protecting pensions and workplace flexibility.

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