Dáil debates

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Confidence in Government: Motion (resumed)

 

11:00 am

Photo of George LeeGeorge Lee (Dublin South, Fine Gael)

The mandate this Government claims for itself is not real. It has the same mandate as I to speak on the people's behalf and to work to make things better. I acknowledge it wants to do that as much as I do. Fianna Fáil has an agreement to govern with the Green Party and a group of Independent Deputies based on what people thought would be fair weather in terms of our economic performance. That is no longer the case, however. Since the programme for Government was published, 267,000 people have joined the dole queues. The tax system which the programme promised to make fairer is now up in the air. A promise was made to cut the PRSI rate by half but we now have income levies and increased health levies. As the landscape is completely different, the agreement is false and it does not focus on the core issue of the people who are in danger of being locked out of the labour market. It is our responsibility to do something for them first.

There is a great deal of truth in what the Government says about taking the time to fix the banks before fixing the economy, and I am not so arrogant as to claim I know exactly how to solve that problem. I am humble enough to be aware that no economist knows the answer to that. However, while we try to figure out the solution to the banking problem, the credit supply for the rest of the economy is drying up. Like the supply of blood to the extremities of the body, when the flow of credit dries up the extremities of an economy will fall off. Parts of our economy will have died by the time the Government has figured out how to restart the flow of credit. Nowhere near enough is being done. I do not imply that it is not worth focusing on the banks or on the public finances but we are not giving sufficient attention to unemployment and that is why I am here. I do not have faith in the Government's approach to this issue because it did nothing while unemployment was rising.

It is all about people. I fundamentally believe that if we fix the people we will fix the banks. If we focus on the people, the growth in the economy will be from the ground up. It is not the same as the 1980s because we cannot say now that the problem comes from the public finances. The banks in Ireland and internationally were not broken in the 1980s. We need a different approach. The Government needs a different agreement but it cannot have one because it has not lived up to its responsibility.

One of the things I said to so many people of the Dublin South constituency over recent weeks was that my difficulty with power is the issue of responsibility. When a person has something powerful like a gun it is about how they use that power; it is about the responsibility with which he or she uses it. I look at the Government and I know its Members understand they have a responsibility and they try to live up to it but they have failed to do so. They have taken very poor decisions throughout a number of years; they claimed there was no recession until last July and they looked at a completely mismanaged and unbalanced economy for a number of years, which was very obvious to anybody with two eyes in their head, and ultimately ignored it. Six out of ten of every male jobs created in the five years up to the crash were in the construction sector; it was completely unbalanced. In failing to deal with that imbalance the Government failed to live up to its responsibility and by doing so it has lost the trust of the people.

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