Billy Timmins (Wicklow, Fine Gael)

The Minister of State may well smile to himself but history will show that Fianna Fáil will, for good reason, go the way of the Liberal Party and Irish Nationalist Party. Recent Fianna Fáil-led Governments have done to Ireland what Osama Bin Laden has tried to do to the western world for the past decade, namely, they have destroyed it.

It is governments rather than financial regulators or central banks which are responsible for countries. Fianna Fáil-led Governments assisted in destroying this country in recent years. The Government was punished on Friday last, not for taking the hard decisions but for the failure to take any decision until recent times and then for taking incorrect decisions. I am confident history will bear me out.

The Government has had many failures which have been outlined by many speakers. I will mention a few, the first of which is early intervention in education. This Government, at a time of unprecedented wealth, has not improved the literacy standards in primary education. It has not sought to address the many difficulties of children in primary education which ultimately lead to a cohort of people who are outside the system, which leads to juvenile delinquency and an increase in the crime level. We have a curriculum that cannot be implemented by teachers. I note the presence of the former Minister for Education and Science, Deputy Mary Hanafin. Many teachers cannot identify reading difficulties of children and nothing has been done. For ten years I have articulated this view. There are children who suffer from dyslexia who go in one end of the system and come out the other having got no assistance.

This Government also failed in the proper provision of child care facilities. Around this country there are hundreds of white elephants being constructed on open ground for child care facilities to take the children of people who are going out to work but who no longer have jobs. These facilities are being constructed as stand-alone facilities. At the time, I pleaded with the Minister to have them as add-ons to local community centres and to education facilities. When Mr. Mike Malott and his "Prime Time" team get on the road on this topic there will be a great display of facilities empty like the old western towns of the mid-west, with no control structure in place and no one knowing who is responsible for them.

On basic facilities, I saw a survey recently on Bray. The new swimming pool, which is very welcome, is used by in the region of 18% of the people once every three months and the promenade is used by 90% of the people. The money put into many of our facilities went into very specialised areas. I pleaded with the previous Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism when a great deal of funding was being given out to sporting facilities that there should be a running track or walking track where parents or children could walk in the evening time, but this also was not done.

In the next few years there will be hundreds of houses demolished in counties such as Laois, Roscommon, Leitrim and Longford. They were built without there being any demand for them, purely on speculation, and on an economy built on sand because the constructor of the economy was a Fianna Fáil-led Government that did not put in place a foundation.

It is not today or yesterday that the Opposition has been wise. I have listened to my colleague, Deputy Richard Bruton, speak on several budgets about the unsustainability of the economy and about the fall in competitiveness. While this was happening, what was the Government doing? Ministers such as the Minister of Defence, Deputy Dea, were standing on Shannon Bridge greeting the morning traffic and waving good-bye to the evening traffic, putting their entire energies into re-election rather than doing the job. The Irish people did not elect Ministers such as Deputy O'Dea. The Taoiseach should not have appointed Ministers to go down the country to cut ribbons or to open off-licences in Leitrim. That is not what people were elected to do and it is about time a generation of politicians took on this task and did the job for which they are elected. We must examine such matters.

I heard one of the new junior Ministers speak this morning about the work-fare concept rather than welfare. The greatest possessions a person can have are a job and his or her self-esteem. There are 500,000 people out of work at present.

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