Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

The Taoiseach seems to think he can wish away the number of people who are out of work because of the number of days and so on they are on the live register. If he wants to get into the figures, there are also people who are unemployed but not on the live register because they no longer receive benefits and they are no longer reflected in the figures. The reality is the number of people out of work is increasing.

The Taoiseach has argued repeatedly that somehow we are the unwitting victim of some global forces that have hit this country from out of the blue that he did not see coming. This is a very Irish recession. Ireland was the first to go into recession. We went into recession on 1 January 2008 followed by the rest of the eurozone on 1 April 2008 and the UK on 1 July 2008. All these countries are coming out of recession. The US came out of recession on 30 June last year, France and Germany exited recession on 31 March last year and the UK, the last of the G7 countries to come out of recession, exited on 30 September 2009 but we are still stuck in recession.

The economic principle the Taoiseach's Government has inflicted on this country is that when it comes to recession, we are first in and we are last out. The reason for that is due to the fact that his incompetent Government got us into this problem in the first place and it is not due to global forces. There is a complacency in Government, particularly since the budget. We have this attitude of wanting to hear the praise from the embedded and that we have turned the corner and we are out of recession. Tell that to the 319 people who have lost their jobs every day since the beginning of this year. Tell that to the almost 440,000 people on the live register. Tell the one of out every three young men on the dole or their worried parents that we are out of recession and we are turning the corner.

I want us to be out of recession and I want recovery quickly, as does everybody——-

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