Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

There are only a handful of people in the country who really care about this exercise in spin with which we have been presented this afternoon. They are the people who have been selected for bigger office and a bigger car. I congratulate the Ministers elect, Deputies Carey and Killeen, for whom I have personal regard.

This Government does not care about the purpose of governing; it cares only about power. This exercise is not about the revival of the economy or the revival of the country but the survival of Fianna Fáil in Government for a longer period of time than this country can afford. The purpose of Government should be to reflect the will of the people, their values, hopes and aspirations and it should be to lead and to navigate this country out of the treacherous waters in which we now find ourselves. Above all, it should to serve the people to put the national community first before party politics or individual egos. On all three counts this Fianna Fail-Green Party Government has failed. This is a Government without a mandate. No Government since the foundation of the State has had such low approval ratings. With almost nine out of ten people indicating they do not support this Government, it no longer reflects the will of the people and certainly does not reflect their values.

Irish people do not want their future and their children's future mortgaged to NAMA. They do not want to take on the massive debts of reckless property developers who lived high on the boom and are protected by their Fianna Fáil friends in the bust. This Government cannot lead. To lead, one needs to get people to row in behind one. Instead, this Government has repeatedly sown division, pitched public sector against private sector and targeted children, mothers, the unemployed, the poor, the elderly, the disabled and others who rely on public services for their quality of life. It has put its own needs and those of the governing parties before the needs of people.

The Government was re-elected in 2007 on a set of promises, central to which was an assertion, made by the Taoiseach more than most, that only the Fianna Fáil Party could manage the economy. On 14 May 2007, when the Taoiseach and then Minister for Finance launched his party's economic policy he stated: "People know what they vote for when they vote for Fianna Fáil. They know precisely what they are voting for." He also indicated that his party's policies were based on "responsible budgets" and his Government would pass on the country "effectively debt free" to the next generation. He pledged €844 million worth of tax cuts annually, including the halving of PRSI. People voted for these commitments. Instead of cutting tax, however, the Government cut wages. Instead of putting money into people's pockets, as the Fianna Fáil Party said it would do, it has taken €11 billion out of taxpayers' pockets and used it to shore up the books of the banks and overstretched developers.

The fiction that only Fianna Fáil can manage the economy is betrayed in how fast the economy unravelled on its watch. Ireland was first to enter recession and we will be the last out of it. Our recession is deeper and will last longer because Fianna Fáil allowed our economy to be built on sand. It turned the export-led economy it inherited from the Labour Party Minister for Finance, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, into a property bubble. Instead of attending to the long-term competitiveness of the economy, it gambled on a consumption boom. The Fianna Fáil Party prided itself on reducing the national debt but instead transferred this debt to every Irish household in the form of impossibly high mortgages and repayments for the costs of NAMA.

The Fianna Fáil Party turned a blind eye to reckless lending by the banks. After all, it needed the banks to maintain the boom. Now that the party is over, it is ordinary people who are left to clean up the mess. In February 2010, some 436,000 people were on the dole, 85,000 of whom were aged under 25 years. Some 283,000 people have joined the live register since the 2007 general election and 340 people have lost their jobs every day since the Taoiseach's appointment. In 2009 alone, an average of four firms went bust every day. It is predicted that the number of business closures in 2010 will be approximately 2,000. The Insolvency Journal estimates that five firms went bust every day in February 2010. Across the economy, in both the public and the private sector, people have taken significant pay cuts.

The Taoiseach states we must regain our lost competitiveness. Who presided over this loss of competitiveness? Ireland's economy has been losing competitiveness since 2003 and for much of the intervening period, while the Taoiseach was Minister for Finance, he presided over soaring costs of housing and commercial property rents, all of which pushed up costs and made the economy less competitive.

The Taoiseach is happy to talk about competitiveness when it means asking a nurse earning €35,000 per year to take an 8% pay cut. Where was his Government's support for competitiveness two weeks ago when the Labour Party introduced a proposal in the House to address problems in the commercial rental sector by giving some relief to retailers who are facing serious competitiveness problems? I remind the House that the Government voted down our proposal. It does not have a plan to create new jobs or improve our competitiveness. The only action we have seen from it is a miserable policy of driving down wages and quality of life, while waiting to hop on the coat tails of a European recovery.

The Government will not even agree to have an inquiry into what occurred in the banking sector. The reason is that such an inquiry would land at the Government's door and expose the Taoiseach's role, as Minister for Finance, in presiding over what occurred in the banking system. In particular, the Government will not allow us to examine what happened in September 2008 when it provided a blanket guarantee for the banks.

Since 2007, tax revenue has declined by 34% in nominal terms from €47.25 billion to €31.05 billion. This demonstrates that it is a lie to suggest the Fianna Fáil Party could satisfactorily manage the economy.

I could address many areas arising from the proposals before the House. I was struck, however, by the Taoiseach's words on the centrality of jobs. He is correct in that regard. This is what the Labour Party has been saying since before the recession. If jobs are so central, why has it taken the Taoiseach two years to cop on to that fact? The Taoiseach did not take the opportunity in the long lead-in we endured while he was celebrating his election as leader of the Fianna Fáil Party and before he became Taoiseach to do the reconfiguration that would have placed an emphasis on jobs. This is being done belatedly and in a way that adds more confusion to the organisation of Government Departments than it clarifies.

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