Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

The former Minister for Education and Science has moved closer to the Taoiseach. They are on the Front Bench at present and are all very happy. They sit there completely oblivious to the real problems which face people throughout the country every day. People do not have jobs, they cannot pay mortgages and their houses are in negative equity or are being repossessed. People are lying on hospital trolleys and their sons and daughters are being sucked again into emigration.

This is the worst Government in the history of the State and the Taoiseach's motion proposes to keep it virtually intact. Its main figures have been involved in crashing the Irish economy onto the rocks in recent years. The Ministers who were confirmed in their jobs today were at the helm when they ignored all warnings given by independent and political commentators about the running of the economy and their failure to correct it. The same group of Ministers presided over the country's slide into a deep recession in which the numbers of unemployed have increased from 167,000 in 2007 to 432,000 today and where the spectre of forced emigration has become a reality. A budgetary surplus of €346 million in 2007 has become a projected deficit of €20 billion this year. A failed bureaucracy runs the health service in which thousands of X-rays and referral letters are left unread and our education system is expected to have the largest class sizes of any OECD member country this year. This is the legacy of a Government and a Taoiseach who is asking the House to give the same team more time to do more damage. I disagree with that.

Outside Leinster House today, a member of the public has set up a placard showing playing cards carrying photographs of members of the Cabinet. He will not have to change many of those cards. While the Taoiseach could have done a radical reshuffle, he has merely played a weird version of Happy Families and, in the process, has proved himself to be a busted flush. This is not a new Cabinet. People will be talking about a new Cabinet but it is merely more of the same and we are stuck with them.

Matters are much more serious than a continuation of incompetence. The new Cabinet proves that the Taoiseach does not get it. He does not get the idea of consistency. When, at long last, he was dragged away from admiring the fundamentals of our economy and forced to realise that the banking system had failed, his Minister for Finance did one thing right. I give credit where it is due. The Minister for Finance sent a message a foot high to bankers that they must get rid of the guys at the top who caused the problem. The instruction to get rid of them was stark and clear. One would think the Taoiseach himself would have learned from the clarity of that message. One would have thought he would have sent the same message to the Departments which have failed and continue to fail, that the people at the top who are causing the problem must be got rid of. The Taoiseach did not do that.

This tells us two interesting things about his leadership and his Taoiseachship. First, he sticks with the tribalism referred to by his predecessor when he said, "Our ethics are get in here and stay in here at all costs". Any business appointing new managers starts with the task, the job and the requirement and then picks the personnel based on their proven competence to that point or elsewhere. The Taoiseach did not do that. He did not look at the job to be done and he certainly did not look at the track record of the people to be appointed. He took the easiest option, which is the tribal option.

Those watching this debate on television or hearing about it will know in their hearts and souls that if the Cabinet were a company the CEO, looking at senior management with an eight year track record of consistent failure, would have no alternative but to fire them. Any CEO looking at a company that had been brought into international disrepute, had moved from wealth to poverty, was surviving only on borrowings and had shed so many of its workforce would know that he owed it to the shareholders to be courageous, not to keep or promote people based on friendship, location or his own unwillingness to act. He would owe it to the shareholders to cut away the dross and put in new people of proven competence.

The Taoiseach did not do that. It may be that he just could not do it, or has he so little faith in his own backbenchers that he could not see, in all the benches behind him, even half a dozen people with the proven competence, energy and diligence to become Ministers? He did not even have half a dozen promising people who could do much better than the current tired bunch of fatigued and exhausted failures. He did not even have five, or four, or three. I have to sympathise with him in that regard because on this side of the House we have a team ready and willing to take over-----

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