Michael D'Arcy (Wexford, Fine Gael)

Yes, it is a matter for people in the Donegal North-East constituency. Deputy McDaid has decided that 80% of the divisions called in the House do not warrant his attention. While he is paid as a Deputy, he does not perform the most basic of parliamentary functions. He is somehow more important than the rest of us and continues to be paid for failing to vote. As the Minister of State pointed out, that is a matter for Deputy McDaid's constituents in Donegal North-East. Notwithstanding that, his party should be ashamed of him and his party leader should have something to say on the disrespect he has shown for the democratic process to which he signed up. Will the Taoiseach pull up Deputy McDaid on his impertinence in taking the money to do with it as he chooses?

Deputy McDaid has adopted a bizarre position on the issue of his pension, claiming he took a decision not to forego to prove a point about preserving the Dáil from the threat of rich people. In the name of God, we are not stupid. The Deputy is taking a position which is impossible to stand up and the Government's moral guardians in the Green Party should force the Taoiseach to pull him up. They did so in the case of the former Minister for Defence, Deputy O'Dea, albeit only when it finally dawned on them that it was necessary. It is doubtful this will be repeated because we have a Taoiseach who buys into the "us and them" approach and misses the tragic point of the idiotic pleas of the former Minister, Deputy McDaid, that he will, on a point of principle, keep the rich from becoming too powerful in Leinster House.

For the past ten years, on the Taoiseach's watch as Minister for Finance and as Taoiseach, the rich have become overwhelmingly powerful inside and outside Leinster House. The former Minister for Finance, Charlie McCreevy, created the tax breaks that bent the economy out of shape and his successor, the current Taoiseach, preserved every last one of them. He pulled the tent pegs out of the Galway tent - big deal. The thinking in government is that we should ignore the reality and look at the symbol. We should ignore the estates desecrating the face of rural Ireland, the hotels built in every corner of the country as a result of tax breaks, most of which were never needed, and the collusion in the cloud cuckoo land inhabited by developers, bankers and Fianna Fáil Party politicians. As long as the Galway tent is pulled down, so the thinking goes, most of the people can be fooled most of the time.

The tradition in this country is that when one does something wrong, one confesses, takes responsibility and indicates one will do something about it. In the rainbow coalition, of which the Leas-Cheann Comhairle was a member, two Ministers resigned not because of major controversies but because the threshold of culpability for wrongdoing was higher than it is now.

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