Enda Kenny (Mayo, Fine Gael)

Ireland has suffered the biggest loss of jobs of any OECD country, with more than 250,000 fewer people at work now, compared to 2007. More than 100,000 young people have left this country since 2008. We have experienced the biggest rise in our national debt. It has tripled in two years, under the stewardship of the Taoiseach, thereby forcing painful cuts in services, pay and investment. Every Deputy in this House has been confronted by public servants and people who are out of work who are worried about the cost of living and the standards they have to meet. Tens of thousands of houses are lying empty in tax-driven developments that were built in the wrong places. Some 200,000 young families find themselves trapped in negative equity. More than 30,000 of them are unable to service their monthly payments. Does any member of this Government understand the stresses and pressures faced on a daily basis by families that are unable to meet their mortgage repayments? Very little assistance is available to them. There has been no response of any consequence from the Government.

These bald statistics do not tell us the real story. They do not tell us about families struggling to survive on one income, or no income. They do not tell us about the lack of hope of those burdened with the scourge of unemployment. They do not tell us about the despair of the weakest and most vulnerable in our society, as the services they rely on are shut down. In recent years, how many times has Deputy Neville spoken about the tragedy of suicide, which was hidden for so long, coming to the forefront around this country as a result of social and economic pressure? There have been many such cases in this city and across the entire country. That is the legacy of this Government. It has failed to heed the warning signs, or to implement real action that would have steered the ship of State and the economy in a direction that retained services for our people, created career opportunities for them and allowed them to maintain a suitable standard of living so they could raise their families in a normal way. The legacy of the inaction of the Taoiseach and his colleagues in government is a society in which fairness does not exist. When I spoke recently to a woman who complained about the removal of services from her 13 year old child, who has been blind since birth, she asked whether there is an understanding of the gulf of unfairness in this country when people are allowed to walk out the gates of agencies with €1 million in their back pockets, approved for incompetence and backed by the Government. That is not fair in any society.

See this speech in context