Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)

Has the Taoiseach no shame? I expected he would come in today and present a robust defence of his Government's performance and of his performance. I expected he would have the usual thump at the Opposition or anyone else he could find to blame. Frankly, the Taoiseach excelled himself with the self-serving nature of his contribution in opening the debate. He has provided us with half an hour of the most shameless speech I have heard in Dáil Eireann for a long time. This was the thickest exercise in hard neck politics I have heard in a long time. It was all about the Government, justifying its action and performance and term of office. I heard very little about the problems people are facing in this country. I refer to the 440,000 people on the live register, the highest number ever. Even in the worst of days ever, the 1930s and 1950s, it never reached a figure like that. Some 250,000 people lost their jobs since the Government was elected in 1997 and in many cases their redundancy money is now gone. They are trying to survive on social welfare payments that have been cut by this Government. I refer to the hundreds of businesses that have gone to the wall and the many more trying to survive. People working in them and running them tell me it has been months since they were able to take personal payment from their businesses. Families are trying to pay mortgages on properties in negative equity. Young people are graduating from colleges and are worried, as are their parents, about the prospect of getting employment. Pensioners are worried they will be next on the target list of this Government.

The Taoiseach tells us everyone else is to blame. He gave us a long list of the people to blame. The closest the Taoiseach came to accepting any responsibility was when he spoke about the two reports published last week and how they blamed Governments. Where did the Taoiseach get the plural? He has been in government for the past 13 years. He was Minister for Finance for four of those years and Taoiseach for more than two. There is no plural. When the Taoiseach says "Governments", he means his own Government and he must take responsibility for what he has done, which he has not accepted today. The Taoiseach has come in to ask the Dáil to vote confidence in him and in his Government.

I have no hesitation in saying the Labour Party will not do so. We will not vote confidence in the Taoiseach because, like the people of this country, we have long ago lost confidence in him and in his Government. We want Fianna Fáil and the Green Party out of government, we want a general election, we want a fresh start for the country and we want to move on as do the vast majority of the people in this country.

At one level, this is a parliamentary exercise. The Taoiseach says his mandate to govern comes from having a majority in this House. This is a challenge as to whether he continues to have that support. This is a challenge for each Deputy – whether in Fianna Fáil, the Green Party, or Independents - whether they stand by their narrow, personal or party interest or by the people who elected them.

Everywhere I go I hear people ask when I am going to get this Government out and when will an election be held and a new Government elected? That can be answered today. I can speak for all Labour Party Deputies. We want this Government out and a fresh start for the country. How do the Independent Deputies, the Green Party Deputies and the Fianna Fáil backbenchers stand? That is the most important question.

This is a representative assembly. Each of us here has a duty to represent the views of the people who elected us. The people want this Government out of office. Putting the question another way, if it were the people voting on this motion, what would be the outcome? If the people had a vote on this motion, they would vote by an overwhelming majority to get this Government out of office. The question is whether Deputies stand for themselves or for the people. Deputies cannot come in here at 8.30 p.m. and vote confidence in the Taoiseach and then go back to constituencies and try to distance themselves from that vote. Any Deputy who votes confidence in the Taoiseach and his Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government must take responsibility, as must the Taoiseach.

The reason people want change is clear. The verdict on this Government is in. The two reports on the banking crisis are a clear statement of the damage done to this country by Fianna Fáil. No matter how the Taoiseach reinterprets them, the reports are a clear indictment of Government policy. The people know who is to blame and they want change but the country cannot have a fresh start while this Government clings to power. For as long as Fianna Fáil remains in government, it will be pre-occupied with self-justification, with defending the record and self-preservation. I heard one Minister say at the weekend that he could not remember ever making a mistake. Apparently the Taoiseach cannot remember making any mistakes either. We simply cannot afford to have a Government so far removed from reality. We will not tackle our problems with a Government serving out its notice, clinging on to power in the faint hope that some kind of recovery will revive its political fortunes while the rest of us are expected to contract mass amnesia.

We need a fresh start and fresh hope. We need a Government focused on three core tasks – creating jobs, reforming the way this country is governed and bringing fairness into the management of our affairs. Economic recovery will not come on its own and it will not come by focusing exclusively on rescuing the banks and dealing with the public finances. We need a strategy for jobs and for economic growth. We need a Government that understands what is happening in the global economy and how Ireland can prosper within it. We need a Government that gets the idea that jobs and growth will not come from a hands-off, light touch approach but from offering leadership and direction and from rolling up its sleeves to create jobs in a new, low-carbon, knowledge economy.

What the global economy is going through is little short of a new industrial revolution. The power centres of the world economy are shifting, billions of people are being brought into the global trading system and there is spectacular technological change. The great recession is slowing these processes down but they will re-assert themselves as the global economy recovers. This new economy, the knowledge economy, presents great challenges but also major opportunities to countries that understand it and know how to harness it. It will bring change, not just to one or two sectors or high-tech firms, but right across the economy. We have to capture that change and harness it.

The Government talks about the smart economy but it does not act on it. The innovation task force made several good proposals but they have not been implemented. The Government talks about hard decisions but it is dodging the greatest challenge our country faces, namely, creating jobs. The Government has taken on board some Labour Party ideas, like the earn and learn scheme or energy conservation in homes, but with no force, drive or energy.

The Labour Party has been unwavering in its focus on job creation.

The Labour Party's proposal for a strategic investment bank is designed to meet the financing needs of innovative Irish companies, and to assist in financing the infrastructure they need to thrive. Using capital from the pension reserve fund, we can build a new institution that will focus directly on financing the new economy. It can help to deal with the impact of the banking crisis, but it is a long-term solution to a long-term need.

The Labour Party's jobs fund is designed to support this sustainable, knowledge economy. It is designed to be allocated outside the Estimates process, as part of our broader proposals for reform of public expenditure management. The jobs fund proposed by the Labour Party will provide additional resources to agencies that can deliver jobs. It will be there to finance PRSI exemptions for new jobs, training schemes, and new strategies for agencies, provided they can show the money will be translated into jobs.

Labour's "Just the Job" proposals on training and work experience are designed to meet the new needs of our workforce. Instead of proposing one big scheme, we have suggested a range of ideas to meet the needs of individuals, so that those who have no work can equip themselves to find new employment. In that way we will avoid the build-up of long-term unemployment that happened in the 1980s.

Not everyone will find a job in a high-tech start-up firm. Labour's sectoral policies, such as those for clean tech and tourism, are designed, therefore, to build up sectors of the economy where Ireland has natural competitive advantages. As a country, we have great resources of wind and wave that can be converted into clean energy, to meet our own needs and those of other countries. In tourism, we can enhance and develop Ireland's tourism product in a sector with a presence in every region that offers employment across a range of skills.

These are all Labour policy initiatives. They demonstrate that the knowledge economy is a progressive project. It cannot be delivered by a hands-off Government that believes its role in the economy is to get out of the way. That was the thinking that led to the disaster in the banking sector. The same ideology is blocking the Government from taking action now. What we need is a Government that understands the extent of the change that this new economy needs, and a public sector that is infused with the same spirit.

This is the second time in a generation that Ireland has been confronted by a profound economic crisis. It happened at a time when public trust and confidence in our public institutions was already damaged. It cannot go on. We must stop lurching from one disaster to the next. We have to change the way this country is run, beginning with a change of Government but also changing the way that politics works. Last week we saw our national parliament reduced to a farce. We had national and international events that could not be discussed because the Government ran away from the Dáil. That cannot go on. We need real reform of how the Dáil operates. We need a national parliament that meets at least four days a week, cuts out the long recesses and deals with relevant issues in a relevant way. More than that, however, we must ensure that individual citizens feel a far greater sense of involvement in the decisions that shape their lives. We need a more practical democracy that will bring back the people into decision making.

Labour's proposal for a constitutional convention is designed to review the functioning of our institutions, with the direct involvement of individual citizens. The Constitution belongs to the people and if there are to be proposals for far-reaching change they must come from a process that involves the people directly. We need to get on with the business of reforming the public sector as the Labour Party has long proposed. Examples include reforming the HSE and our proposal to open up recruitment in the public service and encourage movement between the public and private sectors. We also need to see private sector reform. Many of those who sat on the boards of Irish banks during the making of this crisis remain in place. The unduly deferential approach towards the banks identified by Professor Honohan still exists, in Government itself. Labour's "Never Again" proposals for reform of corporate Ireland include far more demanding and modern standards of corporate governance, an end to the system of " You sit on my board and I set the remuneration for yours", a whistleblower's act, and a break in the link between big money and politics.

We must also change the structures of economic governance and management. We need far greater openness about our public finances and far more scrutiny of the effect of Government decisions, especially in respect of taxation. The era of design-your-own tax incentives is over. We need new structures to identify emerging threats to the economy, and to subject economic forecasting to greater scrutiny. We should, therefore, establish an independent fiscal council to act as an external check on macroeconomic forecasts, the sustainability of public finances and the true cost of tax breaks. We cannot just pretend the crisis did not happen. We have to build in new checks and balances to make sure it does not happen again.

We live in an era of limited resources, but that does not mean we have to ration our values. There are certain basic principles that must guide us, such as the notion that health care is different from other services. Health care should be delivered efficiently and with a clear eye to value for money but it should not be driven by profit alone. There is something far more important, far more basic to the human condition and to who we are as a people, in how we care and how we die, than the bottom financial line.

I firmly believe that the future of health care in Ireland rests in the Labour Party's proposal for a system of universal health insurance, where all are treated equally and not in the out-moded, out-dated ideological reflex of this Government that wants to privatise the VHI. It has no mandate to sell off the VHI. The Labour Party will not do so. We will retain it as a building block of a new and better health insurance system.

Fairness demands that we do not inflict the cost of Fianna Fáil's mistakes on a new generation. Once again, this State has been shamed, when it could not even count the number of children who have died in its care. It is time to hold a constitutional referendum and to enshrine in our basic law the rights of the child. It is long past time that we made a fundamental commitment to the future of our children and of our country by tackling the problems of literacy and numeracy. The decision by the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Coughlan, to withdraw the services of specialist librarians who work in 20 of the most disadvantaged secondary schools in the State, is a callous act of unbelievable folly.

This moment must be to this generation what 1958 was to a generation before - a watershed moment when old ways and past failures were left behind, and fresh thinking was embraced. For generations the political choices offered to the Irish people boiled down to two versions of the same thing. Now there is a hunger for real change, and the Labour Party is ready to lead that change.

It is time for Fianna Fáil to go. It is time for a new start, and a new Government. It is time to set aside the politics of division. This is too small a country for setting neighbour against neighbour. The Labour Party's vision is of one Ireland, a country that pulls together to get through this economic disaster and afterwards works together to build a better and fairer future. It is of a country infused with fresh hope and with the core underlying idea that has driven the Labour Party for a century – solidarity.

This is a great country. Together, from the embers of this crisis, we can build a new and better Ireland if we have a vision of what can be achieved and the commitment to work together to achieve it. It is time for a jobs strategy for economic recovery. It is time for reform to revive and renew our institutions. It is time for fairness in everything we do. It is time to move on, together as one Ireland. However, to do so we need to be freed from the politics of the past and from a Government that is now preoccupied with justifying its past. We need to move on and that moving on can come only with the defeat of this Fianna Fáil Government, the holding of a new election and an opportunity being given to the people to chart their own future, democratically, in a general election.

See this speech in context