Joe McHugh (Donegal North East, Fine Gael)

Deputies Blaney and McDaid cannot say they were not warned on the streets of Letterkenny. Either that, or they were not listening to our people.

I will provide another quote for the Minister of State:

[Y]oung men leave Inishowen at 4 a.m. on a Monday morning, travel to Dublin or its outskirts in a van, begin work at 8 a.m. or 8.30 a.m. and continue until 7.30 p.m. [...] In terms of a sustainable future for the construction industry [...] we are living on a knife edge. We are self-deluded to believe this is sustainable in the long term.

Without blowing my own trumpet, I will explain that this is a quote from a speech I gave in the Seanad on 23 November 2005. I will provide another quote from the Upper House:

There is a worry in Donegal that we are too reliant on the construction industry. [...] [I]n Donegal, the construction and service industries have the monopoly on jobs. We should think in the long term[.]

These are also words spoken by me, on 5 July 2006. The Government should have listened to the people. We, as voices on the Opposition benches, tried to act as a conduit for the opinions of the people, but we were not listened to. This led me to form my own reply to the question: "What is the difference between the Seanad and the Dáil?" The difference is that in the Seanad one can say whatever one wants and nobody listens; in the Dáil one can say very little and everybody listens. These are two quotes from 2005 and 2006 that were not listened to by the Government.

The substance of the Fine Gael motion, which the Government wishes to amend, is a call on the Government to extend the terms of reference, as Deputy O'Donnell has already mentioned, to include the political and policy context for the decision to extend tax relief for property developers in 2006, including official advice given to the then Minister for Finance, who is now the Taoiseach, and the lessons to be learned. The then Minister's failure in the final extension of the construction boom was the 2006 Act in which these reliefs were introduced.

Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I am a practical politician; I am not interested in the prospect of punishing the Government for the sake of it. However, there must be accountability. These mistakes must not be made again.

See this speech in context