Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

It depends on how it is counted. Like the hamster on the wheel, people have given all that sacrifice to find out that after all the promises of green shoots and turnarounds from this Minister, and all the bag of tricks in regard to the cheapest bank bailout in the world and everything looking rosy in the garden, this particular gardener did not really do the spade work of laying the ground for real growth and real recovery.

Fianna Fáil suggests we are facing into an age of austerity. Perhaps it is the Japanese lost decade. That is the wrong way for Fianna Fáil to present it because it is to deprive of any hope thousands of young people who are out of work or on the verge of graduating from college. That is wrong. Our young people, with their quality of education, are world beaters. Many of the 400,000 people who are languishing in unemployment are shocked. These are people who have been used to looking after themselves and to having expectations. They now find that on Wednesday of any week, they may have to borrow from their parents or others to try to get to Friday or Saturday, when they will get some money again.

That kind of thing went out not in the 1980s but in the 1960s. It is why somebody like President John F. Kennedy was such a ray of hope to Ireland because he came here, wonderful looking and well dressed and, just as "The Cosby Show" did for black Americans, he represented something that came from us and something we could become, and which in due course we did become.

Fianna Fáil's sense of pervasive hopelessness is killing the country. This is why I had hoped to hear more about a balanced approach to the economy. We say "Yes" to cutting and pruning expenditure, getting better value for our money and having all of us work harder, whether in the public or private sector, but also "Yes" to growth, to stimulus, to the future, to the skills of our young people, to the education in which we have invested and to the fact we are in the EU. We have an attractive corporation tax rate. Our diaspora, particularly in regard to Irish America but also those of our people who have gone to live in Australia and New Zealand, want to be told by us that we have a plan for recovery and that they can help with that plan. I did not hear mention of any of this.

For all of the language about a smart economy, give me a smart Government that helps to generate hope and employment and I would settle for that. We seem to have one of the most pathetically stupid Governments of the recent period. It inherited a good economy and an easy task. For about five years it followed roughly what the Rainbow Government had done and then, once we went into the euro it lost the run of itself. Now, we must change from that.

Irish politics is now almost entirely dominated by the economy. Consider the business of Dáil Éireann. Already in this single year we have gone through two game-changing moments. First, in the week before Easter, the Minister made his shock and awe announcement about the first disclosure of the Anglo Irish Bank losses. Then, a few weeks ago, there was Black Thursday and yet another stunning set of losses that have been dumped on the citizens of this State. Today's debate is a foretaste of the pre-budget debate we must have in a few weeks when we get the details from the Government of the four-year plan to be sent to Brussels. Then, on 7 December, we will get the 2011 Budget Statement.

Even the most addicted of politically minded citizens have become numbed by the sheer scale of what has happened, while the economics profession has retreated into its own exclusive language of multipliers, deflators and technicalities that rivals the language of lawyers in its obscurity.

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