Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein)

Sinn Féin wants national recovery for Ireland. We will do everything in our power to strive day and night for that objective, to serve the real national interest, and to work side-by-side with the Irish people in communities up and down the length and breadth of this country. That is what we stand for. That is what we have always stood for.

For that reason, because we have the national interest at heart, we want recovery and we believe there is a better way forward, we must oppose the so-called national recovery plan published yesterday by the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government. This is not a plan for national recovery. It is a plan for national impoverishment. It is a savage plan which will force the people to pay dearly for what I described yesterday, and I make no apology for repeating it here again today, as the economic treason committed by the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government.

This Government has no right to impose such a plan on the people. The Dáil should be dissolved now on the plan's publication, the budget should be suspended and there should be a general election. It is a travesty of democracy that a four year plan should be framed by the most reviled Government in the history of this State, a Government whose life is now measured in weeks.

It is a plan delivered by a Cabinet, which, by the admission of its two Green Party members, including the Minister, Deputy Ryan, who has just spoken, has misled and betrayed the Irish people. Yet the leader of the Green Party stood beside the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance yesterday and lauded this four year plan to high heaven, having already handed in his party's notice to quit. It would be a pantomime if it were not so tragic. If the Ministers, Deputy Gormley and Deputy Ryan, and their colleagues believe so much in this plan, why are they not staying in Government to implement it?

The truth is that we have a threefold democratic crisis as well as a political crisis. First, the State is being sold out to the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and international money-lenders, and what remains of our economic sovereignty is being destroyed. Clearly, it is an attack on Irish democracy. Second, a Government with no mandate purports to impose on the people a four year plan, an IMF-ECB deal and a budget for 2011. Third, the two so-called main Opposition parties, Fine Gael and Labour, have bought into the doomed strategy on which this plan is based. Despite all their rhetoric of the past three years and their repeated votes of no confidence in the Government and the Taoiseach, they cannot tell us whether they will vote to stop the budget on 7 December and to stop this plan. That is critical information not only for this House, but for their respective electorates and the people across the State.

Sinn Féin stands clearly in opposition to the Government, this plan and the Government's budgetary intent. We have shown that there is an alternative to the consensus for cuts. We have put forward rational, costed proposals to reduce the deficit through raising and saving revenue, to retain and create jobs through a major stimulus package and to protect public services and social supports. Similar proposals have been put forward by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, by the community and voluntary sector and by many economists, all of whom have shown that there is a better, fairer way. I totally reject the arrogant assertion by the Minister for Finance yesterday that anything put forward in the next general election and not based in this plan is nonsense. That is an outrageous statement on the part of a Minister for Finance at the conclusion of the announcement of the detail of this plan.

In his budget speech in December last, the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, like a British general in First World War circumstances, told us that the worst was over and that the budget represented one "last big push". Now, like those same generals, the Minister and his Cabinet colleagues have refused to learn the lesson of their failed strategy and are sending the Irish people over the top once again into no-man's land – perhaps it should be NAMA land – to be cannon fodder for the banks, the ECB and the IMF. Shame on the Minister and the Government.

Despite the Minister for Finance's appeals, and the appeals of the Taoiseach and the Minister, Deputy Ryan, here this morning on the part of the Green Party, my party will not be signing up to their plan. What we need now is a dissolution of this Dáil, a general election to be held immediately and then, in the new Dáil, a progressive budget that will be part of a real plan for national recovery and that will have the confidence and support of the Irish people as a whole.

We also need a total change in banking policy. This is at the heart of all our ills. There can be no national recovery while the Government's criminal and treacherous banking policy continues. The structural deficit of this State can be dealt with, not in the way this so-called national recovery plan suggests, but through the measures that we in Sinn Féin and others have set out in our pre-budget submission and in other contributions from a variety of sources.

The Government is about to embark on what can only be described as an insane course of borrowing to fund a failed banking policy. We cannot afford this banking policy or this loan. We need real negotiators to deal with the banks and to burn the bondholders. Otherwise, this and future generations will be saddled with a debt that should never have been incurred and for which, clearly, they are not responsible. Not a euro more should go into the Irish banks until their debts are restructured, whether through burning the bondholders or giving them - we can consider it - debt-for-equity swaps. If the Government proceeds with its banking plan its so-called recovery plan is redundant day one.

This plan aims to make an adjustment of €15 billion over four years. This is a figure that sits in splendid isolation from the €85 billion currently being negotiated for the bank bailout in Government Buildings. The addition of that €85 billion to the State's sovereign debt will incur debt servicing of huge proportions over the coming years, amounts that we simply cannot afford.

The premise of the plan itself is fundamentally wrong, even apart from the banking elephant in the room. In the past two years, the Fianna Fáil and Green Party Government has taken €14.5 billion out of the economy through spending cuts and tax increases. Where has it got us? The recession is worse now. Yet, under this plan, they want to take another €15 billion out of the economy up to 2014.

In pursuit of this doomed strategy, low to middle income families are to be hit with pay cuts, social welfare cuts, water charges, local service charges and a flat-rate home tax. This is absolutely incredible. Health, education and other public services are to be savagely hit. This is an attack on the low paid and it cannot be described in any other way. The plan simultaneously lowers the minimum wage and brings people on the minimum wage into the tax net. The minimum wage is to be reduced by €1 per hour, which means a person on the minimum wage would earn €15,500 a year, while the tax band has been reduced to €15,300.

In total contrast to the attack on the low paid there is no increase in the tax rate for the highest earners. Listen to this fact; it is clear that people have noted it well. This is in accordance with the belief of the Minister for Finance that a higher top rate of tax would lead to higher earners fleeing the jurisdiction. He is not worried about our young people fleeing the jurisdiction in what can only be described as a new wave of emigration.

The standard VAT rate is to rise from 21% to 23% in 2014. This is a further grievous blow to trade and commerce, most especially in the southern Border counties. The counties of Cavan and Monaghan which I am proud to represent have been very badly hit in recent years by the flow of shoppers across the Border to the Six Counties. Today, voters in Donegal South-West go to the polls. Their local economy is to be punished further if this plan is implemented, and the same goes for Counties Louth, Sligo and Leitrim in the front first line. This is what we have come to expect from a Government that has repeatedly overlooked the economic needs of the Border counties and that has no plan, and no interest in a plan, to remove the distortions created by the Border and to create an all-Ireland economy. There is where solutions to many of our problems can be found.

The cuts to health and children in the plan are truly frightening. They confirm the threat of the Minister for Health and Children to impose cuts of more than €600 million in the coming year. Our public health services simply cannot sustain this savagery. Staff and services will be slashed and patients will suffer. This is set to cause long term and more sustained damage than the cuts of the 1980s. We await with trepidation the further details that will present in the budget and in its outworking over the period afterwards.

Unbelievably, the leader of the Green Party boasted at yesterday's press conference that the Green Party had defended education in the plan. That is some claim and some defence. Children are to be hit with a reduction of 5% in capitation grants for their schools. This will again penalise the least advantaged schools which are more dependent on Department of Education and Skills support. Higher student fees will make third level education far more inaccessible, penalising intelligent and hard-working young people and denying them the opportunity to contribute to our society because they and their families simply cannot afford to send them to college. So much for the knowledge economy that we hear about so much from Government voices.

This has been a sad and tragic week for Ireland. A week ago the Governor of the Central Bank confirmed that the IMF was coming. People are outraged that our ability to determine our own affairs has been so undermined by the Government. Ba mhaith liom críoch a chur leis an méid atá le rá agam. Cuireann sé seo i gcuimhne dom na focail sa dán "Mise Éire", a scríobh Pádraig Mac Piarais. Níl aon dabht ach go bhfuil aithne ag an Aire ar na línte seo:

Mór mo náire:

Mo chlann féin a dhíol a máthair.

I am Ireland:

Great my shame:

My own family that sold their mother.

Pádraig Mac Piarais wrote other lines and I will end with these.

And I say to my people's masters: Beware,

Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people.

We will see the first indication of a new politically aware unsubdued Irish electorate when the result of today's Donegal South-West by-election is formally declared tomorrow in Stranorlar. Let it be an indication of what is to come.

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