Martin Mansergh (Tipperary South, Fianna Fail)

I am glad to be able to contribute to this debate, not to be giving the official reply or wind-up but to be able to give some of my own thoughts on the subject.

I was present for the first two hours of a debate in the Seanad which adopted a reasoned and constructive tone on all sides of the House whereas some of what I have heard here has been very much the cockpit of politics. That is one of the reasons the Seanad should be maintained, contrary to the position of the main Opposition party.

As the question of responsibility for the situation constantly arises, I want to give two short quotations from the international newspapers of the past couple of days. For those who think the Government is to blame, Mr. Martin Wolf, in the Financial Times, pointed out yesterday, "It was not the public but the private sector that went haywire in Ireland and in Spain." Of course, it is when that private borrowing, and the basis of it, collapsed that the gulf in revenues arose.

The Wall Street Journal, on 23 November, reported:

Ireland's plight is not the result of collecting too little tax. The country is a victim of the global credit bubble, which tended to hit hardest the countries that had the largest and most innovative financial industries: Ireland, the U.K., Spain, the U.S. and, in its especially perverse way, Iceland.

The Government accepts its responsibility in the sense that we believed - it was the belief of nearly everybody and it was the advice - that there would be a soft landing. We were wrong, but so was nearly everyone else.

We had a vision in this country, which was shared far beyond the ranks of my party, of a dynamic economy with low tax rates but flowing revenues because of its dynamism, and with good social services and infrastructure. Unfortunately, it was not sustainable. The favourite mantras of the Labour Party a few years ago were that the country is awash with money and Ireland was the second richest country in the EU, although that was only statistically the case, and the implication was that we should be spending much more money.

I pay tribute to the courage of the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance in the way they have battled against enormous difficulties in the past two and a half years. One can say the situation was partly of our making but it was also triggered by an international crisis.

I have some sympathy with a letter that appeared in The Irish Times this morning from Ms Irene Houlihan in Birr, which states:

The constant pillorying of this country's Taoiseach by a frenzied media whipping up anti-Government mob hysteria is shameful and reprehensible. The words keep coming to mind - and still the crowd shouted "Crucify him! Crucify him!" Was it for this indeed?

Certainly, as a survey recently showed, we have the freest media in the world which is something of which we should be proud, although I doubt if there is a State broadcasting station anywhere in the world that would allow itself some of the liberties that certain broadcasters permit themselves.

There are certainly some columnists and broadcasters whose coverage can be summed up as "aux barricades, citoyens". I was in Brussels at the end of the first day of a Council of Ministers meeting when I saw the leading voice of The Irish Times scarcely able to contain a grin at the thought, as it looked then, that a dissolution might be about to take place. At the same time, it is not fair to criticise the media if one is not also prepared to engage in self-criticism and I regret that I have a colleague in Tipperary South to whom is attributed in a headline the phrase "worse than Cromwell", which he applied to the Taoiseach and his predecessor. I hope on reflection that imputation will be withdrawn.

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