Frank Feighan (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Fine Gael)

I support this motion. This country badly needs political and economic stability. The people I met while canvassing in Donegal, and those I meet on the street every day, want this budget to be taken early. The games will need to stop. I appreciate that the Minister of State provided a considerable amount of information in his speech, but we know what is going on. At the moment I am being monitored by Government Information Services - "Hello, how are you?". For the past ten or 20 years it has monitored everything I have said in this Chamber, in the Seanad, on local radio and in every newspaper. It will contradict me and use what I have said and it has done so previously. For once, Government Information Services should do something reasonable and tell the people the truth. The Government has spun itself such that the people do not believe what it says. The Government Information Services is in place to do one thing, which is not to protect the Government but to protect Fianna Fáil. It puts Fianna Fáil's future and survival before that of the country.

I have knocked on the doors in Donegal. I witnessed a woman crying because her three sons had gone to Australia. Behind every second door on which I knocked were families with young people who have emigrated. That is our future. They told me I did not shout loud enough. However, no one listened because this country was a one-party State and it realised it needed Government Information Services with between ten and 30 people working in it to spin the story that everything was okay in this famous land in which we believed we were making money by selling houses to one another.

We should question the risks taken by the bondholders and whether they should take a hit on the exorbitant cost of borrowings which they introduced to the country. They gambled but they will not lose. Unfortunately, the Irish taxpayer seems to have lost.

I have received four telephone calls calling on Fine Gael to support the budget in the interests of the country. Three of those calls came from members of Fianna Fáil, another example of Government Information Services sending out the message that we should do the honest thing. Fine Gael will always do the right thing by the country because we will put the country first. However, the games under way must stop although, thus far, they have not stopped.

The Dáil will sit for eight days in the month of December. If we are to provide leadership and hope for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed people and the millions of people who are fearful for the future, we must provide a show of leadership and sit up to Christmas day, if necessary, for 12 hours per day, to find a solution to the most serious economic crisis the country has faced.

During the past two years the Government had the choice to protect the people and the State. However, it bailed out the reckless investors and bankers. Not everyone in this country is the same. There are politicians in Fianna Fáil who believe in doing the right thing. However, let us not have this dying embrace and hear the claim "You are all the same", because we are not.

I recall the budgets of the past eight or nine years when Deputy Richard Bruton was our spokesman for finance. He tried to put it that the approach was wrong. He disagreed with benchmarking and the way the Government chose to introduce decentralisation. However, no one heard him and the songs and cheerleaders in the Dáil bar claimed we never had it so good. Let us do something in the interests of the country. I have no wish to play politics. In the interests of the country, let us stop the games and do what is good for the country. Let us show leadership, that we care and that we have a solution. The people want hope and, I believe, with Deputy Michael Noonan's policies and with a dose of reality we can give the people hope.

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