Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)

This budget is a disgrace. It is a full-frontal attack on the lowest income earners, those who are unemployed and those who are dependent on social welfare. What it amounts to is a recipe for economic suicide. It is another deflationary budget being brought in by this Government.

It is being brought in by a Government which claims to act in the national interest, by a political party which claims to be republican. It is at times like this that one must ask what would the founders of the State think about what has gone on earlier today in this Chamber. What would people who struggled to bring the Republic into being think - the people who gave their lives and the people who laboured to bring the Dáil into being and to bring the dream of the 1916 Proclamation into being? We have not got their yet, but I am sure that they would be ashamed of what has gone on in this Chamber today.

Before I walked in here and before the Minister for Finance rose to his feet to announce this budget I watched our national flag being taken down above this building, and I am glad that it was done because what has been done in here is economic treason. Not only is the Government happy to sell out our economic sovereignty to the IMF, but now it is selling out the Irish people.

I think back to a poem penned by Pádraic Pearse nearly 100 years ago, "Mise Éire", lines of which states:

Mór mo náir:

Mo chlann féin a dhíol a máthair.

My great shame:

My sons who sold out their mother.

That is what has happened here. The Minister has sold out the ordinary average people, who caused no harm to the Government and who have done nothing wrong in the State but try to get on in life. These people have tried to build the public services which we want to be proud of and have tried to go to school and to third level education so that they can be the entrepreneurs of the future. These are people who, through no fault of their own, are dependent on social welfare.

The Government has decided in this budget to launch an all-out attack on those people while at the same time protecting the elite in society, protecting the backsides of Members who sit in this Chambers. I have read through the documents accompanying the Budget Statement. Not one penny from a Deputy's gross salary will be reduced. How does the Government think the people listening to this at home or on the radio as they travel home from work can understand that a Deputy on over €92,000 per year should not take a pay cut but somebody on social welfare, somebody who is out working who has a child with a disability or who is on disability benefit needs to take a 4% reduction? Is that fair? Those are the questions people are asking. Ministers are talking about taking token wage cuts of €10,000, which, in reality,-----

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