Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

I have listened to many budget speeches in this House over the years but none was more disingenuous and more dishonest than the one I listened to yesterday. The House listened in stunned silence and many of the media commented upon that fact. They listened in stunned silence to the last will and testament of a disastrous Government. A decade of mismanagement and incompetence has led our nation to this.

The Minister for Finance charged yesterday that other parties could have done no better. In truth, no group of people picked at random off the street could have done worse in the past decade. The Minister's speech was merely a glimpse of the savagery that was planned by this Government to impose upon the beleaguered people of Ireland. Like a rotten onion, the details that were never revealed in the banal speech delivered by the Minister for Finance have been peeled away, layer by layer, each new layer revealing more unfairness and more pain. There are more layers to come as we trawl through the budget announcements coming from each Department. We will see the details of the Social Welfare Bill, yet to be debated, today. There is much more harm and much more hurt to be endured.

The fundamental failure of the budget can be summed up in a single word, "unfair". The budget is simply unfair. How can taking €8 per week from a carer providing full-time care and support for a disabled child or an elderly person be justified? That is a reduction of €8 in a total income of €212. How can taking €8 per week from a widow or a blind person, leaving a residual payment of €188 per week, be justified? The elderly were exempt because the State pension was exempt from the cut only because the elderly of this country engendered fear into the hearts of the supporters of this Government. Carers are too busy, too preoccupied and too consumed in their 24-hour, seven day duty of providing essential care to mobilise. They are not visible and they did not make it onto Deputy Healy-Rae's mercy list. They are expected to endure in silence.

Deputy Gilmore, our party leader, spoke about the education cuts. The Green Party, whose raison d'être was to protect the environment - it cannot even produce climate change Bill-----

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