Brian Cowen (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

That is the level of rhetoric we are hearing from the Deputy on an ongoing basis and thankfully people are starting to cop on to it. They will realise it more when an election takes place and we check the veracity of his policies and his proposed solutions for the country in the midst of the biggest crisis since the foundation of the State. We all know what would have happened. The economy would have collapsed.

One of the Deputy's solutions is to tax working families even more in order to make sure it can raise €2.5 billion. He did not know what was in his policy when he made his contribution to the House.

The second point I would make as to why I will not accept Deputy Gilmore's confidence motion is that even Fine Gael thought it was stupid. It was a stunt last Saturday, in an effort to see if the Deputy could get his face in the paper for Sunday. That is what it was about.

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