Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Is the Taoiseach satisfied that with his Government only three months in office, Ministers are displaying an arrogance not normally seen until a second term? Is he in agreement, for example, with the gratuitous insult by the Minister for Education and Skills to parents whose children are forced to attend dilapidated schools starved of investment for decades? Incredibly, he blames them, saying yesterday in the Daily Mail of one such school:

What the hell is the community doing? The school is probably surrounded by wonderful houses with two or three cars parked outside every door and yet parents living in these houses are content to let their children go to a school like that.

What planet is the Minister living on? He is apparently blind to the fact that, tragically, many of those parents are probably living with crippling mortgages and negative equity and that many have lost their jobs. Not to mind the fact that parents are constantly fund-raising to make up for a lack of State funding.

Is the Taoiseach satisfied that members of his Government speak like this about hard-pressed taxpayers while the Government continues to throw tens of billions of the same taxpayers' money to bail out the rotten debts of speculators and bankers? Is he satisfied that another Minister, the Minister for Enterprise, Jobs and Innovation, who is, to boot, a gentleman farmer in Meath of the pastures-----

See this speech in context