Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour)

Deputy Boyd Barrett is an idealist and he believes what he says. The problem is that we must pay our way. We are borrowing €18 billion to fund ourselves for this year. Do I like the memorandum of understanding we inherited from her predecessors? No, I do not, nor do I like reporting to external forces, chapter by chapter and the line by line of public expenditure. I am determined and the Government is determined to get us back to a position where those domestic decisions are made by the sovereign Government of Ireland without oversight. In order to do that, we need to make reductions in expenditure that are laid out in order to get to a balanced budget and a 3% deficit by 2015. This is our determined view.

The notion that we could abandon the memorandum of understanding and tell the Troika of the EU, the IMF and the ECB to take a hike is fine. They would happily take a hike. This would leave us with an €18 billion hole in expenditure this year. That is not having a moratorium on staff, that involves closing hospitals and schools and Garda stations. That is the slaughter of public services, the consequence of Deputy Boyd Barrett's idealism or naivety if he thinks we can simply magic away a gap in our expenditure of €18 billion.

We must be honest and truthful with people that there is no magic way of getting out of the debt burden placed upon us by previous Administrations and decisions made by them. It falls to us, those elected in this House now, to have the responsibility to face up to that and make the hard decisions.

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