Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

They do not have jobs now thanks to Fianna Fáil. The Fianna Fáil Members should be holding their heads in shame for what they have done. I could take this Bill seriously if those Members put their hands up to say they were guilty of wrecking our economy and imposing unbelievable suffering on working people, the vulnerable and the poor.

Fianna Fáil Members, however, have not done so. They have not acknowledged their role in doing untold damage to the economy. We do not know if we will ever recover from what they have done. The idea of Fianna Fáil Members standing up here to pretend they are the champions of cleaning up political corruption after their rotten relationship with big business is simply staggering. Fianna Fáil is the A-Team of creating the conditions for political corruption which has devastated our economy and our society. The new Government, and specifically Fine Gael, is the B-Team which is coming up fast behind Fianna Fáil.

How can one take seriously the Government's commitments on dealing with political corruption and the rotten relationship between big business and politics when at the recent forum it held in Dublin Castle to discuss how we can get out of this crisis it had present Mr. Denis O'Brien, a man who we know from the debate here on the Moriarty tribunal has major questions to answer, to put it mildly, about the way he got the second mobile telephone licence and the involvement of a former Fine Gael Minister in taking money from Mr. O'Brien during the time that licence was up for grabs? It beggars belief that the Government would invite this man who is a tax exile to discuss how we should get out of this crisis which was caused by corporate vultures and people who did not believe they should pay taxes or that taxes were only for the little people. How can we take seriously the commitments of a Government which rightly condemned the Galway tent but is involved in organising golf classics where developers and wealthy individuals make significant contributions to the huge election campaign fund of Fine Gael in the last election, a fund that was clearly boosted in a very significant way by major corporate donations? I find it very difficult to take any of the Members opposite seriously. We will support this proposal but we need to go much further.

One simple measure we could start with is to put severe limits on election spending. We would be doing the ordinary members of the population who are inflicted with posters on every lamp post and inundated with leaflet after leaflet or wall to wall advertisements during elections-----

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