Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)

I have received much correspondence from people who have serious fears about how the Government's cuts will affect their incomes. It is important their voices are introduced into the debate and I will give one example from an e-mail I received recently. It states:

Hi there. Said I would private e-mail you because there seems to be such a shame in being broke. These cuts cannot be made. It will tip us over the edge. We have six children. My husband is self-employed and recently had to sign on. Because he is self-employed, he did not get the dole. He is still registered and it breaks my heart to see him hanging on in the hope work will come in.

We are not social welfare people, never were. We both worked hard to have what we have and it breaks my heart to see it slowly being taken away. We are struggling to pay our mortgage and put food on the table. We have to budget to the last penny. Any cut and something will have to go - maybe the coal for the fire. We cannot afford the oil for the heating anymore. Where did it all go wrong?

During the good times we did not buy properties or have flash cars. We just lived. My daughter is doing her junior cert at the moment and talks of wanting to do medicine when she leaves school. I sit, listen and encourage her but all that goes through my head is how we are going to pay for college when we cannot even afford to let her go to the cinema with her friends.

Christmas is coming and you cannot explain to a five year old that Santa cannot afford that new bike, so something else has to be cut. Government needs to live our lives for just one week and they would see what has happened to this country. All they are doing is day-to-day crisis management and not actually coming up with solutions. I have a 19 year old son who is considering leaving the country. I did not raise him to ship him off. People's hearts are breaking. They need to listen to us.

Sorry for the rant but it is just so hard week to week trying to feed them all, keep them warm and clothed when you are looking into an empty purse by Thursday. We never wanted to end up on social welfare but for the time being that is all we have. Thanks for listening.

That is representative of hundreds of thousands of people in this State who are in extreme fear over what they expect to happen to them in the budget. The Labour Party Members have enormous power, opportunity and influence. They can dictate how this budget will go. They have the power to dictate whether this family and hundreds of thousands of others will be able to buy oil, put their children through college or put food on the table. That is within their gift.

We are told that our sovereignty has been hived off to Europe. Lack of sovereignty has resulted in the country being badly treated in the past. The Famine and significant numbers of deaths related to emigration were due to a lack of sovereignty. The current lack of sovereignty is leading to mass emigration, unemployment and poverty. Ironically, at a time hundreds of millions of people around the planet are fighting for sovereignty, Government Members are preparing to hand more fiscal sovereignty over to the EU and to prepare a Lisbon Mark III, which will take away our ability to manage our own affairs in the future.

For the sake of the woman who wrote this e-mail and the hundreds of people and their children who must have written letters and e-mails to Fine Gael and Labour Party Deputies, the Government needs to prioritise Irish interests rather than slavishly following the policies dictated to us by Germany and France and the EU core for their own internal electoral needs. It needs to put Irish people first.

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