Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent)

There are elements of the budget which everybody in the House will welcome such as the universal social charge tax relief, income tax stability, research and development relief and mortgage interest relief, which mark a genuine effort by the Government to give some solace to people who are afflicted or vulnerable. I sometimes, but rarely, sympathise with the plight of the Government because, as it has stated regularly, with more than an element of truth, it has found itself in an economic hole which it is true it has inherited. The problem is that having landed in that hole, it seems to have taken to it and be as happy as a pig in the unmentionable commodity mentioned by Deputy Mattie McGrath in the House a short time ago.

The Government appears to have taken on the mantle of the conservative policies of Fianna Fáil and others and addressed it with relish. It seems that what Deputy Boyd Barrett has said is true, that the diktat is coming from elsewhere; it is not just coming from the Department of Finance, as is traditionally the case, or the last Government or the European Union. A series of strong, external forces are dictating internal policy to a degree that is totally unacceptable.

There are alternatives. While I do not agree with the one suggested by Deputy Boyd Barrett, there are several others. This is a conservative budget ad nauseam. A predecessor of the Taoiseach, Mr. Liam Cosgrave, said that when one was in a hole, one should stop digging. That is the policy the Taoiseach should have adopted. He should have addressed the issues in a far more radical way and not taken the old traditional routes which may - I do not believe they will - get us out of the hole to which he refers so frequently.

What is lacking in the budget more than anything is vision. I heard the Taoiseach say in his broadcast the other night that he wanted to see Ireland retrieve its sovereignty by 2015. It seems that is the last thing it will achieve in 2015 because this budget will take us on to a series of budgets which will lead us into what we will see agreed this weekend, a form of fiscal unity. We are going to be under the hammer of the troika for a few years, but we will then face fiscal unity which is, by definition, a sacrifice of economic sovereignty and independence. That is where we are headed, but let us not aspire to it but move directly in the opposite direction. What I would like to have heard from the Minister today was that he had a vision of where we would be when his series of budgets was completed in 2015 or 2016.

See this speech in context