Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail)

I will accept responsibility for what was in the agreement but I will not accept responsibility for this. The Minister keeps claiming it had been agreed and discussed. We never signed up to it and we are not responsible for the measures his Government agreed to if they were not in the original agreement.

I also believe the timing is wrong. The Government is jumping the gun because it would have been better to tell the troika that while Fine Gael might not have an ideological difficulty with selling State assets, now is not the time to even discuss the issue. The Minister published the McCarthy review of the sale of State assets last year but he will not publish the information that persuaded him to make this decision. He pulled the figure of €3 billion out of thin air. No evidence has been published to back it up. It is similar to the figure he published on 17 November 2011 when he claimed that public sector reform would lead to a payroll reduction of €2.5 billion. No evidence was produced to support that claim.

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