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

Those are fine words, but does the Taoiseach seriously believe that it is appropriate to tell a man who has worked for 30 years in a small business, and who only recently lost that business, that he looks like a man who could do with a day's work, in response to him expressing his concerns about the impact of austerity policies? Does the Taoiseach not think that was a serious error of judgment and that he should simply apologise for it? What worries me, taken alongside his comments that the high levels of emigration from this country are just a fact of life, is that there is something glib and callous about the way the Taoiseach sees the problems affecting real human beings out there, who are at their wits' end-----

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