Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)

During the debate, my colleagues have described in great detail the impact the household charge will have on low and middle income families. Not only is this flat rate charge unfair, it will make life demonstrably harder for many thousands of families struggling to make ends meet. I am sure the Minister of State must be aware from her constituency clinics of these people to whom I refer. However, I would like to focus on a different aspect of the household charge, namely its impact on the domestic economy, jobs and our prospects for economic recovery. This week, both the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance said their economic strategy - if one could call it that - is on track. They say GDP growth returned in 2011, GDP projections for 2012 remain on track and unemployment is stabilising. Unfortunately for the Government, the hard facts tell a different story. The last two quarters of 2011 saw a return to negative growth in GDP. In other words, the State is officially back in recession. In fact, the domestic economy, where most of the jobs are, has not been out of recession in the past five years and GNP continues to contract at an alarming pace. Unemployment has not stabilised, with the latest Central Statistics Office quarterly household survey showing that 14.8% of the labour force are out of work. Meanwhile, the ESRI report published this week forecasts that unemployment will continue to rise this year. These figures do not include the tens of thousands of people - many of them young - who, faced with a State that has utterly failed them, are emigrating in search of work.

These hard facts confirm what people across the State are experiencing every single day, week and month, namely, unemployment, emigration, financial stress and real human hardship. Contrary to the Government's claims that the economy has turned a corner, the reality is that we are in the grip of an economic, unemployment and emigration crisis. In the midst of these overlapping crises, what is the response of Fine Gael and the Labour Party in government? Their great plan is to take more money out of the pockets of hard-pressed families in the form of VAT hikes, petrol and diesel tax increases and the household charge. These taxes and charges not only push families into ever greater levels of financial hardship but also damage the domestic economy. Every euro the Government takes out of the pocket of a low or middle-income family is a euro taken out of the domestic economy. It is a euro not spent on local goods and services, with the result that more struggling businesses lose trade and are forced to lay of staff. This leads to more unemployment, more emigration, less tax revenue and increased social welfare expenditure.

In my constituency of Donegal South-West - I cannot be sure it will remain as such after the boundary commission has had its say - the impact of the Government's failed approach can be seen every day. It is there in the classrooms where dozens of the primary teachers who finish work this week will not be allowed to return in September because of the Government's policy of attacking rural schools and the children seeking to be educated in them. It can be seen in the closure of Garda stations in rural areas throughout the county and the threat to the district headquarters in the Glenties areas. Policy failures are clear to see in the pending closure of Lifford Community Hospital, whose patients the Government wants to evict as it has done to other vulnerable people in other counties. The Government's ineptitude can be seen in the bed closures in Letterkenny General Hospital that are inevitable unless the Government allows the recruitment moratorium to be lifted and provides additional funding for their retention.

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