Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

What do we mean by responsibility in the context of this Bill? In particular, what is our own cultural attitude to responsibility? In my view, for too long our default approach to responsibility has been like someone sitting in a restaurant looking at the healthy option on the menu. We know it is the right thing to do, we know it is good for us but we quietly hope that someone else would take that option for us. However, responsibility is not someone else's problem; it is an obligation that falls on all of us.

This country has learned some very hard lessons. The people we represent are taking on a very difficult and heavy burden. The recent strong vote in favour of the fiscal stability treaty demonstrated a number of facts. The country saw the immediate reward for the vote with a dramatic lowering in the rates demanded by lenders on the international money markets. Those lower rates have allowed Ireland to return successfully to the international money markets bringing closer the day when we can wave goodbye to the troika and once again raise all our required funding on the international markets as an economically sovereign nation. Had the electorate heeded the populist and hysterical rants of Sinn Féin and the far Left and voted against the treaty, I have no doubt that we would have been setting up the guest rooms for the troika for a long time to come.

This Bill allows the State to bring in prudent housekeeping measures and an independent system of checks and balances which has been the norm in many other countries and it is nothing unusual. The main instrument of that independent system will be the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council which will be given a statutory basis in this Bill. The council will assess and report on the macro-economic and budgetary forecasts of this Government and all future Governments.

When the council was established, I took it as a good omen that it had made its home in Whitaker Square, which is named for Ken Whitaker, one of the greatest civil servants this country has ever seen. Mr. Whitaker was educated in my home town of Drogheda and is a person I have the pleasure of knowing. In his role advising successive Governments, he was always the epitome of unassuming wisdom and represented what is best in our public service. Such selfless public service is in stark contrast to the cynical, self-serving populism that masks itself as opposition which we heard from Deputy Mary Lou McDonald and her colleagues today and yesterday. The Sinn Féin Party continues to trade on people's fears and to offer sweet-sounding panaceas, the latest being a wealth tax based on figures that are six years out of date. Not only are these simple and popular solutions unworkable, but the party would not even seek to implement them if it were in power. I need only look 30 miles north from my home town to see what the party does when it is in power. A Government involving Sinn Féin has implemented cuts left, right and centre across the Border and is taking in local property rates of approximately £1,000 per year on ordinary three-bedroom semi-detached homes. Yesterday the Administration in the North announced swingeing cuts in care centres which will see 750 places lost in the next five years. Based on all of this evidence, how can we take any of Sinn Féin's commitments in regard to public services seriously? Its promises ring very hollow indeed.

The reality is that if a simple and popular solution to our problems could be found, it would have been implemented a long time ago. In fact, it was simple and popular policies which got us into this mess. The outcome of 15 years of simple and popular is probably ten years of difficult and unpopular. As a country, we have finally grown up. There was no choice other than to take responsibility and adopt a mature position. On that basis, I am happy to support the Bill.

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