Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Ní fhéadfainn a rá ar chor ar bith go gcuireann sé áthas orm labhairt ar an rún, ach tá sé fíor-thábhachtach go bpléifí an rún seo agus go ndéanfaí scrúdú ar na geallúintí agus an méad a bhí ráite ag páirtithe an Rialtais seo sula ndeachaidh siad i gcumhacht agus ag aimsir an olltoghcháin deiridh.

The Government should do the honourable thing by seeking a fresh mandate. If recall elections were allowed in this country, it would have been recalled long ago. Despite its protestations, it knew before it came into office exactly what the financial situation involved. Right up to the election the parties now in power accused us of understating the financial difficulties we faced and that things were a lot worse than we claimed. Despite their concerns, however, they wooed the electorate with extravagant promises. I do not doubt that the Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, will protest that the Government is doing a good job in the circumstances and that the electorate realises that. If she believes that argument, she should go before the electorate, apologise for the fact that all the promises the Government parties made were empty, and state that this time they are going to stand on the programme they are following, which happens to be the programme of the previous Government. They would then have an honest mandate rather than one built on a tissue of false promises.

The bank guarantee is a hardy perennial for the Government. Unlike its colleagues in Fine Gael, the Labour Party argued before the election that the guarantee should not have been provided, but it has since renewed the guarantee on two occasions. It was happy to accept the receipts from the guarantee, which totalled €1.2 billion this year, and it paid unsecured bondholders in full. It has failed to achieve any form of debt write-off from Europe and has tacitly admitted that it will never do so. It neglects to explain that if the banks had collapsed, their depositors would have lost their savings.

Under Fianna Fáil, anyone who bought shares in the banks that failed had his or her shareholdings wiped out. We did not guarantee shareholders in the banks and many ordinary people lost all of their money. With regard to subordinated bondholders, they received 10 cent in the euro and were virtually wiped out. Who did we save? We saved depositors in the banks. It is time for the Government and, in particular, the Labour Party to state they would have burned depositors in the banks. One might say we should burn tier one bondholders, but there are a number of snags with that theory. First, in Anglo Irish Bank, for example, some €50 billion of the funds belonged to depositors, as opposed to €10 billion in the case of tier one bondholders. Therefore, if we had burned tier one bondholders and the bank had been allowed to collapse, depositors would also have been burned. Furthermore, in law, tier one bondholders rate equally with depositors. Therefore, one could not burn one without burning the other.

With regard to Anglo Irish Bank bondholders, the Government knows now and could have known before the general election, if it had checked, that its bonds were not taken out in Ireland but in another jurisdiction. Therefore, there is nothing the Government can do to change the law and if it had defaulted, it would have been taken to court immediately in Britain for non-payment of the bondholders. Therefore, it has perpetrated a huge lie, shown by its own actions to be an untruth. The fact is that it has followed a policy of paying bondholders and renewing the guarantee. The saying goes: "Let me be known by my actions, not by my words". The actions of the Government have validated those of the previous Government and shown the falsity of its stance when in opposition.

The issue of promises has been mentioned by my colleagues. Let us look at three of the main promises made. A promise was made with regard to the student charge, but the famous promise made at Trinity College Dublin has been totally broken. A promise was made on child benefit, curiously enough by the Labour Party, but it has been broken and smashed. The effect has been cumulative, such that the bigger the family, the harder the hit. I will speak more about this issue in the debate on the Social Welfare Bill tomorrow. A promise was also made with regard to income tax. I did not realise how many of the current Government were educated by Jesuits until the past few weeks. In their nice Jesuitical minds there is a fundamental difference between changing PRSI rates and changing income tax rates. However, as the ordinary public see it, it is all the same. It is money that comes out of their wage packets. Because of the way it was done, the same amount of money was taken from the person earning €400 a week and the one earning €4,000 a week.

As I said, if the Government believes its programme is right and the one the people want and voted for, it should have the courage and go and ask them. It should have an election, not based on the false promises it made - probably the greatest ever made in an Irish election - but on the policies-----

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