Billy Kelleher (Cork North Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this issue but rather than call this a debate on the priorities for the Government in the year ahead we should rename it a debate outlining failures in many cases with regard to the commitments that were made to the Irish people in 2011. We need only consider the programme for Government and, three years on, extrapolate from it the successes or failures. One would have to say that by any credible stretch of the imagination there has been a great deal of spin as opposed to substance in terms of the Government's performance. I will refer to the health area later.

On taking office this Government's general philosophy was that over the five-year period it would make major contributions in terms of employment. The NewERA document, which was then transposed into Government policy, proposed the creation of 100,000 jobs. We were to have debt restructuring, debt write-down and the stabilisation of the banking system. Reflecting on what has been achieved, one could argue there has been very little movement away from the plan that had been previously put in place and the Government policies that were outlined in the programme for Government have not been supplanted into that.

It is almost a betrayal of its mandate to suggest the Government has adopted the proposals that it put before the Irish people and was elected on.

Reference has to be made to the whole area of the restructuring of debt and debt writedown. There have been great plaudits and much back-slapping on the Government benches with regard to the renegotiation of the promissory notes. None of us at any stage had a lot of joy about the time we had to enter into the promissory notes and make commitments to burden the Irish people for many years but, by an stretch of the imagination, given the vulnerability of the State at the time, decisions had to be made in a very pressurised situation. There is a letter in the Department of Finance from Jean-Claude Trichet, the previous President of the ECB, to the late Brian Lenihan, the then Minister for Finance, with regard to the bailout and the pressure that was put on the sovereign Irish State and its people at the time by the ECB and others to ensure there would be no burning of bondholders, because this might have a contagious effect on the broader euro currency area. On numerous occasions, it has been requested that this letter be released and, on numerous occasions, this has been refused. If it was a letter that was very damaging or indicted the previous Government in some way, I am quite sure the Minister, Deputy Noonan, would have put that into his breast pocket and slipped it out the back door some night. Some night he would have done that, if that was the case. It beggars belief that we are now talking about banking inquiries and everything else-----

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