Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I am sure the days following on will not be as serene and friendly as this moment, but sufficient for this day is the joy thereof. Ar an gcéad dul síos, céad mile buíochas do muintir Baile Átha Cliath Thiar. I express the deepest appreciation of the Socialist Party and the Anti-Austerity Alliance to the people of Dublin West for sending the former Councillor Ruth Coppinger to Dáil Éireann to represent them alongside myself. I welcome Ruth's family and supporters to the Visitors' Gallery. Her late parents would be delighted to be here as well if things had been different.

The now Deputy Coppinger has been a sterling fighter for the ordinary people of Dublin West for a very long time, leading and assisting the crucial campaigns that were necessary, for example, to defend services at Blanchardstown hospital and resist cuts to special needs assistants, campaigning with those desperately in need of homes, campaigning to resist draconian austerity taxes, campaigning with those affected by pyrite, campaigning with those afflicted by private management fees, and, today, campaigning with the Paris Bakery workers scandalously forced to occupy their premises for the unpaid wages and rights to which they are entitled.

On 23 May, the ordinary people of Ireland did not merely speak - they absolutely thundered against the injustices of the austerity burden placed upon them for six years to salvage a degenerate and socially destructive European financial market system. That burden has been borne by the child who has special needs or is acutely ill or the pensioner whose medical card has been callously removed, by low and middle-income workers and the unemployed now threatened with punitive water taxes, and by the young frog-marched into forced labour schemes or forced out of their country. These policies of austerity have been crushingly rejected. The Government is now suspended in mid-air, with no democratic legitimacy for further austerity. Like a pair of schoolyard bullies against whom the schoolyard has finally revolted, Fine Gael and Labour are left politically pummelled and punch-drunk, one sprawled senseless on the floor, the other staggering around in a daze.

See this speech in context