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

The Government dares to come in with this pitiful amount of time to debate what we are told is to be a radical new policy direction and an almost new Government. The Labour Party had a full six weeks to discuss the disastrous perdition into which it has put our country over the past three years in terms of austerity and to discuss the leader on whose back they might pull themselves out of the hole. It has been a full week since the coronation of the Minister for Social Protection as Tánaiste. My concern over that time is not for the whole raft of wannabee Ministers on the Government backbenches, who have been reduced to nervous wrecks over the past week, but, more importantly, the vital documents - so we have been told - on crucial policies such as the massive housing crisis and the crisis of low pay which the Labour Party has discovered after three and a half years in government.

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