Shane Ross (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I congratulate the two new Members of the Technical Group on their election to this House and on their erudite expressions of opposition to this budget. Somewhat alarmingly, I found myself agreeing with a great deal of their analysis even if I do not think their solutions are necessarily ideal. While I was listening to the budget speech I also detected the aspect of it to which Deputy Wallace referred. It is just part of a pattern of being subject to the whims of those who are overseas and who control our economy. This is part of what they call the recovery pattern after the extraordinarily tyrannical demands made on us in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Like many others in this House, I grow angry when I read the kind of propaganda that is constantly spun from the Government benches about its management of the economy. The big lie in the Minister's speech which summed up this was his assertion that the Irish people have made major sacrifices. The Irish people made no sacrifice whatsoever; the Irish people were sacrificed. This Government was a big player in sacrificing the Irish people. This budget tells us that we are fast learners of the doctrine of Angela Merkel. Nobody could have been more pleased by the delivery of this budget than the German Chancellor. This is totally and utterly in keeping with the map she set out for us in 2009, 2010 and 2011 as part of the troika bailout and the dictaton what should happen to our economy. Throughout his speech, the Minister claimed credit for what he described as the improvements in the figures for GDP, growth, employment and emigration. The Government has not achieved many of these things. Its freedom of movement in this budget is, as Deputy Boyd Barrett and others have noted, as much as it was allowed because, according to our masters somewhere else, it is time that we handed back some of the crumbs to those from whom we have taken a large part of the loaf. That is what has been happening today.

We must be wary of accepting that chapter of our history as though it is something we did ourselves. What we are doing today, and what is coming from those benches and on the radio from both Ministers, who are appearing on the media ad nauseam, is that we are getting one or two things back which should never have been taken from us in the first place. We should not be grateful for that. We should not be giving them our applause. Nobody should be fooled that the Irish people have somehow swallowed this doctrine. The two Members who just spoken are living proof of the fact that the people of Ireland are not fooled.

Whatever is given back and whatever the big lie we are told today, it is going to be taken away again, and it will not compensate for water rates, the property tax and other taxes which have been imposed on us totally and utterly against our will.

I welcome one or two things in the budget. I welcome the removal of the pension levy and the fact that old-age pensioners are getting their bonuses back. However, I do not welcome the fact that we are constantly getting figures quoted about GDP growth and ten-year bonds yielding 1.72%, which will please the heads of Europe, but means nothing to the people who have suffered under the budgets that have been imposed on us. I am particularly sorry that the budget contains no sense of vision, departure or radicalism. It contains nothing novel. If the Government was clearly in favour of doing what it says it must, if it was a radical Government and wanted to change not just the political shape of the country but also its economy, why has it not tackled the quangos we have seen so often put up in lights and never touched? Why did it not address in the budget the cronyism referred to by other speakers and save money there? There are thousands of millions of euro to be saved in that area.

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