Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I accept that we have more to do and issues to resolve. That was the case during the Celtic tiger years and it is surely the case now after six years of fiscal retraction. The Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, has led our national recovery alongside the former Tánaiste, Deputy Gilmore, and the current Tánaiste, Deputy Burton. The Taoiseach will go down in history as one of our finest taoisigh. He will retire with a record of real and substantial achievement. I am proud to have served in his Government. We have turned around the State's economic fortunes. We have been a real reforming Government. I am proud to have placed legislation supporting whistleblowers on the Statute Book for the first time and to have restored the freedom of information regime in the way it was originally designed in the 1990s. We have extended and strengthened the powers of the Ombudsman. This House sits longer than at any stage previously in our history. Contrary to popular belief, the guillotine is practically redundant. For the first time in decades, councillors at local government level are sitting down to make real decisions on the deployment of resources. That process, of itself, has been revealing.

The no confidence motion was tabled by an unholy alliance of those who created the mess from which we are recovering and those who are determined to make it worse. It is a limp affair, offered by parties that are going through the motions.

Sinn Féin, the party led by the "Leader for Life", the Enver Hoxha of Irish political life, voted for the bank guarantee, socialising banking debt on the backs of the Irish people. Far from the radical party of the left, it proved to be the bankers' poodle on the one occasion when it really mattered.

It is joined by the real author of our financial collapse, Fianna Fáil, which is led by a man who almost stuck it out to the end before deserting that particular sinking ship. Having joined together to back this motion, are they offering an alternative Government? Should this Dáil vote itself into a general election today? They are not. Their policy alternatives are not real, but they know that. Nor are they even prepared to ally themselves together to form a Government. Hardly a day goes by when the leaders opposite rule out sharing power with each other. It is bizarre that the only party that all of the parties opposite want to share power with is my own. They are joined by the Independents, who seem to spend most of their time discussing how to lose their independence through some form of alliance. I listened with interest to their new apparent leader, the reinvented cheerleader of Anglo Irish Bank, Deputy Ross.

The Opposition tabled not so much a motion of no confidence in the Government as a motion rejecting governance itself. Government is a place where hard decisions are made. Democracy is not some form of juvenile game where individuals pursue heightened forms of personal purity. Democracy is the process by which people with competing interests and perspectives come together as adults to resolve real differences and take decisions, supported by the majority and protective of the minority.

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