Ruth Coppinger (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

On seeing the Taoiseach table a motion of confidence today, I have to compare him to Comical Ali claiming he was winning a war when the tanks were rolling into Baghdad. The speeches I heard today were utterly delusional. When the Taoiseach believes he has saved the taxpayers billions of euro, the rest of us see that he has bailed out bondholders he said he would burn during his election campaign. When he sees reconstructed, stable banks, the rest of us see struggling mortgage holders who never got any help from this Government and who never got a write-down on inflated house prices. When the Taoiseach says Ireland is the best small country in the world in which to do business, tens of thousands of people regard it as the best small country to leave. I could not believe it when the Taoiseach said Ireland should never be a cold house for its people. He said so in the midst of the biggest housing emergency this State has ever known and about which the Government is doing little or nothing.

The Taoiseach's claim to be making progress on women's rights is also delusional. All we see is a medieval anti-abortion law. The Government has not the guts to take on this issue. I refer in particular to the Labour Party, whose members are sitting beside the Taoiseach. The law criminalises women for their decisions.

The claim of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, that not guillotining debate is one of democratic Ireland's greatest achievements is laughable.

On Friday, there was nobody sitting on the Government benches. They let the clock run down on the debate. That is the new tactic.

The charade that the Government is going through today is irrelevant. The real politics will be tomorrow, when I guarantee tens of thousands of people will be on the streets outside the gates of Leinster House to deliver the real no-confidence vote in the Taoiseach. In their elaborate speeches, the Ministers did not mention the dreaded words "water charges" once. Even at this eleventh hour, the Taoiseach could save himself and abolish the water charges. I do not know whether it would be enough because people have reached the stage where they want the water charges to go and they want the Taoiseach to go.

I raised the question a couple of weeks ago whether the Taoiseach or the Tánaiste were Del Boy or Rodney in trying to sell the dodgy water charges at a discount. Today, I see the Taoiseach is Trigger, in that he is living in a completely different universe from the thousands of people who will be on the streets outside this building tomorrow.

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