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

Many of the questions ask the Taoiseach to do this and that. The best thing the Government could do is stay quite a distance away from Northern Ireland. It has nothing new to offer, considering that the austerity already imposed in the North by the Tory-Liberal Democrat government is causing the same social suffering, dislocation and poverty as this Government's austerity has caused here in the past four years following the austerity of the Fianna Fáil-Green Party Government. Why would ordinary working class people in the North, on any side of the community, have confidence that this Government would bring something positive to them in the type of changes that are needed, when its record is one of slashing and burning services in the past four years?

Is it not the case that in the Stormont talks the Taoiseach did not lift a finger when the Prime Minister, Mr. Cameron, arrived to impose a new round of savage austerity on the people in the North, dictated by the Tory-Liberal Democrat government and to be implemented by the parties in the Executive? How can the Taoiseach talk about developing services such as education when 20,000 public sector jobs are to be axed in the immediate years ahead, as a result of more Tory austerity? Does the Taoiseach not find it sad that the parties in the Northern Ireland Executive will not just implement the failed policies of austerity but also wish to imitate the discredited policy of reducing corporation tax on big business, at the same time that a scandal a month is emerging involving major international banks and some of these big corporations fiddling billions in taxes-----

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