Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Today's spring economic statement was billed, among much fanfare, as a roadmap to the great recovery, drawing a line under this Government's devastating cutbacks and austerity and marking an end to what the Minister, Deputy Noonan, describes as the lost decade. They are grandiose claims that have amounted to nothing. There is nothing new whatsoever in them - no change in thinking or direction, no real commitment to rebuild society and the economy in the aftermath of catastrophic hardship for so many people, and no real understanding of where things are at for hundreds of thousands of families and workers who are really struggling and are at their wits' end.

Listening to both Ministers, Deputies Noonan and Howlin, brings to mind the great Irish writer Jonathan Swift, who once observed that blessed are those who expect nothing for they shall never be disappointed. Bravo to that. It just goes to show one today.

Most people were not taken in by the Ministers' hype, certainly not the people I represent, but for those who were perhaps gullible enough to believe the Government guff of recent weeks about increasing people's standard of living and bringing relief to low and middle income families, that bubble has been well and truly burst here this afternoon. Today, the Ministers have clarified again the position of this Fine Gael and Labour Government. It is progress for those at the top and patronising tokenism for the rest.

I am sure people were relieved to learn that the Minister, Deputy Noonan, is greatly encouraged by the data flow over the past year or so. I would think people were very concerned to hear him assert that the recovery is, to his mind, broadly based. I do not know the circles in which the Minister mixes. I do not know the people he talks to in the course of his political duties but I want to tell him, unequivocally, that a recovery has not reached the homes, the livelihood or the pockets of countless thousands of people across this State. If he has a difficulty in believing that he is more than welcome to visit the north inner city of Dublin or my home neighbourhood of Cabra where he will meet no end of people who will him that very directly.

Where is the big initiative, the game changer, for the low paid or for the squeezed middle about whom the Minister claims to be so concerned? Having starved public services of funding and staff, taxed working people into poverty, driven hundreds of thousands of our best and brightest to emigration and stood idly by in the face of homelessness, mortgage distress and eviction orders he comes in here today looking for brownie points. As he now limbers up for a tilt at re-election, for what is he hoping? A pat on the back or an expression of gratitude perhaps from the very people who have borne the brunt of his failed Government?

Today’s rhetoric from the Ministers is very familiar. There is a real sense of déjà vu. They have the neck to rehearse again the same tired rhetoric that marked their 2011 election campaign. They replayed the charade that they care about fairness or a decent society as the Minister, Deputy Howlin, loftily announces to the Chamber that an economy is not society, and vice versa. They used this Dáil Chamber to spell out again their empty, meaningless promises but, after all, that is what Labour and Fine Gael do in elections. Do they imagine for a second that people cannot see through them? They are fooling no one but themselves.

It is fitting that the backdrop to today’s statement is the ongoing controversy surrounding Siteserv and other IBRC transactions.

As the Government crows about its great reforms and introduces a new concept of national economic dialogue, we are faced again with depressingly familiar questions around the insiders of Irish society. The Ministers opposite know who I mean - the people in the know; what I call "the entitled classes".

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