Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have asked and called year on year to use NAMA's resources to tackle the infrastructure needs of the State and the Government has turned its face against those calls. One would think the Government was elected yesterday or last week. Of course it should be doing that. True to form, the Government is not dealing with the social clause in the NAMA legislation, but is getting NAMA to give money to developers to build private houses and sell them at the highest cost. That is not what we need when there are 130,000 families on social housing waiting lists.

We have seen the form of this Government. It has promised a lot and delivered little. It promised to take on the banks in terms of their veto and in terms of variable interest rate mortgages. They are screwing nearly 300,000 customers. The Minister told us the stick would come out on budget day but there is no mention of giving the Central Bank the powers to cap interest rates. Nor is there any mention of increasing the levy despite the fact that only one bank has moved at all in terms of standard variable rates.

Income inequality has been the hallmark of the Government. It could be tackled, yet we have a Labour Minister of State for employment who refuses to take action on low-paid contracts or on the high levels of low-paid and insecure work. He refuses to even acknowledge the scale of bogus self-employment in the construction sector and has limited the work of the Low Pay Commission to focus solely on the minimum wage and not on the wider issues surrounding low pay and income inequality.

It is remarkable that after four and a half years of deep cuts to education, health and social protection, and increased unfair taxes targeting struggling families, it is only in recent weeks that the Labour Party has finally found its voice. Not one of its Deputies had the courage of the party's founding principles to stand up to Fine Gael's conservative Tory agenda. Instead, they became Fine Gael's greatest champions, and not for the first time. What a difference a term in government makes. In the closing days of the 2011 election, Labour strategists reduced the party's entire campaign to a single, simple message: "Elect us and in government we will soften the sharpest edges of Fine Gael."

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