Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

With the greatest respect, we increased it to the highest level in Europe prior to the crash.

The clawing back of €300 million through the failure to index tax bands is a significant policy decision. This was not announced yesterday; it is buried in the documentation. The obvious purpose of this was to give space for changes which might win a few more headlines.

At the conclusion of five budgets, the net impact of the income policies of this Government is entirely clear. It has significantly increased inequality. It squeezed the middle further and then failed to relieve it in spite of endless stories promising action.

The Government has put political positioning ahead of everything else during its term. It entered office with the objective of claiming credit for the recovery which it knew would come. Selling the fairy tale of a decisive Government coming into office and turning things around quickly, no matter what the impact, was its single guiding obsession. It did not seek to shape a recovery which would benefit all parts of our society. It merely wanted to play politics with recovery.

To the mounting fury of many Government members and backbenchers, the public have been reluctant to shower them with laurels and re-elect them by acclamation. The problem is that everyone knows that the Government did not deliver this recovery. The economy is growing today at roughly the long-term trend rate predicted by all major research bodies. This is growth built on the foundation of skills and enterprise developed by the people over decades. Ireland is recovering because of its core strengths, not because of a politically obsessed Government which has no interest in long-term issues. The Government did not deliver recovery, but it did make it unfair and divisive. It also allowed crisis after crisis to develop because of a refusal to engage in even basic planning on fundamental issues and its addiction to short-term action.

One of the major problems for the Government is that it is trying to claim credit for growth it does not understand and did not predict. For the first half of its term, growth was lower than it had predicted and now it is higher. The majority of measures to fix the structural deficit were in place before the Government took office. That is a fact which cannot be disputed. If it wants to claim that fiscal retrenchment delivered recovery, the Government has an enormous problem of having campaigned and voted against it budget after budget.

Ireland has a great economic story to tell the world of a dedicated and skilled people and solid foundations, but the Government is refusing to tell it because it gets in the way of its political strategy. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Brendan Howlin, was absolutely right when he said those who promised to simply throw out tough policies were making promises which were both unrealistic and foolish. It does, however, take some neck for the Government to attack the policies of the far left here and say, "Who speaks of Syriza now?” It was the Labour Party and Fine Gael who were promising the radical alternative in 2011.  It was they who promised “not a red cent” and “Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way.”  They were the Syriza of 2011-----

See this speech in context