Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It must be miserable to be a Sinn Féin Deputy. It must be the most miserable, horrible job because they are sitting there watching the economy going better, more jobs being created and people starting to get a bit of hope but they are miserable because they cannot exploit people's fears as they could in the past. Their strategy for five years was transparent, namely, to exploit people's misery and fears and say how awful everything was and what a shower we were on the Government benches for not giving a damn about anybody. It was a great little strategy but it is unravelling now and people are seeing through it. We have the Sinn Féin mother of all sorrows in this House but up in the North they are austerity junkies, laying off 20,000 public sector workers, cutting back services and agreeing to budget reductions all over the place. They are chancers. To give them any more credit than call them a pack of chancers would be to overstate things. If they want to continue to engage in misery that is fine but it is not worth any more of my time.

Those of us who actually have to make decisions, to have an input and to bear the responsibility of achieving something, do not look back on the past five years and gleefully say that it was a difficult time for people but it was great to do it and we got a great laugh out of it. We inherited an awful mess but we took difficult decisions and did our best to bring it back to where we started to put people back to work. Then people start to pay taxes and then we can reduce the enormous burden of taxation on other people and put money back into social services and public spending.

What did the Sinn Féin manifesto say at the last election? It said they would reverse every single cut and would tell the troika to go home.

It promised to reverse every cut without any money to do it. What is particularly interesting is that not once did Sinn Féin ever produce a plan or even a vague outline as to how it would fulfil that manifesto. It never proposed in an alternative budget in the first year of this Dáil outlining how it would reverse all the cuts because it was making it up as it went along. It does not want to be in government and does not want to make decisions. Its plan for the next five or ten years is to keep growing and then eventually it might enter government without being responsible, constructive or having some kind of national interest. It does not make sense. It is only self-interest that motivates it - self-interest to grow the party, grow the mission, report back to the IRA and let it know how it is getting along with its little strategy. That is what it is about.

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