Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

These Supplementary Estimates are a belated recognition, prompted by a looming general election, that one of the major slogans deployed by the Government in its first years in office was completely bogus. I do not know if the Minister remembers the slogan that we would get more for less but it was repeated ad nauseamwhen the Government was inflicting the most savage and cruel cuts in vital public services and supports and infrastructural and capital spending. Its claim that it was a reforming Government that would get more for less was a complete fallacy. The most obvious place in which this fallacy has been exposed is the health service where the slashing of budgets, staff numbers and investment has led to a diabolical position in which we have unacceptable waiting lists of up to two years for people in chronic pain who need operations, while tens of thousands of other people in hopeless and desperate circumstances must wait for procedures and many others must lie on trolleys for days on end. That is the legacy of the more for less fallacy the Government has promoted.

Another major area in which the more for less fallacy has been exposed is housing. How wrong can a Government be? It has managed to generate the worst housing crisis in the history of the State by butchering and effectively stopping investment and spending on social housing. We are now paying a heavy price for this failure and the lack of sufficient investment in flood relief, drainage and water infrastructure generally. All these chickens are coming home to roost.

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