Seán Fleming (Laois-Offaly, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It was a sham from the very beginning.

I listened with incredulity when the Tánaiste spoke earlier. She demonstrated why she is at the end of the road after five years. When one is five years in government, one becomes detached and removed. One starts to believe one’s own publicity. The Tánaiste probably believes those press releases by the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Howlin, to some extent, as well as her own ones.

This evening, the Tánaiste said that five years later, she was very proud that she and her coalition partners managed to end the worst recession in Ireland in living memory. Talk about conceit and arrogance. Nobody is worried whether she feels proud or not. The Tánaiste did not end it. In fact, she made the recovery worse, making it a two-tier one, dividing society in the process. She claimed she and Fine Gael solved the economic crisis when it was the people who did and suffered in the process. She said the people should be grateful to her for solving the economic crisis. I advise her to continue to say that every day for the next six weeks because she will get her answer then. If she goes around telling the people how wonderful she is and how proud she is for solving the economic crisis, she will get her answer. If she keeps up that level of arrogance, the people of Ireland will show her their way of dealing with such arrogance.

She also told another big lie this evening. She knows that when she came into government, there was a troika agreement in place. It was a three-year agreement with a date by which the troika was to leave Ireland. This was set out in an international binding agreement before the Tánaiste ever came into office. However, she told us that the Government sent the troika home. The Government had no say in it whatsoever as there was an international binding agreement with a date for the troika’s exit written in stone with which the Government complied in full. The troika left on the appointed day, as set out on the first day it arrived. For her to be so arrogant and actually to believe she sent the troika home speaks for the level of self-delusion in this Government.

With respect to matters at national level over which the Government has control, this is where it will come a cropper with the public. Many things on the international sphere have gone well for Ireland and Irish people are happy to see an improvement in the international and national finances but people are not feeling it in their households. I would look to areas, including housing, and now we have the housing crisis, over which Labour Party Ministers have had control. The Labour Party Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government, Deputy Alan Kelly, is responsible for housing. The Minister, Deputy John Burton - or I suppose she believes she should be called "Tánaiste" all the time - is responsible for social welfare and social protection payments. Those two Labour Party Ministers between them have created a homelessness situation that has never existed in Ireland to the extent we have seen it in recent times.

We were accused of building too many houses when we were in government, and it is took some turnabout for this Government to turn a surplus of houses into a homelessness crisis in a short period of five years. There are two reasons this has happened. One is that the Government allowed NAMA to sell off many houses at knockdown prices to vulture funds from American, Canada and China. Furthermore, the local councils were not given the money to take up the houses that NAMA was offering them. Between the way the Government has run NAMA and the way it funded the local authorities, we now have a ridiculous situation where the Minister with responsibility for housing, rather than spending €30,000 repairing and refurbishing a vacant council house to provide a permanent home for people to live in, would prefer to spend €190,000 on a temporary prefab house. They are nicer looking than the old prefabs that we had years ago but that is what they are. They are fabricated off site; they are simply put together. The Government would rather spend €190,000 on a prefab temporary structure than €30,000 to refurbish a vacant house and there are 3,000 such vacant houses throughout the country. The Government prefers to do the photocall for these wonderful houses. I will not talk about who got the contracts for that housing but most people will know that one does not have to look too far from the friends of Fine Gael in Government on this issue.

Why have we a housing crisis and why are people on the housing waiting list finding it difficult to get a house? The reason is that Minister, Deputy Burton, has refused to deal adequately with the rental supplement during the past few years. When rents were increasing, she refused to do it. She has bought into the Fine Gael mantra that one cannot interfere with the market. That is what the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, says about the banks, that one cannot interfere with them. That is why an Irish owned bank, AIB, is paying three times the interest on deposit rates to depositors in Germany than it will pay to Irish people who are living in Ireland. Perhaps it is the Taoiseach's way of saying "Thank you" to Angela Merkel. He is probably heading off to Davos tomorrow or the next day for a little tap on the head from some of these wonderful big bankers in Germany.

See this speech in context