Michael McNamara (Clare, Labour) | Oireachtas source

That is what happened in this instance. We talk a lot about political gimmicks, but the political gimmick is this motion of no confidence. Perhaps the Tánaiste might have done it another way, but that is not what we are debating. We are debating a motion of no confidence in her because of how she has run her Department. I will be quite happy to go through the voting lobbies and I am sure a walk-through vote will be called.

If Members are going to have the theatre of politics, then let them have it. There will be a walk-through vote. I am happy to walk through the lobbies on the Tánaiste's record of reform. If one goes back to the Beveridge report that came out immediately after the Second World War, its objective was to do away with the five great evils, namely, squalor, ignorance, want, disease and idleness. For a long time, the social welfare system in this country - the Twenty-six Counties, as Sinn Féin would refer to it - has been about buying off a group of people. It has not been about vindicating the right to work or about getting such people back to work, making them functioning members of society and protecting them when they do not have a job. It has been about buying them off and if Sinn Féin has learned one lesson from its so-called republican brothers who have governed in the South-----

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