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

Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are holding the country to ransom. Citizens have been left stranded and are increasingly becoming angry and frustrated as for close to 50 days Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil have been playing out this really cynical spectacle.

5 o’clock

This is motivated solely by the pursuit of political power, while the citizens are blighted with a diabolical housing and homelessness crisis that is worsening on a daily basis and a chronic situation in our hospitals. The blight of low pay, inflicted mostly by the last Government, but also previously by the Fianna Fáil-led Government, is now leading to workers rightly making pay claims and the possibility of very serious industrial conflicts, which we are already seeing play out at Luas, with Tesco workers also balloting for strike action.

While all of that is going on, there is the scandal of the Panama papers, in which we discover firms without nameplates hidden away up residential streets facilitating hundreds of Irish companies to engage in transactions offshore in tax havens such as the British Virgin Islands and almost certainly involved in tax evasion or massive tax avoidance, robbing the suffering citizens of this country of millions, tens of millions or possibly hundreds of millions of euro.

We cannot discuss any of this nor do anything about it because of the spectacle of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael manoeuvring to be top dog and refusing to accept that the days when the political establishment could control both the Government and the Opposition are over. They cannot stand that history has moved on and that they cannot control both sides of the House. However, they will have to accept it. Things are changing. I heard Deputy Lisa Chambers talk about the fact that Fianna Fáil does not want to break promises and that the people demanded a change of Government. Yes, they demanded a change of Government, but not because they are interested in the personnel or the banner of Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael or any other political banner. It was because they want changes in policies. Their anger at political betrayal is due to the fact that people make promises about specific policies and issues that affect them and then abandon those policies and promises. That is why the Labour Party has disintegrated as the political force-----

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