Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It was sad listening to the Minister, Deputy Howlin, like the little lad in the playground bragging to the big lads about all of the sweets he had given out while they were nudging one another and saying that they had not seen any evidence of sweets. He was protesting too much, bragging about social welfare rates increasing under the last Government when that was really a reflection of the wealth transfer to the wealthy and a compensation for the poor wages being paid. The Government's strategy is wrong, as was summed up by the Minister, Deputy Noonan's remarks on the economic recovery being most clearly evident in the labour market. That is precisely the area in which the problems in the economy are the most evident. In the 1950s, we brought workers back from Britain to build houses. Not so long ago, someone could leave school and get a permanent and pensionable job in a local authority. Now, we have the spectre of graduates working in repeat internships or JobBridge schemes for low wages. Our new recruits in the public sector, be they gardaí or nurses, get less per hour than a worker in Aldi or Lidl. It is a race to the bottom and we are building a low-wage economy based on neoliberal economic policies that the stability programme is designed to perpetuate and develop further.

The programme update tells us that we will formally exit the excessive deficit procedure, EDP, this summer. That should be great cause for celebration - hooray, hooray - but we must remind ourselves as we pop the champagne why we were in the programme in the first place and why the public was shackled and put on the hook for billions of euro in gambling debts in which we had no hand, act or part. Coming out of the EDP, we will go straight into the new austerity of the preventative measures of the Stability and Growth Pact under which we must achieve our medium-term budgetary objective, MTO.

Deputy Pearse Doherty was correct, in that a change has been proposed today. It is sickening and insulting to democracy that we have a Government with zero mandate from the electorate. Face it - the Government took a hounding. It has no authority to endorse any document in the name of the Irish people-----

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