David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Last Thursday or Friday, when I first saw the motion tabled by the Labour Party it was as if the past five years had not happened. We have had a disastrous Fine Gael-Labour Party Government. We know from all of the reports and evidence from the OECD, EUROSTAT, TASC and all of those who have examined income inequality and poverty levels that income inequality has increased. Inequality rose and workers' rights were diminished as a consequence of the policies of the previous Government. We also know the wealthy and the elites were protected and cosseted by Fine Gael and the Labour Party. The poor, disadvantaged and working classes were abandoned. Workers in many companies were locked out of their jobs. From 2011 onwards, basic rights were denied to many workers throughout the State.

When I think of the previous Labour Party-Fine Gael Government and its track record on workers' rights, I recall the workers in Lagan Brick, Vita Cortex, TalkTalk in Waterford in my constituency, La Senza, Clerys, Dunnes Stores and many more companies who were denied basic rights and had to engage and sit-in protests. Guess what? They received no support whatsoever from the previous Government. They received no support from Fine Gael or the Labour Party. We had an era of sit-in protests as workers, through no fault of their own, had to occupy their places of work. This is what I remember about the Labour Party-Fine Gael Government and what happened in the past five years. We had a continuation of the neo-liberal policies of Fianna Fáil by Fine Gael and the Labour Party.

We have had an election and the Labour Party got what it deserved because it betrayed the people who voted for it. True to form, after it received a lashing from the electorate having provided a crutch to one of the conservative parties, it has come back to prance about in opposition, throwing radical shapes and pretending to be different and caring about workers, their rights, equality and all of the issues it did not care about during the past five years. If anything, the motion is a good thing because it represents a long list of failures of the previous Labour Party Government.

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