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

I am sharing time with Deputies Ruth Coppinger and Mick Barry.

First, I extend my sympathies to the victims of the horrendous fire in London. We do not yet know how many there are but the scenes are shocking and we should extend our support for, and solidarity with, the people there. We do not know why the fire took place, but very serious questions are being asked. I am no expert in this area but, coincidentally, I received a call this week from a fire consultant who told me that many housing developments in this country are very serious accidents waiting to happen because fire regulations are not being fully complied with, even in local authority housing stock. The tragedy of London should prompt us to consider whether fire safety is being properly applied in the housing stock of this country.

I do not want to be mean-spirited on an important day for the Taoiseach-elect, Deputy Varadkar, and his family but for the thousands of families facing intolerable hardship because they are homeless, the hundreds of thousands languishing in pain on hospital waiting lists waiting for operations and the many women in this country who urgently need the eighth amendment to be repealed in order that they do not have to suffer unacceptably when faced with crisis pregnancies, the fanfare of recent days and the pantomime of the Fine Gael leadership over recent weeks have been a source of frustration and, in many cases, anger rather than a cause for celebration. Most right-thinking people lament the rise of the politics represented by Donald Trump and the phenomenon of fake news and all that goes with it, but the establishment-political-media bubble has fed the causes of this phenomenon over recent weeks by engaging in a theatre that has been all about personalities and nothing about the policies and issues that make a difference to the lives of ordinary people who suffer in unnecessary hardship.

I do not believe it makes any difference whether Deputy Enda Kenny, Deputy Leo Varadkar or Deputy Simon Coveney is Taoiseach. What is important is that he is from Fine Gael and we need to interrogate the policies of that party to see whether those policies are delivering for ordinary people. We also need to interrogate the policies of Opposition parties and everyone in this House to see how we can address the issues facing the citizens of this country. That is what they expect us to be doing. We should take a salutary lesson from what happened in the recent election in Britain. Prior to the election and for the first few weeks of the campaign, if one was to believe the political-media bubble, it was all about the personalities of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. Theresa May was going to walk the election and Jeremy Corbyn was to end up as toast. Then something changed and that was something called a manifesto. A manifesto was leaked with policies about the issues people cared about. They were not the issues the media were talking about, nor those with which the bubble was concerned. They were issues such as housing, health, education, equality and tax fairness, in which corporations and the wealthy would pay their fair share of taxes. They were about not bringing in fees for students, ensuring rights for those with disabilities, and fairness in the treatment of immigrants.

At the time, Jeremy Corbyn's policies were condemned by Deputy Howlin as being much more like the policies of Solidarity-People Before Profit than Labour Party policies. Deputy Howlin is on record as saying that.

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