Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Interestingly enough, Sinn Féin's pre-budget submission from a couple of years ago was entitled "Route to Recovery" and was about going towards a "just society", something that also rings a bell because it was a slogan that Fine Gael used many times in the past. If history is to be repeated, I look forward to reading Sinn Féin's submission in a few years' time and its plans for building "a republic of opportunity".

Looking back on what Sinn Féin has submitted over the past few years, one feels like one is reading not so much an alternative budget, but an alternative reality. Sinn Féin has had so little faith in the ability of this country and this Government to get things right that it claimed only a few years ago - I will cite its leader's post-budget speech - that the budget loomed over us like the end of world. Sinn Féin revelled in apocalyptic language about how bad things were and how they would never get better if the Government's fiscal policies were pursued. It claimed that there would be no recovery, the deficit would never be reduced, unemployment would never fall and families would never see their finances improve. The only solution that Sinn Féin could offer was a war on wealth, higher corporation taxes, higher income taxes, a plethora of new levies and telling the IMF and Europe to get lost.

Each year, Sinn Féin confidently predicted that our approach was not working until it saw that it was. Then it began saying that the effects were only temporary. Now it has very little to say about the economy at all except that it is "on your side". It condemns a budget that includes €387 million in income tax reductions for working people and families. If Sinn Féin and other parties of the left cannot support modest reductions in taxation in times of economic growth and fiscal surplus, what would they do to middle-income families if there was another downturn? I think we all know.

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