Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Mercenaries deserve to be identified and put out of action as opposed to being embraced by Governments and the Civil Service. They led the attack on our people. Deputy Fitzmaurice is right; it is as bad as what the Black and Tans did and many lives have been wrecked. Many people have taken their lives and many families are distraught, not to mention all the homeless people to whom we pay lip service.

Hand in hand with all of this, we are not building houses. There is something very sinister taking place at the heart of Government. We are unable to build houses, yet we built houses in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s when we did not have a crane or a JCB. In the past, houses were built with picks and shovels and ropes were used to move cement. Everywhere one looks in Dublin one sees cranes.

One would get dazzled with them at night-time through the haze. However, they are not building houses. They are building more offices for the companies we thought we would get over here in the past couple of days, but we saw where our friends were there as well. We pulled out of one of them and we lost the other.

These policies are disastrous and they are having a negative impact on our country. Men gave their lives to get our independence and here we are selling it for 30 pieces of silver in a Judas-like sale, and we keep doing so. We expect to dose the medicine on the ordinary people - to hell or to Connacht. Now it is to hell or to anywhere. Connacht has not even room for them anymore, but we do not care. We let all these fellows have their bonuses and their big dividends and tax havens. It is despicable.

Deputy Donohoe is a relatively young Minister. I wish him well. I am not saying that the Minister is too young or anything like that. Deputy Donohoe is a married man with a couple of children. I am sorry, I cannot say anything about children or being married anymore. The Minister knows what I mean. He is new on the job, a new kid on the block and we expect a great deal of him.

We expect that the Minister has a nose on him that is smart enough to see what is going on, that we are being ripped asunder. We are being mauled and blundered, like we were back in the days when Cromwell was here. It is the very same. I stated, through the good offices of the Ceann Comhairle, on Leaders' Questions to Deputy Donohoe's great leader a few weeks ago that the bank robbers are no longer on the streets as I used to see them when I was young, with the gardaí following them and the Army minding the money for the courier services. They are inside, deep in the boardrooms. They are inside in these Ponzi schemes and they are doing what they want to whom they like when they like with impunity. We even pass legislation to support them. We say, "Off you go, lads.", and pat them on the back. I have said on many occasions that it is like rubbing butter to a fat sow's you-know-what. I will not say you-know-what but the Minister knows it is a big behind - we all know what it is. It is craven. It beggars belief that we, as an elected Parliament, would allow this to go on in this day and age in 2017. With all the education, all the advisers and all the financial gurus, it beggars belief that these fellows can come in and run rings around us and have Ponzi scheme after Ponzi scheme, and as Deputy Fitzmaurice and others have said, rape and blunder, ride into the sunset and let us all go to hell.

How can any ordinary person buy a house? Then we try to bring in a rejuvenation scheme. The former Taoiseach announced it one day, in what I called the "Four Roads to Glenamaddy", in Edgeworthstown, somewhere over in Longford. It was like "Four Country Roads." I do not know where he has gone now, what road he is on. I would say, a road never travelled - I do not know was it Mick Foster or which of them said that.

We are not afraid to travel, but these fellows are travelling all of the time. They are running rings around us and we are supporting them. We try to rejuvenate towns and people want to turn offices and failed businesses into living apartments, and we cannot take the VAT off for them because we would be helping the buildings. I say we can easily just take it off for the person buying the property who wants to get a house for himself. We cannot take the charges and development fees off because the local authority needs them.

I have asked on countless occasions that we bring up the county managers to explain why we cannot build houses. We are sick of announcements of all the funding the Minister is giving. The people out there are wide awake to this. I have stated previously that they are waiting in the long grass for the Government. They waited previously and by God, they gave Fine Gael a fair clipping in the grass too. The few of them who survived were like hares in tufts of grass so that they could not be rooted out, but they will root them out the next time. The people are coming for Fine Gael because they are educated. We have young families out there who are educated now and they understand a fraud for what it is.

Fraud is being perpetrated on the people in the name of democracy, and it is awful. I am surprised at the Independent Alliance. The Labour Party, the ordinary working man's people, supported Fine Gael. Founded in my own town, it could not even hold its conference there. We know what it did and what happened to it. Now it is the Independent Alliance's turn. Fine Gael was trying to export them to North Korea - some of them would not come back - and it was happy out to be part of the laugh, a diversionary tactic.

Here we are. We had heavy rain today but the fog is lifting. The scamaill on the mountains are lifting and we can see what is going on. I doubt the Government wants people rioting on the streets, as they did over Mugabe - I mentioned his name here two weeks ago and I was told he was nearly finished, and he is. The Government's day is coming too because the people are awake. It used to be the west awake. The whole of Ireland is awake to see the misery on the streets, the people who cannot get homes and the homeless, and we then ridicule the priests and the nuns and all the volunteers who help to feed the hungry and clothe the needy.

However, there are no needy with the Government, only the boys who need and want everything, and they will not allow anything, not even the scraps. When we were young, we would feed the hens with the scraps from the table. These fellows will not even give the scraps to anybody. They want it all to themselves, with big deep pockets. I would remind the Minister that there are no pockets in a shroud. They want to be everywhere. Greed is alive and well, and kicking. The culture, here in this Parliament, and in the Department of Finance and the Government circles, in the past number of years is feeding that greed enormously. Unless we get food poisoning or something, I do not know how we will get rid of it.

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