Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to share my time with Deputies Dooley, Calleary and MacSharry. Given the scale of current problems in vital areas such as hospital waiting lists, homelessness, non-functioning Northern institutions and Brexit, it is indeed to be regretted that we have to spend parliamentary time discussing Government communications. However, there is no alternative because the Taoiseach's approach to this issue is central to how he is running the Government and to the Government's efforts to push media coverage away from more serious issues.

We have had nine months of this behaviour and it is time for it to end. As we saw yet again this morning, this is a Government which is absolutely obsessed with spinning everything. There is almost no issue where it will not try to pre-empt coverage by planting a soft, one-sided story in a newspaper. It even sought to twist coverage of today's debate by briefing about the likely outcome of the internal review. The journalist was told this shows there is no real problem and there have been simply a few teething errors.

We will have to come back to this wider problem of an obsession with trying to manage the media. Even though this is a Government with the weakest ever popular mandate when compared with recent decades, it is actually the Government least likely to consult people before taking decisions. It is also, increasingly, the most arrogant Government in decades when it comes to attacking the right of others to question its actions. The petulance and aggression, which are coming to define its approach to being challenged, is there for even the most naive to see. We saw some of it earlier on Leader's Questions again.

Previous Governments, of different make-ups, followed a far more open approach to briefings on matters such as Northern Ireland and Europe with parties that shared the same basic approach. There is, effectively, no recent example of something being discussed in confidential briefings in advance of Government spinning the media. We have actually lost count of the number of occasions where we were informed through the media that we were apparently engaged in discussing matters such as future budgets even though no such discussions existed. This morning another piece of political posturing about fiscal responsibility was briefed. Given the Taoiseach spent nearly all of last year talking about the need for massive cuts to higher income tax, it proves that consistency is not something the Government is too concerned with.

This type of game playing is corrosive. It is long past time for Fine Gael to understand that this is catching up with it. Within days of the announcement, also via an anonymous briefing, that the Taoiseach intended setting up a new unit, and it was the Taoiseach who said he was establishing the new unit, we began raising questions about its role, scale and politicisation of basic public information. Since then, the Government has ignored basic legitimate questions and ploughed ahead regardless. This unit is the personal project of the Taoiseach. At any global forum it is the personal project of the Taoiseach. The emails in The Sunday Business Poststory by Hugh O'Connell reveal all of that.

The Taoiseach asked that it be established. He said that here in the Dáil. He recommended its head and essentially selected and appointed him. He said that here in the Dáil as well. He also secured its budget. In addition, he has followed a policy of giving as little information as possible to the Dáil and his Department has tried to withhold basic information, when sought, through the freedom of information process. The entire purpose of this unit is political. It has been set up and given unprecedented staffing, resources and political access for the sole purpose of promoting the political message of the Government. Remember the four marginal constituencies, four newspapers and four advertorials advertising the Fine Gael candidates in those four marginal constituencies. That is the bottom line. It happened. We are not making it up.

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