John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Brexit or no Brexit, regardless of how it turns out, this debate quite clearly puts the Government on notice - notice to quit. It has a litany of failures, health being just one. This motion of no confidence in the Minister should be a notice of no confidence in the Government itself. Each and every one of the Departments over which it has presided has at one stage or another seen unfulfilled promises, overspends and poor management. Behind the Minister and the Department of Health are all the officials who were engaged in this, and they have turned around to the Oireachtas committees and told us they will not appear before us. The Government allows this to happen. I suppose, by extension, we allow it to happen. There are those of us in this party, on this side of the House, and indeed within the party ranks and among the public, who want us to pull the plug.

I ask the Government, in the face of Brexit, to wind itself down in an orderly way. It is an utter failure in what it has done and I would support a vote of no confidence in the Government itself because the Minister cannot be left on his own. The rest of the Government also bought into the matter and were present when the Minister told the story about the overspend and so on. What is forgotten in this debate is not the national sabotage that has been described but rather the sabotage of people's rights, namely, to a home or not to have one's house repossessed by a vulture fund. Although we may not like Ben Gilroy, his and others' rights have been ignored and he is in the lock-up. The Government has ignored many rights.

Fine Gael claims to be the party of accountability but when voting for the recent Comptroller and Auditor General (Amendment) Bill 2017, which was put forward by my party, Fine Gael refused to support it. I no longer know why we support the Government or why we sit on our hands and allow it to function. Both the public and the majority of the House have had enough of the Government and, therefore, it should go.

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