Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

There are two outstanding points with regard to how the general public sees this. The first is that people are shocked at the sheer scale of the financial damage done to the country and shocked at the scale of financial self-harm being wrought by the Government's actions. People see it in their local areas and their local schools that are being threatened with closures. They see the caps for simple services like home help for elderly people, the shutdown of disability services and the four-hour commutes they are making every day. They see that the pleas they make for extensions to rail lines to their towns are being scoffed at by Ministers, who say it is just not possible as money is not available. They see their own children suffering from the lack of mental health services, the 1 million people who are currently on hospital waiting lists and the 100,000 people who were on trolleys last year. They put that massive need in their own lives sitting beside the Government's financial self-harm and they simply cannot get their head around it. It is impossible for people to understand how they can suffer so hard in their own lives to try to get simple services for their families when the Government can be seen to squander such a level of money, and nothing happens as a result of it.

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