Mary Lou McDonald (Dublin Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are all agreed that the motif and theme emerging from this election is change, but I hear a note from some Members who might seek to suggest that this is some kind of capricious nonsense on the part of the electorate, that perhaps people were not really sure what they meant by change, that it was some kind of fuzzy ill-defined feeling. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I was delighted to go the length and breadth of this State and to talk to hundreds, maybe thousands, of people and they told me what change means. Change means a secure roof over their heads, it means not having their adult children and perhaps their children living in the box room. Change means being able to pay your rent and not worrying from week to week or month to month that the landlord might knock on the door and tell you that it is game over. Change means not having your elderly relative on a trolley, not having that surgery or procedure cancelled again and not getting a letter from the authorities in the hospital saying the good news is that you have an appointment but the bad news is that it is 18 months away. Change means knowing that you have enough to get by reasonably well. Change means that you are not constantly bothered by the €2,000 in rent, €1,000 for childcare, and a real struggle to insure your car. That is what Imelda told me after the election. She is from Cork but now lives in Coolock and she voted for another winner, Deputy Mitchell. Change also means dealing with the climate emergency, not rhetorically or in the box-ticking way that the establishment do but really getting to grips with the green agenda.

Change also means that the old order must pass. That is really what the problem is here because of course government formation is about numbers. We can add. Of course it is about policy coherence, no one is arguing to the contrary but government formation is also about power and who wields it. The reality is that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have run the show for almost a century and, by Christ, they are not minded to let go. That is really what all of this is about. People told me very clearly that they were voting for us to be in government . The 500,000 or more people who voted for us were clear that a vote for Sinn Féin was not a protest, it was a vote for a different Government - a Government that would have the courage, the imagination and the energy actually to do things differently, a Government that would put the citizen and families and communities front and centre, not big corporates, not the elites, not the well-networked, not the people that Deputy Micheál Martin used to knock around with in the Galway tent.

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