Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Can I join you, a Cheann Comhairle, in extending best wishes for Christmas to everybody in the House, particularly to the service officers, the ushers and the Oireachtas staff for all their hard work in a difficult year.

It seems Christmas started early for the Taoiseach yesterday when he entered into a winter wonderland fairy tale where the bank bailout never happened and the €17 billion was never taken out of the pension reserve fund to bail out the banks. Neither was cruel hardship and austerity imposed on large numbers of people which resulted in a housing crisis and the massive understaffing of health service, of which we are still suffering the consequences.

The programme for Government has a shared future. Does that extend to a shared acknowledgement of the past reality that people have suffered and the reality of the bank bailout? Will the Tánaiste correct the Dáil record to show that there was in fact a bail out of the banks-----

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