Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

This must be the longest game of musical chairs anyone could have imagined. Tweedledum replaces Tweedledee, or maybe Tweedledee replaces Tweedledum - who knows? Quite honestly, it will make very little difference to many people. Nothing will change and the record of failure will continue.

It is hard to find a single area of policy where this Government has not failed. A Government that cannot provide its citizens with one of the most basic needs - an affordable home - is a failure, full stop. Some 90,000 families are on lists for public housing, which does not exist. More than 11,000 individuals and families, including more than 3,000 children, have been in emergency accommodation for years, with all that entails for people's health and mental health due to stress, as well as the development of children who have to travel long distances to school. Young, educated and reasonably paid people cannot afford to live in urban areas, especially in Dublin, and that is now a key factor in the recruitment and retention crisis in the health service and schools.

There has been a complete failure to implement Sláintecare as a total package of reforms to transform the public health service. When the Sláintecare report was produced, it was pointed out that a piecemeal approach to its introduction would be the worst way to go about its implementation, yet that is what the Government has done and there has been no improvement. In fact, the public health service has gone from bad to worse and is now in complete crisis despite the great commitment and work of healthcare workers in the system. This is yet another failure to provide a basic need for citizens - access to high quality healthcare when you need it, not when you can afford it. There are many failings in the public health system but the failures in mental health, especially for young people, are an absolute scandal.

More than 100 years after the founding of the State, we still do not have genuinely free education. It speaks volumes that there is a State-funded scheme to help struggling parents with the cost of sending their children to school. Just stop and think about that. In what other wealthy modern society would that be tolerated? We do not provide our children with public transport to get to school in areas where it is required. The expansion of the free school transport scheme was a fiasco. There was an utter failure to plan and put in the necessary resources. Yet again, we have a scheme, not a right or an entitlement, for which one must qualify. That is what public services amount to - not properly funded universal services to meet needs but a series of schemes. This is again a failure to provide places in schools for children with special needs and provide the services those children need. I could go on.

The Government has failed to come anywhere near meeting its climate emission targets. In the past three budgets there has been a failure to ensure welfare payments keep pace with inflation, resulting in an actual cut. The one progressive measure announced by this Government was the promise to end direct provision, through which asylum seekers are, in effect, imprisoned for years, but it now looks like that promise has gone on the long finger.

We have this rigamarole today where one failure will be replaced by another, who has already been there and done that. I call it the Lanigan's Ball day - you step in again, I step out again, I step in and you step out, learning to dance for political power. We need real change - a left change, a socialist change - and we need it badly.

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