Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)

I am sharing time with Deputies Coppinger and Boyd Barrett.

On a personal level, I wish the former Minister for Finance well but on a political level and on an ideas level, I do not wish his ideas and his politics well. It is worth examining what Paschal Donohoe's ideology has been and what it has meant. He is one of the more ideological and more considered figures within the political establishment in Ireland. What characterises the more general statements by the former Minister is to talk about the defence of the centre and that the centre must hold against extremes of left and right. He characterises himself as a centrist and Fine Gael as centrist, and presumably Fianna Fáil as a centrist. What does that mean? First, let us consider the extremes of left and right. The left are those who say that we should have decent access to housing for everybody, that we should have free childcare, that we should have a decent national health service and that we should have a society based on people's needs not profit. The right, of course, are those who want to demonise the most vulnerable, who want to burn down IPAS centres and so on but look substantially at this centrism Paschal Donohoe speaks of and what this Government has legislated for? Take the example of the last budget. This is centrism and this is what is packaged as what is sensible, normal and not very ideological at all. In one of the richest countries in the world with a record budget surplus, this Government and Paschal Donohoe decided to make disabled people poorer, and not just poorer in real terms but poorer in nominal terms by well over €1,000. This Government decided to make the poorest income group poorer by over 4% in real terms. It decided to make everybody, ordinary people, poorer by about 2% while giving huge tax breaks to big business. This is presented as sensible centrism.

An article in the Business Post, which got very little coverage or very little kind of echo, was very interesting.

It was revealing of how the Government actually operates. The article refers to a meeting between the heads of Google and the then Minister for Finance:

Briefing documents for the meeting show Donohoe offered a number of commitments on tax changes to Ashkenazi [head of Google], several of which were subsequently delivered or signalled in the budget.

One of those is worth more than €300 million. Google was able to knock on the front door, come in, meet the Minister for Finance and get a tax break of €300 million in the same budget that made disabled people poorer. This gets to the heart of what Tariq Ali has described as the "extreme centre". The extreme centre thinks that hard choices need to be made for the poor, the disabled and workers but if you are Apple, Paschal Donohoe and this Government will spend millions to fight for your right not to pay tax, if you are Google you get tax changes in order to minimise your tax liability and if you are a developer you get a massive tax break. This is why we need a fundamental change of Government and who the Government represents.

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