Jim Higgins (Fine Gael)

In spite of what the Minister said, the contents of the Book of Estimates have little, if anything, to do with the slowdown in world economic growth. Last May the Minister and his Government colleagues perpetrated the biggest con job on the electorate since 1977. In that year the Minister's Fianna Fáil predecessors and their infamous manifesto wrecked an economy, which then took 15 years to repair. It abolished rates on domestic dwellings and motor taxation in one fell swoop. The buzz-word at the time was "pump-priming" the economy. Instead of pump-priming the economy, it wrecked it. The then so-called Minister for Economic Planning and Development, Mr. Martin O'Donoghue, went down in annals of history as the architect of this catastrophe.

History will be equally damning in relation to the economic performance of the Minister for Finance. The last general election was a replica of the one in 1977, possibly even worse. It was preceded by a splurge of spending that has left the coffers empty, married to a plethora of promises, each of which has now been shamelessly discarded, abandoned and thrown on the scrap heap leaving the economy in tatters. To an extent, I am delighted the chickens have come home to roost and the people who once again blindly voted for the promises of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrat have now been left to rue the day. They now realise they were duped. The chickens have well and truly come home to roost, but instead of laying any golden eggs, they are leaving behind glugger after glugger.

The Minister for Finance will go down in history as the Minister who brought the much envied Celtic tiger to its knees. If somebody in the private sector perpetrated the fraud that the Minister for Finance perpetrated and wasted billions of money that was not his own, he or she would be charged, hauled before the courts and convicted of reckless trading and possibly even end up in jail.

Having fooled the electorate in order to win the general election and get back into power the Minister devised a clear political strategy – two or possibly three bad years of drastic economic cut-backs followed by two more years of splurge and give-away before the next general election based on the premise that people would forgive and forget. However, the people will not forgive and forget because public anger and revulsion at the manner in which they were conned is such that those who trusted him and bought into his policies are likely to be anything but forgiving come the next general election.