Shane Ross (Independent)

I thank Senator Bradford for sharing time.

I would like to wander around this topic the way everybody else has without being very specific about it. The initial reaction to the election results is for one to be somewhat puzzled. If anybody gives them any thought, he or she would come to the conclusion that the extraordinary rejection of the Government in these elections is not only a reflection on what has happened in the past few months. We can understand, to some extent, the extremely penal measures that have been taken by the Government against virtually every taxpayer in the country and against people in receipt of social welfare benefits. While we may not agree with these measures we can understand the reason they were taken, namely, because the budget deficit is wide and the economy is generally in a pretty perilous situation. However, that is not the reason Fianna Fáil and the Green Party got such an astoundingly bad vote. That was because there was a verdict on what Senator Bradford touched on and on the years prior to the last general election also.

What is depressing and also an eye-opener for the Government is that the people decided they had made a mistake in the last general election and that they had also been fooled. People gave a fairly decisive mandate to Fianna Fáil, although not so much to the Green Party, in the last general election on the basis - I do not believe this is in dispute - that Fianna Fáil would be the people who would run the economy best. That was the message its members sold, which gave them the resurgence they enjoyed in the last weeks of the polls. They sold that message very successfully. It was sold on the basis that they would run the economy extraordinarily successfully and they had injected people with prosperity during the previous four or five years. The problem with that was that within weeks of the general election and gradually over a period people began to realise that the message they were sold was a lie, that what had been happening was an extraordinary piece of economic deception. Money was being pumped into people's pockets which was not theirs. Developers were allowed to go bananas and borrow money like there was no tomorrow. That was a feeling of false prosperity to which nobody was calling a halt. That is something which people generally could not be expected to understand but understandably they were enjoying it.

I do not believe for one moment that there were not people in government, among the regulators, as Senator Butler said, and in the Department of Finance who did not realise that Ireland was living an economic lie for many years, but they did nothing about it for purely political reasons. What happened in this election was the people who had been waiting for the Government and who realised this took it out on the Government parties. They voted against them in spades. They realised not so much that they had made a mistake in the last general election, which they probably did, but that they had been deceived on a massive basis by the authorities, the oligarchs, the banks, the builders, the regulators, the politicians and the Department of Finance all during that period. It was a vote not so much only on the harsh measures but on the lack of taking corrective action before now. It was the first chance people got to do that and it was the first time they realised this.

I suspect there was also an additional cry of pain in this because all of us began to realise we were worse off than anywhere else in Europe, that we, our Government, banks and oligarchies had behaved worse than those anywhere else in Europe. Other countries' governments in Europe, which had taken some measures that people did not like and which had to ride out a recession, did very well. That is where Ireland is in such a strange situation. Silvio Berlusconi, despite his extraordinary domestic difficulties, did very well. Angela Merkel, despite the severe recession in Germany, did very well. Nicholas Sarkozy did well in France. I concede Gordon Brown did not do so well in the UK but, I suspect, much of that was to do with an immediate problem, of which everybody is aware, to do with parliamentary expenses, which has had a sensational effect.

Whereas in Europe the people appear to have moved or stayed with the kind of centre right parties, here there was undoubtedly a move to the left. It is a extraordinary reflection on gut reaction. Much of it was middle class reaction. Joe Higgins - I personally welcome this - a member of the extreme left, put out a member of Fianna Fáil in Dublin. What are we to make of that, namely, that the largest party in the State was put out of action completely and a man who represented a long dynasty in Fianna Fáil by a Marxist-Leninist, who does not even believe in the rights of private property? What does that tell us about the people who voted for him? What we saw here was not just a working class protest vote. What has to have happened is that the middle classes came out to vote and the people in south Dublin, the people who voted for Deputy Lee, voted for Joe Higgins. The people of Dún Laoghaire, the most middle class constituency in Ireland, voted for Joe Higgins. What are we to tell from that? A move to the left like that is a move, I suggest, more of real disillusionment than a move towards the ideology which Joe Higgins unashamedly espouses.