Ciarán Cannon (Fine Gael)

On the day he became leader the Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen, stated:

This is what the Government wants and needs. Its responsibility is to fuel the engine of community and to lead the charge away from the promotion of exclusive self-interest towards a superior value of a wider community interest. The pre-eminence of community and participation over self promotes social harmony and a better quality of life for all. This is what will allow us to develop a society of social inclusion.

In those words one gets a sense of a man who knows how unique it is to be Irish, who recognises the unique values that have been passed on to us by our parents and grandparents, and who must have a deep understanding of that community spirit that has bound us together many times in the face of adversity.

Having heard the Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, speaking in those terms last year it makes it difficult for me to establish the value system that underpinned the delivery of yesterday's budget. This budget undermines and effectively dispenses with the unique value system our Taoiseach so eloquently described on the day he was elected. Rather than promoting social harmony and a better quality of life for all, this budget has driven a wedge between the public and private sectors and has sent a strong signal to our vulnerable that when times get really tough our Government does not have the compassion or the ingenuity to protect them from the brunt of an economic disaster. The disabled, the blind and our hard working carers were not spared but instead led up the steps to be sacrificed on the altar of fiscal rectitude. The Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, seemed to be more interested in pleasing the columnists of the Financial Times and the gurus in the European Central Bank than in protecting those who deserve our protection.

I called to the store room in the basement in Leinster House last week and had a long chat with one of the men working there. He queried me on my opinion as to whether his pay would be subject to a cut in the budget. He told me he was working eight years in the Oireachtas yet his gross salary was only €28,000 per annum. A neighbour who is a special needs assistant telephoned me during the week asking me that same question and pointing out that she, her family and her children could not sustain any cut in her salary or in her child benefit. I did my best to assure both of those people that no matter how bad things were it was highly unlikely that they or others like them would suffer any cuts. In the alternative budget proposed by Fine Gael last Friday, anybody in the public sector earning less than €30,000 would have been protected yet those same people were afforded no protection by this Government.

In that inaugural speech last year the Taoiseach, Deputy Cowen, stressed the importance of representing the interests of our young. He stated:

...the character of the generations that will build this century is still being formed. These generations will decide the shape of the future. It is the youth of this nation who will determine that our peaceful island remains a safe and secure place for all our people to live. It is our youth who will determine how 21st century Ireland meets the challenges of an increasingly globalised economy. It is our young people who will help to shape the environmental destiny of our island, this Continent and the wider world.

How do those same young people feel this morning? I only spoke to one, unfortunately, an economics graduate who had worked hard to top his class in college and who was only too willing and eager to play his part in staging our recovery. He told me he was booking a ticket to New Zealand to follow his brother who went there last year. What was our Government's response yesterday to this young man and others like him? Nothing more than a drop in unemployment assistance and a youth employment programme that has been inadequate in terms of imagination, scale and effort. Our young people want to work but there are no jobs. They want to get into further training and education, evidenced by a 60% increase in those contacting FÁS this year compared to 2008.

In April of this year, the Government announced 2,000 places on a new workplace scheme, 500 of which were supposed to be ring-fenced for those aged under 25. This morning, however, the National Youth Council of Ireland confirmed that the workplace programme scheme is not working as it has placed only 129 people in the workplace since its inception. That abysmal failure amounts to only one work placement place for every 3,282 people on the live register. Is it any wonder our young people are disillusioned? Rather than providing them with hope for a brighter future their social welfare supports have been slashed and they are relying on harebrained training schemes for jobs that do not exist and are provided by a deeply discredited organisation. Next year's biggest export will be those same young people whom our Taoiseach believes we must rely on to meet the challenge of an increasingly globalised economy. They will face up to that challenge but a huge number of them will do it many thousands of miles from the families and communities that shaped them.

In a ham-fisted effort to stop the haemorrhage of shoppers across the Border the Government once again bottled it, displaying a lack of courage in implementing only a small change in excise duty that will lead, for example, only to a drop of 60 cent in the price of a bottle of wine. Such a tiny price drop, coupled with the remaining gulf in VAT, will not stop visits to Newry, Banbridge or Derry, and retailers across the country will close their doors forever at the end of January. This excise duty measure will result in a loss of revenue when a courageous step to reduce the duty significantly would have eliminated the price difference once and for all, with millions of euro of revenue returning to our badly depleted tax coffers.

The bad timing of this approach and its implementation has also left a large number of drinks wholesalers with a huge deficit that they will have to sustain and some, including the small family businessman I spoke to last night, will not survive this change.

The budget has failed miserably to inspire hope among our people. As the Minister, Deputy Brian Lenihan, resumed his seat in the Dáil, any hope of a carefully crafted job creation strategy and vision for recovery went up in smoke and we were left clinging to what Deputy Richard Bruton aptly described as a jobless and joyless offering.

The capital budget for the 2010 to 2013 period has been reduced by more than €15 billion. This will lead to the cancellation of a large number of school building and other infrastructural projects. When this drop in investment is coupled with the major increase in transport costs that will be driven by the introduction of a carbon tax, it is clear that the outlook for Irish business is bleak.

One of the sad aspects of this budget is that other options were available. Speakers on the Government side in this House asserted again in this debate that the Minister had no alternative. I remind them that Fine Gael proposed a well-thought out, fully detailed, costed and, above all, fair alternative last Friday. We found methods of protecting the vulnerable. Our plan did not dispense with our value system. On last night's "Prime Time", the Minister for Finance rather condescendingly dismissed our plan as fanciful and magical. Earlier this year, Fianna Fáil spin doctors decided to rename the Fine Gael good bank plan as a magic bank plan. Perhaps this country needs its Government to show a little magic, a little sparkle of confidence and a little lateral thinking. More than a little hope would be generated through such thinking. It is apparent that such ingenuity and vision will never emanate from this jaded and disjointed Government.