Seanad debates

Tuesday, 8 March 2011

2:30 pm

Photo of Eoghan HarrisEoghan Harris (Independent)

I will not take part in the kind of "ho-ho" stuff going on here. I would welcome, endorse and wish the new Government a fair wind if it was a brave Government, be it a minority Government or one governing on a knife's edge. However, a Government with a majority that large is asymmetrical and holds in itself the seeds of its own dissolution.

The Oireachtas has one task in hand, namely, the economy. Central to that task is that we cannot do anything about the banks. We are fairly locked into the realities of the ECB, as Mr. John Bruton said. That is a straitjacket. The only area over which we have control is the domestic economy and the public finances. There is a deficit of €19 billion, the bulk of which comes from public sector pay and pensions and social welfare. Far from this Government tackling that task, the programme for Government is a collusion not to deal with it. The Government will never have the full confidence of the people until it behaves like a national Government. It calls itself such, but a national Government by definition is one that takes hard choices, does hard things and administers hard medicine. This is a division of spoils between two parties.

I voted for Fine Gael, wished it well and hoped it would have the bottle to reach out to Fianna Fáil, to count up the Independents and, if necessary, to govern as a minority party and administer the strong medicine to the public finances that was necessary. I regret that Fine Gael has decided not to do this. I hope everything works out for it, but I cannot see how it will. After a few months, never mind years, the Labour Party - the party of soft options - will look more and more like the national Dublin modernist progressive party and Fine Gael will regret that it did not decide to live dangerously. There are no free lunches in this life. There is no way a Government of this size will have a soft passage.

There is no Opposition in the country right now. As Yeats stated, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity". I do not say the Opposition are the worst, some of them are. I wish that Fine Gael had the courage of its convictions. I also wish the Labour Party had the courage of its convictions and went into opposition to give us a decent division in the country. "The best lack all conviction", Yeats says and it is true. It is true that Fine Gael and the Labour Party lack the conviction to do what is necessary. This is a big, heavy, lumbering Government, which contains in itself the seeds of its own destruction. Right now, the only real Opposition in this country is the media, and I am glad to say my newspaper will take part in that Opposition.

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