Michael Mullins (Fine Gael)

I am getting worried that Senator White's memory is not as good as it should be because she is being very selective in what she remembers.

We all remember that this Government inherited a country on the brink of bankruptcy. The IMF had arrived in the country a few short weeks earlier. Senior Ministers in the previous Government were saying that the IMF was not coming here when its representatives were arriving at Dublin Airport. Over a period of two elections the previous Government bought the electorate by making unsustainable promises. It wasted valuable resources that, unfortunately, brought politics into disrepute. We had tribunals established and the legal profession benefiting to the tune of hundreds of millions of euro as a result of those tribunals. Senior Cabinet decisions appear to have been made in the Galway tent where the only people who were important to the previous Government were the cronies who were hanging around and who would literally walk on one. I attended the Galway races on a number of occasions and saw them operating.