Thomas Byrne (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

It is not enough to say that Fianna Fáil did it because Fianna Fáil was thrown out of office at the last general election precisely because Fine Gael and Labour promised they would do things differently. When the Taoiseach was challenged on this yesterday in Dáil, I was very disappointed to hear him respond by saying that Fianna Fáil did it so it is okay for the Government. It is not okay because the public said it was not okay and we paid a high electoral price for that. Fine Gael and Labour in government do not seem to have learned the lessons of that. They think it is okay to go ahead with the old ways of doing business and that is wrong. It seems that Fianna Fáil is one of the few parties that is trying to learn some of the lessons from the crisis when we acknowledged that the public did not agree with the way things were done. Simply by throwing back what happened in the past at us, this Government is definitely on the wrong course.