Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Government should have some responsibility for it. I despair. I live in the inner city and have lived there for 40 years and I have literally spent millions of my own money restoring a house. We have utterly decrepit pavements. I invite the Minister of State to come and have a look at the pavement on, for example, Parnell Street, where one is taking one's life in one's hands. The Government introduced a property tax. I persuaded the Minister for Finance, Deputy Michael Noonan, during a budget debate to introduce the living city initiative which he did, carefully excluding Dublin. When he extended the initiative to Dublin this year, some anonymous little squirt of a civil servant put down a provision saying that it should not extend to what he called mansions, in other words the Georgian core.