Aidan Davitt (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of my party, I wish to ask about the serious inequality with respect to the ordinary five-eights in Ireland, middle Ireland, the coping classes, the squeezed middle. This caring Government which claims to have prioritised social reform has done anything but that - it has bared its teeth on middle class Ireland. No longer can a garda or a teacher marry a bank clerk or a Dunnes Stores' worker and hope to settle down and raise a family. The moral fabric and generational right of the middle class is being unspun by a Government that cares only for big business, large enterprise and banking fat cats. The Government will quip about what it inherited two elections ago but with some will and a little vision middle Ireland, which it has sucked dry and left lifeless, could have hope. Get the councils off their backsides to service the sites they have in land banks and sell them on to first-time buyers at cost price. Middle Ireland will do the rest. They will beg, borrow and help each other to build and get our country moving again. Where there is only despair, let there be hope. Come on, Taoiseach, give the coping classes a break. Help them to help themselves.