Tom Clonan (Independent)

I thank the Minister for coming to the House. I thank my colleagues for sharing time with me. I hear in the Minister's remarks the alarm bells we have heard so many times before about impending economic shocks. He referred to them as shocks that may become more frequent. I entered the workforce in 1987, almost 40 years ago, so I have lived through recession, boom, recession, catastrophic economic collapse and then boom and here we are, perhaps on the threshold of another period of economic instability. In the 1980s we had mass emigration, and an intractable security problem on the island provided by the Provisional IRA and groups like the INLA. Ireland was an economic and social basket case. I remember the Jack Charlton years of the early 1990s when we began to recover. That in turn paved the pathway for the Celtic tiger with all of its intellectual and ethical failures. I recall the groupthink, the Gleichschaltung that accompanied that economic imperative. It is true that during the Celtic tiger we went off a cliff financially but I do not believe that anybody intended this country to experience the economic and social collapse that it did. I think it was a case, if not of negligence, then misadventure. I prefer to think of it as misadventure. However, the austerity years were a deliberate, planned, programmed attempt to inflict pain and suffering on the most vulnerable people in our society.