My speech on the Motion of No Confidence
Below is the video of my speech made in the Dáil today during the Motion of No Confidence in Táoiseach Brian Cowen. You can read the text of the speech further below.
Deputy Ruairí Quinn: This is the second time in my political lifetime in this Chamber that I have seen the Fianna Fáil party bring this country to the verge of bankruptcy. I sat on these benches in 1977 when the triumphant Jack Lynch came in with his manifesto of economic illiteracy that believed we could borrow our way into the future in other people’s currencies. That economy collapsed amid its own contradictions when Jack Lynch was ousted two years later. Then there was Mr. Haughey, clinging to power for reasons we now understand, literally giving money to everybody and anybody.
For those of us who are old enough to remember and for those of us who still have the scars, the crawl back through three general elections between 1981 and 1982 was a difficult time for everybody, but we did crawl back. Slowly but surely, through that very difficult period in the 1980s, we tried to get the country back on its feet again. It was not just people on this side of the House who did that; people on that side of the House tried as well. They recognised that mistakes had been made and they had the honesty to recognise them and to deal with them.
When we went into Government with Fianna Fáil in 1992 and left in 1997, I had the honour of being Minister for Finance. I had the responsibility and the courage to ensure that we would not try to buy the next election. As a consequence, the Taoiseach and his colleagues inherited the first planned surplus in over 30 years and the most competitive economy in Europe at that time, creating 1,000 jobs a week, with unemployment rapidly falling.
The 1997 to 2010 period should have been a wonderful period of prosperity, of shared opportunity, of modest and prudent investment, but the Government blew it and I can give one iconic example of this.
One hundred years ago in this city and across the country, children were getting out of overcrowded tenement buildings in urban Ireland and poorly built thatched cottages in rural Ireland, with no running water, no decent construction, dampness and cold in the winter and walking to school, where they were housed and educated in classrooms that were in state-of-the-art buildings at that time. The Taoiseach knows them because they are part of our rural landscape. Those children got the best and were educated in the best physical surroundings that were available to them; better than anything they lived in at home.
If we fast forward to today, the grandchildren of those people get up in warm beds in centrally heated houses, double glazed windows and patios, walk to their cars and are driven to school, where they are educated in prefabs.
A total of 100,000 children are currently in prefabs in this country, and that population is growing. The children who are born tonight will be knocking on school doors in four years’ time. As it takes the Department of Education and Science five years to process an application for a school extension, they will be knocking on the door of a prefab.
Why did this come about? The money was there. Fortunes were made. Builders could not get enough people at home to work and they had to import labourers from everywhere else. Money was not a problem and the frequent cry was “I do not care how much it costs, just how soon can it be built?”
I acutely remember listening to representatives from the chambers of commerce in Carrick on Shannon when they met me in a deputation in the spring of 1997 when I was on a visit to Sligo and Leitrim. They told me they wanted the urban renewal scheme for Carrick on Shannon and I asked them what part of the town did they have in mind. They told me I did not understand, that they did not want to discriminate within Carrick or between Carrick and the different villages and towns in Leitrim, but that they wanted Section 23 urban renewal for all of Leitrim. I had to bite my lip.
If one goes to that part of the country today, one will see the prefab schools and the empty buildings. The whole of the north Shannon region is a wasteland of buildings that will never become homes, because the Government of which the Taoiseach was a member, under Mr. McCreevy as Minister for Finance, gave that section 23 to the whole north Shannon basin.
The legacy of the Celtic tiger will not be the soundly built buildings in which our grandparents were educated, but buildings that we will have to plough back into the ground. If ever there was such conspicuous, wilful and criminal waste, then this is but one example. Time prevents me from citing many more, but we never heard one single word about the wasted money for a generation that will never come back again. That money is gone, like the savings people had in bank shares which made up their pension. These were prudent, middle class people who were at an age where they could not buy proper pension plans for themselves and were advised to put their money in banks. They were not advised to do this for an appreciation of the shares, but for the dividend that was to be paid out. They are now impoverished, and who do they think of when they look at the despair around them because they cannot sell buildings that have lost their value and they fear old age?
Does the Taoiseach appreciate or understand the deep seated anger, disgust and contempt in which the people hold him and his colleagues? I had to go out to Glasthule this morning on personal business. I was asked at the DART station there when I was going “to get them out”. I was asked “how long more can we put up with them”. There is palpable anger, disgust and a despair that does not affect just the Taoiseach and the Fianna Fáil Party. It has infected us all. The Government has contaminated the republican democracy that is enshrined in this Chamber. As some Members of this House were crooked, contemptuous or lax in what they did, we have all been infected. That is the virus that has become Fianna Fáil. That is why it is unbelievable that the Taoiseach would even have the temerity to come into this House and ask that we vote confidence in him and his colleagues. There is a litany of waste and contemptuous dismissal, as Deputy Dempsey showed by saying “What is €50 million?” for the voting machines that even Robert Mugabe would not buy.
Deputy Alan Shatter: He might.
Deputy Ruairí Quinn: That money would transform schools across the country and could be spent in so many different ways. Yet it was piddling sum according to the Minister, or just petty cash. The Taoiseach has treated taxpayers’ money as petty cash and he has the temerity now to seek confidence from us.
He spoke earlier about policies he has delivered and said that the Government is now on the right course. How do we know we are on the right course? Is it because The Wall Street Journal tells us? How do we know that he is getting good advice or implementing it? Why should we trust or have confidence that the people who have blown the boom will restore it back to some degree of credibility?
The Government Deputies will escape in four or five weeks into the summer, and I can see in all their faces and in the weariness of the responses to questions that they just cannot wait. However, the people will not go away. The Taoiseach just does not even have the courage to call three by-elections and because he does not have that courage, the children of this republic are not getting the referendum to which they are entitled. This is happening not because of legal complexities or because the Government cannot afford the referendum, but because Government Deputies are so scared of their political futures that children of this nation are not being cherished equally. They are not being cherished equally due to mean and miserable political cowardice that prevents the Taoiseach from going to the country.
The republican Oliver Cromwell gave advice to a decrepit, corrupt and now defunct government and parliament in Westminster many years ago. I offer it to the Taoiseach: “In the name of God, go”.
The Taoiseach: I am not corrupt, Ruairí.
