["Instead we have a Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, coming into power promising real change but slavishly following the previous Government’s policy. That policy has been dictated by the IMF, the EU and the ECB not to bail out the Irish people but to salvage German, French, British banks and those of other countries from their disastrous and frenzied embrace of Irish bankers and speculators in the Irish property market bubble. It is criminal that an Irish Government would ever slavishly agree to make a vassal State of the Republic of Ireland and its people, to squeeze tribute from our people to save the capitalist banks of Europe and in doing so destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of our people now plunged into unemployment, financial hardship and social dislocation. In this budget and the past four years the austerity policy means €25 billion has been reefed out of the Irish economy in pursuit of a policy of cringing acceptance of the diktats of the financial markets. Can this Government not see that, not only is this immoral and unjust in the extreme, it is decimating the domestic economy? As we are tired of pointing out, if we savage the ability of the majority of our people to purchase goods and utilise services, then tens of thousands of workers depending on this demand for their jobs will be thrown on the scrapheap of unemployment and, tragically, that is what is happening. All the key indicators in the domestic economy show the abject failure of austerity. Private investment has collapsed, VAT receipts are more than €400 million behind and unemployment has risen by thousands since this Government entered office. Much is made of the growth in exports. Every job in the export sector is vital and we defend it but the type of investment and the capital intensive nature of the investment that goes into exports means that it is not where the hundreds of thousands of jobs we need will be created in the next period of years. On the other hand, taking €670 million from the pockets of ordinary people through the VAT increases and taking other money in the cuts in child benefit and elsewhere will further add to the downward spiral of austerity. The interest relief for householders who are trapped in the nightmare of negative equity and extortionate monthly mortgage payments will be welcomed to a degree but is dismally inadequate. That generation of workers who are trapped in this nightmare are victims of the extortion perpetrated on them in the housing market by the immoral speculators legislated for by Fianna Fáil and the PDs. The huge proportion of their incomes that continues to go to the banks massively dislocates the economy. Otherwise those funds would be going to the purchase of goods and services in the domestic economy, stimulating demand and sustaining tens of thousands of jobs for tens of thousands of people who are now on the dole, unfortunately."]