The Taoiseach in his speech this afternoon outlined his vision of the country he seemed to perceive from the distance at which he views it. I strongly urge him not to get off the mythical horse of Tr na ng for fear that his vision may turn to stone. The country the Taoiseach described is not the country in which I am living. The country the Taoiseach eulogised is not the country which the pickets outside his palatial offices tried to bring to his attention as he drove into work, proclaiming that there are 258,700 people unemployed. The country the Taoiseach eulogised is not the one I recognise in Dublin City Council where there are queues of people looking for housing and money from the Department of the Environment who have resolutely refused them the money to build houses. The same Department, as Deputy Callely will be aware, has not even given us the legislative framework within which to administer the grand sum of 150 housing loans to deal with a queue of 30,000 families. I do not know what country Deputy Haughey thinks he is Taoiseach of but it certainly is not this land. If the speech he made today is a true reflection of his perception of where this country is at, we have more problems than I thought we had when this debate started.
This Government are a failed political entity. I hope the Taoiseach recognises the phrase. They have already lost the confidence of the farmers, the unemployed, public sector workers and the entire business community. Significantly, the Government have also lost the support of a number of Fianna Fil Deputies and very few of the Progressive Democrats have a good word to say about them. In short, the Government have lost the confidence of the people and we believe they should now lose the confidence of the Dil.
This country needs a new start and a new direction if we are to tackle the social and economic problems which now confront us but we must start with the Government. They simply must go. They are tired, dispirited and divided. The two [63] parties in Government no longer trust themselves or each other.

Before I recommence, may I inform the House and seek their [475] agreement to the fact that I will speak on behalf of the Labour Party but that my colleague, Deputy Spring, will be the main speaker? He will take the 45 minutes tomorrow or the next day and I propose to take the 25 minutes now. Accordingly I calculate that I have approximately 23 minutes left.
As I was saying before we went into that most illuminating period of questions and answers, this country needs a new beginning and a new direction if it is to tackle the major social and economic problems that confront it. A start must be made with the Government - they simply must go. The Government are tired, dispirited and divided. The two parties in Government no longer trust themselves or each other. The Ministers no longer trust the Taoiseach and the backbenchers no longer trust their Ministers. Instead of a clear and decisive Government led by a Cabinet of energetic and well-moded Ministers, we have a cluster of politicians who are cowering in a Cabinet bunker, unsure of what they will meet outside and incapable of dealing with what they find inside. The Cabinet are clinging to office by their fingernails, desperate to remain in power, yet incapable of governing. The struggle for power within this beleagured coalition has now been superseded by the race for power within Fianna Fil itself. Indeed, a Leas-Cheann Comhairle, I gather that that race has now started as and from this afternoon. Already the first blood has been drawn by the four picadors, who have irreparably damaged the credibility and the standing of their party leader, the Taoiseach, by the wounding comments and declarations of no confidence they have proclaimed both in public and in private. It is clear that Fianna Fil have lost the confidence of their own supporters among the public and that the Taoiseach has lost the confidence of his own backbenchers in the Dil. If the Taoiseach was depending on the level of applause that greeted the finale of his speech this afternoon then he most certainly has lost their confidence.
[A Leas-Cheann Comhairle, for the past four months the nation has experienced the high drama of ongoing discussions, not yet concluded, between the coalition partners concerning their detailed and agonised negotiations about a new Programme for Government, which still remains inconclusive. Perhaps the timing of its finale is related to the Dublin Theatre Festival, for which the Taoiseach, as Minister for culture, has some responsibility. Indeed, properly scripted and carefully choreographed, the events of the past few weeks could have been submitted by the Government press officer - otherwise known as "Mara" on certain radio programmes, a fictional character, I hasten to say - as their contribution to Samuel Beckett's Theatre of the Absurd. It would undoubtedly be a drama of high farce if it were not such a tragedy for the rest of the country.
This country has lost its way simply because the Government leading it no longer know where they are, what they are doing or where they are going. There could be no more savage indictment of the incompetence of the present management of the economy by this Government than the comprehensive results of the survey of business opinion published last Sunday in the Sunday Business Post. Members are now being asked to vote confidence in a Government which itself, even as I speak, has not agreed its own programme for the rest of this session and for the next three years. Confidence in what and for what, that is the question.
The Government, who repeatedly proclaimed the miracles of their own economic success in the vain hope that they would be sustained if the lie of their so-called success was repeated often enough, have now lost the confidence of the very sector that they claim to lead. In the Taoiseach's own words, we now have "an appalling economic crisis". That was some miracle that has now been transformed into "an appalling economic crisis". Is it any wonder that dissatisfaction with the Government and their performance has increased among the business community from 18 per cent [477] in June to 58 per cent in September or that pessimism about the performance of the economy has increased from 65 per cent in June to 81 per cent in September? It should be underlined that those figures represent the views of people who are currently at work.
It must also be recognised that unemployment has increased to its highest level ever in the history of this State. What has been the Government's response? It has blamed our birth rate. It has come up with the reason that some Irish emigrants had the timidity and the temerity to want to return home. It is perhaps symbolic that a member of the Fianna Fil Parliamentary Party, as his contribution to the national endeavour, personally flew, courtesy of Aeroflot - that is some irony - across the Atlantic to lodge 2,000 applications for Morrison visas in Virginia in the United States.
The House should pass a vote of no confidence in the Government because the people who are trying to make our economy work no longer have confidence in the Government's ability to manage the economy and oversee our affairs. The Labour Party have always recognised that economic growth is essential if we are to achieve the targets set out by our own policies and, indeed, the targets set out in the original Programme for Economic and Social Progress.
We do not blame the Minister for Finance for the continued recession in either the United States or Great Britain. We blame the Minister for Agriculture and Food for many things, but we do not blame him for the continued crisis in relation to the GATT talks or for the current shape of the MacSharry proposals. Nor do we blame the Minister for Tourism, Transport and Communications for the shortfall in the numbers of tourists coming to this country across the North Atlantic. But we do blame each and every one of them for not reading the signs soon enough and for not listening to the valid criticisms of the Labour Party, the Fine Gael Party and every other party on the Opposition benches in this House and of every economic commentator outside the House. Ireland has [478] had a deaf and dumb Government that will not listen and cannot speak.
The figures provided by the Minister for Finance in the January budget were wrong. He rejected criticisms when challenged not only by himself but also by others. When the Minister for Finance introduced the Finance Bill last April to give effect to that January budget the figures he provided then were also wrong. When challenged, he again rejected our criticisms. Despite repeated challenges to restate a new course for economic management in the light of the facts that were then available to him and his Department, the Minister for Finance and his Government resolutely stuck their heads in the sand and refused to listen and refused to speak. However, within days, virtually within hours, of the Dil going into recess - if not recession - the Department of Finance published their economic review and outlook for 1991. Lo and behold, suddenly they had seen the light. If that is democratic, accountable government, then this is some other place and I am not living here, because we are not in fact dealing in the real world at all, and that is why this Government do not deserve the confidence of this House.
The Minister announced in July - after the Dil had gone into recess, after we had adjourned for three months - a package of cuts in Government expenditure amounting to about 100 million. No adequate information was given in relation to the cuts, to where the savings were to be achieved or to how the services that they underpinned could be either replaced or maintained. An impressario's magic wand was waved over the "temporary little difficulties" of the budget in the midst of a summer recess.
The Government in general and the Minister for Finance in particular have frequently lauded the contribution made by the social partners, in the trade unions in particular, through the Programme for National Recovery and its successor the Programme for Economic and Social Progress towards economic stability, wage restraint and industrial harmony.
[479] However, within weeks, in July, a ten-year strategy with its three-year initial programme was arbitrarily abandoned with the dismissive and irresponsible assertion by the Minister for Finance that the Government could not and would not pay a proportion of the public sector pay bill which was to fall due in 1992, notwithstanding its commitments, undertakings and promises.
The elaborate process of discussion, dialogue and consultation between the social partners, as orchestrated and manipulated by the Taoiseach and Fianna Fil, was exposed for what it is, a sham designed to con the public into thinking that the trade unions had become subservient, that the public sector could be taken for a ride in hard times, by denying them the legitimate pay increases awarded them by the arbitrator, and in good times proclaiming that yet again they must wait until the really good times had finally arrived. The really good times did arrive late this summer for a small specially privileged group of people in our society who had repeatedly told the Government and the rest of us that investment and job creation could not come about until the right climate had been created. Well, ordinary workers did create the right climate as they saw it but the jobs have not materialised. A few very unrepresentative people in the business community have benefited uniquely from their close position to the centres of power and from political influence.
After 16 weeks of recess, on our first day back in this democratic Assembly, I want to put on the record of the House that the Irish people feel betrayed and sullied by the way in which our affairs have been managed by this Government over the past 16 weeks. Clearly the Irish people have lost confidence in the ability of this Government to run our nation's affairs. The Minister for Finance should have convened, through the proper channels a comprehensive meeting of the social partners to review the progress of the Programme for Economic and Social Progress in the light of new national and [480] international economic circumstances but he did not. Instead he casually announced - which seems to be the new style of this Coalition Government - in the course of a Sunday radio news programme to thousands of low paid public sector workers throughout the State, that lo and behold, they would not be paid the increases they had been awarded and which they had confidently expected would be paid in January 1992. It was obvious from the concern and panic among his Cabinet colleagues, the Minister for Labour and the Taoiseach's own spokesperson, they realised that irreparable damage had been done and that some rescue operation should be put in place. But no rescue operation has been put in place because this Government no longer have the ability to mount that kind of operation.
In Brussels in less than eight weeks there will be the finalisation of the two treaties that will determine the future of this nation for the rest of this century but this Assembly does not know what the Irish Government are saying. Neither does anybody in Brussels, Strasbourg or indeed in the European Parliament itself. Because Fianna Fil are impoverished on the stage of European politics they are frightened at the prospect of more democratic powers being given to that Assembly. We are about to trade a major portion of our sovereignty into two treaties that will determine the ability of this economy to improve the life of every citizen. We simply do not know what the Minister for Finance is saying at the EMU discussions or what the Minister for Foreign Affairs is saying at the EPU discussions. There is no democratic accountability to this Chamber. The Government are simply waiting, cowering in the corridors of Brussels, hoping that at the end of this entire process some extra funds will be put into the Structural Funds basket that will enable Ministers to come scurrying home and announce to all and sundry that they have got a few rich crumbs from the European table.
If that is what 1916 was about, if that is what 70 years of sovereignty is about, then I want nothing from it from the [481] soldiers of destiny because that is not what brought the Labour Party into politics or indeed any other party in this democratic Assembly. We can do better than that. We have a view of Europe; we have a view of this nation, of our history and future. It is being sullied, frustrated and betrayed by the Fianna Fil Coalition Government of all the talents. There is no economic miracle in this country: there is economic impoverishment. There is no democratic accountability: there is Government by secrecy and cabal. There is no European vision. There is a Celtic mist of the past, outlined by a man on a white horse who was afraid to dismount for fear that Tr na nAosta would turn into ashes. I say to the Taoiseach, wherever he is, that it is no longer Tr na ng. He no longer represents the people who will grow up and be citizens of his island because he has lost touch - as have his Government - with this nation, with its heart and future. He has lost the confidence of the people. To coin a phrase from another Chamber, in God's name, go.

