James Connolly once said that "ruling by fooling is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on". The Fianna Fáil/Progressive Democrats government has taken a leaf out of the British book and is attempting to rule this state by fooling the people - but there are not as many fools out there as they'd like to think. I doubt if so many people have been so quickly disappointed and indeed enraged at the performance of a government so quickly after it came to office. And what angers people more than anything is that the government has been engaged in transparent efforts to deceive them and they find it downright insulting.
As we begin this new Dáil session, the real policies of the government - as distinct from the Paradise promised before the General Election - are now very clear. The cuts are beginning to bite. On the eve of the Dáil's return on 29 January, people with disabilities had to protest outside the Taoiseach's launch of European Year of People with Disabilities to highlight the savage cut in the Budget allocated to the health boards for intellectual disability services in 2003 - from ¤38 million to ¤13.3 million.
This cut has been described as disastrous by the Federation of Voluntary Bodies and by the National Association of the Mentally Handicapped of Ireland, as bringing us back to the mid-1990s. The caring agencies and voluntary bodies cannot maintain existing services, let alone proceed with badly needed new developments. It will mean longer waiting lists for day care, respite care and long-term residential care. The scandal of nearly 500 people with intellectual disabilities detained inappropriately in psychiatric institutions is set to continue.
Also on the eve of the new Dáil session, the Community Platform, representing a host of groups working with the disadvantaged and the marginalised in our society, pointed out at a press conference that there was nothing in the proposed new partnership agreement to address many pressing social issues. The focus of government, employers and the trade union leaders is, of course, on pay and in the proposed agreement all else has been relegated to the margins. The Dáil has also been relegated to the margins and yet again, as an agreement is negotiated and concluded, elected representatives have no say and the Dáil is not afforded the opportunity to have any input.
We saw the deception of this government exposed in the Estimates and in the Budget and the results have been rolling out since then and especially since the Dáil rose on 18 December. After the broken promise to extend the General Medical Services Scheme to 200,000 more people and the broken promise to end waiting lists in two years, we have had more crisis in the health services. Accident and Emergency units are unable to cope with the number of patients presenting, this at a time when major changes in training practices are imminent and could lead to the closure of A&E units in a number of hospitals around the country.
Again on the eve of the commencement we had the publication of a report exposing the shortage of hospital beds and the scandalous practice of bed-blocking by consultants, who are abusing the public health system in order to profit from their private practices. And the death of Bronagh Livingstone is still fresh in the minds of people throughout the country, a tragic reminder of how this state has failed to ensure that our people have more efficient and more equitable health services and the real human cost of that failure.
We had another example of deception on the disgraceful state of many of our national schools. Four days before the General Election, the government published a partial list of schools with partial information, deliberately leading people to believe that their schools would be dealt with in the year ahead.
A fortnight ago, we had the real list and hundreds of schools with substandard premises throughout the 26 Counties have been told they will not be able to proceed with refurbishment or new building, even though many are far advanced in planning. The cut in the School Building Programme is condemning young children to totally unacceptable conditions and makes a mockery of this government's supposed commitment to education as a priority. Many of those children come from homes dependant on social welfare, where they received an increase in the Budget of a pathetic ¤6 per week. Inflation has already diminished the value of this paltry rise.
In the face of public anger at all of this, the Coalition has displayed complacency and arrogance, content to rely on numbers in the Dáil to force through their flawed programme.
The crowning insult and the biggest act of deception was their sleight of hand in allowing Shannon Airport to be turned into a military staging post in preparation for the war in Iraq. The Dáil was misled and attempts were made to mislead the Irish people. The government pretended firstly that there were soldiers and no armaments on civilian planes stopping over at Shannon. We now know better.
The government has displayed complete disregard for Irish public opinion and their futile attempt to deceive the public about the true nature of the military machine, which they are facilitating, has only served to expose their dishonesty.
We in Sinn Féin will hold this government accountable for their litany of deceptions since they took office. We will campaign both inside and outside the Dáil to demand that hospital waiting lists are dramatically reduced; that children are no longer educated in overcrowded and substandard schools; that there is a fairer distribution of the obvious wealth that exists in this country; and that we uphold neutrality and independence and the commitment of the Irish people to lasting peace at home and abroad.
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