We have had more than enough of this state’s worst-ever government

DISHONEST, disloyal, destructive, disgraceful are just some of the words that can be used to describe this Government, which is unquestionably the worst that this country has had to endure since independence.

Fianna Fáil got into government on false pretences in 1997, promising to tackle the crime situation, the drug scene and the gang violence in the wake of the murder of Veronica Guerin. Now all of those are worst than ever. It has taken the Government almost 12 years to bring in legislation to cope with jury intimidation and gangland violence, and by now this cancer has spread throughout the island.

As a country that depended for so long on emigration and whose children have been welcomed around the globe, the way we treated some people who came to this country was a disgrace.

In 2000, then Tánaiste Mary Harney visited Canada trying to recruit workers for Irish industry, while the Department of Justice was refusing to allow asylum seekers to work. Instead of having to work, they were compelled instead to go on welfare. Some of those people were highly skilled and should have been accorded the opportunity to demonstrate that they could contribute to our society.

Between achieving independence and the advent of the Celtic Tiger we never had to worry about immigrants or refugees. For centuries Irish people blamed the British for just about everything that went wrong, including the Great Famine. Now we have to face up to our own failings.

When it comes to intolerance, whether we like it or not, Ireland is seen in much of the world as a bigoted place. After all, it is not that long ago that Protestants and Catholics were killing each other on this island.

Of course, there was very little of that bigotry within the Republic. We might well have had the same kind of bigotry here if we were not such a homogenous people.

The number of Protestants in the 26 Counties was so small that the vast majority of the Catholic population never really saw them as a threat.

Nevertheless, the 1950s were plagued with scandals like the Mother and Child Controversy, the Cloonlara affair, the Fethard-on-Sea boycott and the Rose Tattoo fiasco, all of which betrayed a level of intolerance that was not very far beneath the surface.

Now for the first time in generations there is a significant immigrant population in this country. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence knows those people are not responsible for our economic problems. They are victims, too, but one frequently hears of them being blamed. The Fundamental Rights Agency published a survey this week based on an EU-wide study into the experience of discrimination and racist crimes. Some 23,500 people of ethnic and immigrant backgrounds were interviewed throughout the EU.

The survey found that 73% of black Africans questioned here, and 25% of those from new EU member states, considered that discrimination based on ethnic or immigrant origin is widespread in this country. We ranked sixth worst among the 27 members states.

It does not take much to rouse ethnic violence, as we should know only too well on this island. We are moving on to very dangerous ground.

It is really scary because we have a Government that has repeatedly demonstrated it knows no more about leadership that a goat knows about geometry.

There are stories about people having anything up to €800 a month being paid as a rent supplement by Social Welfare. This should be investigated because that money is not really designed to help the people in those houses. That is for the owner who probably has political connections.

Is it the same old story of paying to house the useless voting machines, which have cost the state more than €61 million and nobody is being held responsible? The ministers involved are still in office and even have the right to draw pensions now for their periods of incompetency.

It is only this week that the Government decided to set up a committee to decide how to get rid of the voting machines. Even when they are scrapped we will apparently have to pay the rent for where they are now being stored because there is something like a 20-year lease on those storage facilities.

Government figures now suggest Gross Domestic Product will be down this year by more than 10% from its peak, which crosses the line between what is categorised as a recession and a depression. We are living grossly beyond our means. We have had almost a year of empty talk about sharing the pain. That is just more of the same kind of deception that brought Fianna Fáil to power in 1997.

Each Government effort to tackle our problems has been more pathetic than the previous one. The Government backed off the initial medical cards announcement and the 1% levy on people who were not earning enough to pay income tax. Then we had the fiasco of the rise in VAT that drove hundreds of millions in trade across the border. Brian Lenihan then announced the Government was going to take back ministerial pensions from current politicians, but it has done another U-turn on that. Cutting the five ministers of state was another own goal. The Government has made so many U-turns that it has been going round in circles and is now dizzy. The people who got us into the current mess are clearly not competent to run the country. There have been suggestions that all countries are now in economic turmoil, but this country got it more wrong than just about any other country in the world. Canada is doing particularly well and it should provide hope for us all.

IN 1984, Brian Mulroney led the Progressive Conservatives to the largest majority in Canadian history. Like Bertie Ahern last year, Mulroney saw the writing on the wall and stepped down in 1993. Kim Campbell replaced him and became Canada’s first woman prime minister. When she called a general election later that year the Progressive Conservatives suffered probably the most humiliating defeat ever in democratic politics. The party went into the election with an overall majority. It had 151 seats, but it retained just two seats.

Kim Campbell and every member of her government lost their seats with the sole exception of Jean Charest, who had actually opposed Campbell for the leadership of the party earlier that year. It is my one hope that our deceitful, decrepit Government would get what it deserves and comes back with just two seats after the next general election. In the national interest that election can’t come too soon.

The Ceann Comhairle will be returned automatically and hopefully this week’s victim, John McGuinness, will be returned. He is clearly a misfit within the current Fianna Fáil set-up because he has had the courage to tell the truth.

He had the temerity to admit that the two Brians have “made a bags” of the October budget. They and their colleagues have done much worse. They have undermined the Fianna Fáil party and seriously undermined faith in our whole democratic process.

Enough is enough, and we have had more than enough.