Tag Archives: Applause

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From top: Party leaders at RTÉ’s Leaders’ Debate last night; Richard Boyd Barrett and Stephen Donnelly

Last night RTÉ’s Leaders’ Debate took place in University of Limerick with Richard Boyd Barrett, of People Before Profit; Gerry Adams, of Sinn Féin; Micheal Martin, of Fianna Fáil; Enda Kenny, of Fine Gael; Joan Burton, of Labour; Stephen Donnelly, of Social Democrats; and Lucinda Creighton, of Renua Ireland.

Topics that weren’t discussed included abortion, repealing the 8th amendment, funding for mental health services, Ireland’s suicide rate and school patronage.

Instead, the questions – from the audience – were about election promises, business and employment in rural communities, Ireland’s ailing health system, homelessness, rural crime and civil war politics.

So who won the most plaudits?

Grab a tay…

On election promises

Micheal Martin: “They’re [Fine Gael] are the only party here proposing a €10billion package, we don’t even have €10billion. Even the Department of Finance are saying it’s about €8.6bn, so they’re spending every penny that they have available and they’re spending every penny that they hope to have available. And can I just say one thing to Gerry Adams. Gerry’s questions are integrity or whether I can keep a promise or not. Gerry’s been denying for 30 years if he’s ever been a member of the IRA and he expects people to believe him and your economic policies…”

Applause

Gerry Adams: “Michael, go to An Garda Siochana, you’ve been going around the country making these accusations, go with your information to An Garda Siochana.”

Micheal Martin: “There’s not a guard in the country who believes you weren’t…”

Applause

Gerry Adams: “Your lot created the economic collapse, your government, nobody else, excuse me, let me finish my point, now you can tell us all you want about the IRA or my associations with it, will I help anybody who’s homeless tonight, will I help any child who’s hungry tonight, will I help the emigrants who from all over this island are scattered throughout the globe because of your policies?…There are children are trollies, there are elderly people on trollies, it’s a centenary years of 19 and 16 and we can’t even take care of our poor.”

Applause

On business and employment in rural areas

Claire Byrne: “Richard Boyd Barrett, the Taoiseach, you’ve got to give it to him, the people are coming back.”

Richard Boyd Barrett: “Well, look, first of all, we welcome any job wherever it is, as long as it’s properly paid and we don’t welcome these pretend jobs or exploitative jobs where people who are getting a few quid on top of their dole when they should be getting paid properly in JobBridge [Applause]. We think it’s completely unacceptable that new entrant nurses or new entrant teachers, for doing the same job, are getting paid less, just because they happen to be a bit younger – that’s is outrageous [Applause]. And and the fact that USI say 95% of student nurses are planning to leave the country because they think the pay is so miserable and the situation in the public health service is so awful [Applause]. So if I can just Claire make the point, briefly, of course the private sector creates some jobs and we welcome all of those jobs and we certainly need to give assistance to small and medium enterprise by having a more progressive break system which gives a break to small enterprise and gives the big guys, the big chains, the big multinationals pay a little bit more in tax and rates so that we can actually help the small business in the town centres and in the rural areas. But it is critical to say that if the public sector does not create jobs in the area of infrastructure, in the area of health, in the area of housing, in the area of education, our young people will not come back here and we will not have the young educated people [Applause].

Claire Byrne: “Stephen Donnelly, thank you, go ahead..”

Stephen Donnelly: “Can we debunk a myth here. This faux outrage for our doctors and nurses and teachers and guards. Let’s just debunk a myth here. The establishment is telling you that they’re going to take €4bilion to €5billion out of the revenue base [by abolishing USC]. The really smart economists that we hire to tell us how much money we’re going to have say we’ll have €3billion. So we have faux outrage from an establishment that is telling you that they’re going to cut the revenue base so much, that there won’t be a penny to equalise wages for new entrants which should happen. There won’t be a penny to create a modern healthcare system. And John [member of audience] back to your question on business, there won’t be a penny to back Ireland’s businesses because that’s what we have to do. Of course the public sector plays a part. The IDA is one of the most successful organisations of its type in the world but we have to be just as ambitious for Ireland’s businesses as we are for the multinationals. Right now, we’re not. You asked Claire, talk to anyone who’s hired 50/60 people in the last five years and say, ‘how many ministers have come and seen ya?’ and, if they’re an Irish business, they’ll say, ‘zero’. Now compare that to Donald Trump arriving to buy one of our golf courses off his private jet and being met at the end of a red carpet complete with dancing girls and harpists by our Minister for Finance.”

Applause

Gerry Adams: “For the last five years, the Taoiseach and the Tanaiste could have grown the economy and at every opportunity, I stood up and said that to them, ‘grow the economy, you can’t come out of recession…’.”

Enda Kenny: “Yeah you voted against Europe and everything else.”

Adams: “Yeah, because you went cap in hand, on all knees..”

Applause

On Ireland’s ailing health system

Claire Byrne: “Health just seems to stump everybody. It just seems to get everybody.”

Lucinda Creighton: “And we’ve had previous politicians and ministers calling it Angola and so on. I don’t agree, I think it can be solved but it requires leadership and it requires a vision. We had Tony O’Brien, the head of the HSE, and the Minister for Health Leo Varadkar agreeing with him, calling it a visionless organisation, no plan, no strategy. That has to change. The first thing we’re proposing is to depoliticise it. Actually get all of the political parties working together with the healthcare professionals, listen to the nurses, the doctors. We’re proposing in a very short period of time to get a national forum together, to trash out the issues, to identify, not a five-year cycle, promising more changes, the HSE has been a failure, UHI was a failure, all of the various grand plans, they were all designed to win elections and win votes. We need to change the approach, make it about consensus, bring the political parties together, bring the healthcare professionals together, listen to them and develop a 20-year vision, not a five-year one.”

Applause

Claire Byrne: “Richard Boyd Barrett, a NHS system, is that what you’re proposing too?”

Richard Boyd Barrett: “Yes, absolutely, because it’s cheaper and, very simply…”

Byrne: “Yeah, but it has to work.”

Boyd Barrett: “Of course it has to work but it’s cheaper if you don’t have the private healthcare for profit sector taking a huge amount of the expenditure that’s going into health and just putting it into back pockets. The most expenditure on health, anywhere in the world, is in the United States, they spend twice as much, more than twice as much, as Britain does but they have some of the worst outcomes and millions of people have no healthcare whatsoever. Britain, a system which is free at the point of use, spent about half as much because we don’t have all the money going to the private healthcare providers and the private health insurance companies who are just racketeering at the moment..”

Byrne: “Yeah but you can’t use the NHS system as a perfect example…”

Boyd Barrett: “No I’m not saying it’s a perfect example. In fact part of the problem is Margaret Thatcher tried to butcher it and introduce market mechanisms and competition which we don’t need in the health service, we don’t need market mechanisms. What a health service is made up of is nurses, doctors, medicine and the places for them to practice those things. And of course the irony of the Government talking about care in the community is precisely the story we’ve head, or the one in my area where the Loughlinstown A&E was downgraded and we said, at the time, to Minister Varadkar that is going to lead to a disaster in St Vincent’s because the spillover will now go into Vincent’s and of course, lo and behold, within a year or two, that’s exactly what happened. You close down, or downgrade the local A&E services and then you have absolute chaos in the so-called centres of excellence which are actually a nightmare, they’re understaffed, they don’t have enough doctors and nurses.

Applause

Richard Boyd Barrett: “I just want to make the point. Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil between them took 10,000 mostly frontline staff, mostly nurses, out of the health service, and closed down thousands of hospital beds. You certainly don’t get a better public health system by doing that. But you know the irony on the crisis in the A&E and the waiting lists is it’s not as if the capacity doesn’t exist in the country. Because at the same time you could be sitting in a warzone of a hospital that is overcrowded, you hear ads on the radio, a fancy ad, saying, ‘well if you can pay to come to the Beacon Clinic or to the Blackrock, you can come in and there’s no queues at all’ right? And this is the problem. We have a two-tier system where healthcare is being dished out on the basis of the size of your wallet, not on the basis of medical need and that is what we need to address.”

Applause

Stephen Donnelly: “Talk to doctors, nurses, physios in the national health service in the UK and of course they’ll give out about the health system, everybody does but they will be proud of their health system. Talk to our doctors, nurses, physios, hospital porters and they describe the system as the enemy. So yes we need to get the system right but we also have to create a culture where we start to trust our clinicians. Because right now, if you talk to clinicians, they will tell you that they are not trust…”

Joan Burton: “Claire, people, you know, Stephen is speaking in management consultant talk. I can actually hear a stack of reports being written to analyse all the problems but remember, at the end of the day, it’s a very relatively simple job to actually have primary care centres that people go to if they have diabetes, if they have other chronic conditions rather than going to their hospital and if an older person, like Sharon’s dad [from audience] is going to a hospital, it should be possible for Sharon to phone the hospital so that her dad goes to an urgent assessment unit that is actually a structure being created as we speak and I will defy anybody here to imply that our doctors and nurses and our services and our hospitals aren’t hardly bad. The A&E is a terrible problem but when you actually get past the A&E we have splendid doctors and nurses who give very good services and there’s an air of negativity in this debate.

Applause

On homelessness

Micheal Martin: “In 2012, basically, the Labour Party and Joan Burton, as minister for social welfare, reduced rent allowance and the bottom line is this: Focus Ireland, Simon and all the agencies at the coalface said, if you do this and you continue with this you will drive vulnerable families into homelessness and what happened? It went from 12 families a month to 40 families a month to 70 families a month…”

Claire Byrne: “They do it on a case-by-case basis.”

Martin: “The bottom line is more families are being driven into homelessness because of the failure to increase rent supplement. Fr Peter McVerry, everybody involved has been saying this. Joan has her head in the sand in relation to this as a policy issue.”

Joan Burton: “We’re doing it.”

Martin: “It seems ideological in terms of the Labour Party and Fine Gael saying..”

Applause

Richard Boyd Barrett: “The provision of council housing is self-financing, ok? It actually creates a revenue stream for the State. So, whatever upfront money you have to put in and we have it in the Strategic Investment Fund, the Credit Unions have actually offered the Government money to build social housing. We can borrow it from the European Investment Bank at very low interest rates. It’s not a problem, the problem is the political will and the disastrous decisions that were taken by this Government. In 2012 a Labour minister sent around a circular saying ‘we are stopping building council housing’. Full stop. And then Joan Burton compounded that problem in the face of warnings that it would be disastrous by reducing rent allowance and said at the time it would drive rents down and in fact it sent rents through the roof and then they make the problem even worse by selling off all Nama’s property and land to vulture funds who are now ratcheting up rents and making even more people homeless.

Applause

Boyd Barrett: “What we need is a return to old-style council housing provision and affordable housing and rent controls so that these…vulture funds can’t put people on the street.”

Byrne: “So just so we’re clear, Richard, on what you’re going to do. Are you going to fund developers to build the social housing that we need?”

Boyd Barrett: “No we want local authorities and a State construction firm to build the council housing, just as was done when this country was a virtual third world country. We were at least able to put a roof over people’s heads. So please don’t tell me we can’t do it in the 21st century.”

Applause

Byrne: “And you also want to see mortgage writedowns happen, who pays for that?”

Boyd Barrett: “We pay for it anyway, people are put out of their homes, then they end up in the homeless system or reliant on rent allowance.”

Byrne: “But who decides who pays their mortgage and who doesn’t?”

Boyd Barrett: “I think what we need is an approach to insolvency, mortgage insolvency which says, in the first instance, we keep families in their home. Putting them out on the street still ends up costing the State money and people have to be housed anyway.”

Byrne: “Isn’t there a moral hazard there though? That you’re saying, person in number 44, you get to keep your house, you don’t have to pay your mortgage and the next house down, you do have to pay…”

Boyd Barrett: “No the moral hazard is the banks that engage in reckless lending and the bondholders in Europe who financed speculation in the housing market got bailed out by us and the people who are homeless on the streets are paying the price for the crimes of others. And this Government, and indeed the previous Government, chose to protect those banks, those bondholders, the people who engaged in the reckless lending and people in mortgage distress or homeless on the streets are the ones who paid a very bitter price.”

Applause

Rural crime

Lucinda Creighton: “For anybody who’s convicted three times of a serious offence, whether it’s dangerous or armed burglary, whether it’s murder or manslaughter, sexual offences and so on, they will automatically be handed down a life sentence. We’re also proposing to change..”

Claire Byrne: “A life sentence?”

Creighton: “Correct.”

Byrne: “And you want life to mean life? So they’re locked up forever? Hasn’t that been tried in the United States and it doesn’t work?”

Creighton: “Three strikes has worked in some states in the United States and not in others. Where it’s been applied too liberally it hasn’t worked. Where it has been applied judiciously, like in Washington for example, it has worked really effectively. This is about serious criminals who are terrorising people in their homes and we make no apologies for saying they should be taken off our streets. I mean if you just look at, turn on your television this evening and watch the funeral that was taking place in Dublin today. Gardai roaming the streets, hundreds of gardai while known criminals are walking around in broad daylight and I’m not sure if you’re aware, Claire, but in 2009 a piece of legislation was introduced in this country which allowed for the offence of directing a gang or an organised gang and do you know how many prosecutions have been achieved under that legislation?

Byrne: “I’m sure you’re going to tell us?”

Creighton:Zero, not one. And I think it’s an absolute indictment of the political system, of the established parties for failing to ensure that we actually apply our laws, that we have appropriate sentencing laws and that repeat offenders, who terrorise people, are taken off the streets.”

Applause

Byrne: “The other interesting proposal you have, you want to make parents..”

Creighton: “Correct…”

Byrne: “Parents legally responsible for the crimes of their children. Now that will scare the daylights out of some people who are doing their absolute best to raise their children in the best way they possibly can. You’re going to lock them up because they’re children did something wrong.”

Creighton: “We’re not locking them up but what we’re saying is that parents are and should be responsible for their children. I’ll tell you what it means in practice. Where a child is repeatedly convicted or found guilty of offences, their parents will be obliged to show up in court. That’s hardly too much to expect, that a parent should should up and be responsible and…”

Byrne: “Yeah but it’s not their fault.”

Creighton: “And if their children are going through the system repeatedly they will be held responsible for the legal fees. Why should the taxpayer continually pay for children who are running completely out of control and whose parents show no interest. The parents should be held responsible and, again, we make no apologies for saying so.”

Applause

Richard Boyd Barrett: “The big issue in our area, and I think it’s the same in a lot of areas, is the slashing of community services so for example in the last week, we had project in my area, a little small project, called the Oasis Project, which was a drug and youth outreach project, young, vulnerable teenagers in a disadvantaged area, the HSE has slashed that, like they have slashed many other community projects. And the parents at the protest meeting we held said, and a lot of the workers there and this cost a tiny amount of money right, the parents said some of these kids are going to be carrying guns in a year or two because we’ve taken their services away. And the fact of the matter of is if you butcher community and drug task services and outreach services for young people…”

Claire Byrne: “That’s a different thing…”

Boyd Barrett: “No, it isn’t…I’m interested in trying to deal with crime and trying to prevent young people from falling into crime by giving them options.”

Byrne: “That’s perfectly acceptable point to make. But people right now..”

Boyd Barrett: “It’s a point nobody has made yet.”

Byrne: “People right now have a problem with crimes happening tonight. What do you do about it, do you increase Garda numbers, do you reopen the rural Garda stations? What’s your position?”

Boyd Barrett: “I just made the point that if people in rural areas feel they want their stations back, they should get them back. ”

Byrne: “What if that doesn’t work though? What if you’re doing something in order to make people feel better but it doesn’t work. But you’re doing it because people want it you’re not doing it because..no, no, this is very important.”

Boyd Barrett: “It’s very important.”

Byrne:This is taxpayers’ money, you’re going to spend money on doing something that might not work. You’re saying, ‘well if people want them, we’ll give it to them’, that’s populist politics.”

Boyd Barrett: “No it isn’t at all. I said what I think we should do in the areas that I’m familiar with. Where local communities in rural areas have had Post Offices taken away from them, schools closed down or local Garda stations taken away and they think that that has damaged their community, they have right to have those things back.”

Byrne: “OK.”

Boyd Barrett:I bow to the will of the people in those areas. But in the areas that I know, what we need is to put in support and services for young people in disadvantaged areas.”

Applause

Following contributions from Gerry Adams, Enda Kenny and Micheal Martin on organised crime in Ireland…

Richard Boyd Barrett: “If we could also do something about the white collar crime and the people who’ve robbed this country blind…”

Applause

Civil war politics – can Fine Gael and Fianna Fail forming a coalition

Lucinda Creighton: “There is no difference between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, there’s no difference in terms of the culture, in terms of the influence of the vested interests in Government, in terms of whether it was the Galway Tent or whether it was the appointments to State boards, whether it’s the judiciary…”

Byrne: “I heard you say in an interview that this for you is about Government, that you would go into Government.”

Creighton: “No it’s not, you see that’s where you’re wrong. For me, it’s not about power, it’s not about just getting into  a ministerial office and I’ve proven that already. This is about a new vision for the country, it’s about a new way of doing business.”

Byrne: “But you have said you don’t want to go in there and be impotent..”

Creighton: “Exactly, and the one thing I can say and I can commit to is that Renua Ireland will not enter Government just to make up the numbers there are plenty of other parties that are willing to do that, we are only going to enter Government if we see serious change in terms of transparency, accountability, cleaning up politics, ending cronyism and an entirely different approach to politics and to governance in this country. And if that happens then we will be happy to enter Government and really it doesn’t matter who it is, Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, makes no difference to me, they’re pretty much all the same.”

Applause

Gerry Adams:I think that the electorate should send the three amigos [Martin, Kenny and Burton] to ride off into the sunset…”

Laughter

Adams: “They should take this opportunity, let them get on their donkeys and ride off because there’s a chance now to elect…”

Laughter

Adams: “There’s a chance now to elect a progressive government, there are 101 candidates who have signed up to a programme, a charter for change, which is about public services, it’s about people-centred, citizen-centered governance. Now, also at this time, more people in the last election, across the island of Ireland voted for Sinn Fein than voted at the historic election in 19 and 18, so there’s a change coming and the people should seize the opportunity. James Connolly said in 1916, on New Year’s Eve, opportunities are for those who seize them, let the people seize the opportunity on the 26th and get this crowd out and put a progressive Government in.”

Applause

Richard Boyd Barrett: “We’re willing to talk to anybody who’s willing to pursue genuinely progressive policies based on lifting the burden of austerity and giving the proper the funding to our health and education and public services and fighting for equality.”

Byrne: “You would go into Government with Gerry Adams?”

Boyd Barrett: “We will discuss with anybody who is interested in those things and that’s why we’ve signed up to the Right To Change platform. What we will not do and do what the Labour Party did in the past, in fact on many occasions, which is swap their principles and their promises and their policies, in order simply to get into power and then betray those policies.”

Applause

Watch the debate in full here