We have just seen a very good reason why Dáil Éireann should express no confidence in the Government. On an important Bill involving high legal principles the Government have asked the House to dismiss it as though it is a Fianna Fáil election programme. I ask the Government to be serious. As a senior Member of this House—as it happens, still on the right side of 50—I ask the Government not to insult the Dáil and the people of Ireland by asking the Dáil to endorse the Government's amendment to the motion of no confidence. The amendment is an impertinent one. It asks the Dáil to express its satisfaction at the Government's management of the economy.
That is a sick joke. The Minister for Economic Planning and Development and the Government know there is only a tiny minority of dedicated Fianna Fáil supporters who know anything about the management of economic affairs who today have any confidence in the Government's management of the economy. Even if it was bad management I could understand the amendment, but there is no management at all. There is no Government at all, and that is the almost universal cry of the plain people of Ireland. Quite rightly they are asking why the Government do not govern. They were elected to govern, they did not and they are not governing.
The most tragic aspect of the present national crisis—there is a crisis of unprecedented dimensions—is that the Government do not realise there is any crisis at all. They describe it merely as a problem. There is a problem, but the problem is the Government. It is a problem of the Government's making. When we were in Government, Fianna Fáil spent several years during a real international recession arguing that all we said was untrue, that all that was needed was to elect them to office in order to make Ireland once more a land running with milk and honey for everybody, without any great effort.
I accept there is an international crisis now but it is only one-fifth as serious as that which we experienced. The situation in Ireland today is immeasurably worse. There is a strong irony in Fianna Fáil's European election slogan which asks the people to vote for them in order to have "a strong voice in Europe". Fianna Fáil were given the strongest voice ever for a Government of Ireland but the only time we hear that voice now is complaining that their critics are being unfair to them, particularly complaining that the media critics are not giving them a fair innings. They were given a voice to govern, to put right many of our problems, but all we have had have been feeble indifferent government, Green Papers and White Papers, economic theory that has little relationship to practice. We are now quickly grinding to a halt. The Government should govern or get out.
Yesterday, the Minister for Fisheries and Forestry said that whether we like it or not, whether the people of Ireland like it or not, Fianna Fáil will stay in power during the next two-and-a-half or three years. If that is to be our plight, and the people are angry that it is their plight—they were deluded into bringing that situation about—would the Government please govern and do the things that are necessary, even if they are unpopular? They have enough safeguards and shields for themselves in their massive historically unprecedented majority to save them from the unpopularity that might be theirs if they did the right thing. I have been long enough in politics to want to see the country ruled properly, irrespective of who gets the glory or who gets the blame. I sincerely urge the Government for God's sake to rule properly.
The sad political situation is that the Government are primarily responsible for our difficulties. They have themselves to blame for the woeful industrial situation because they led people to expect things which could not be delivered by our economy, our society. The reason is that the Government have not got a policy. For all their White Papers and Green Papers and talk of planning, we have not got a plan. With great respect to him, the Minister for Economic Planning and Development reads his policies from textbooks that have little association with the real facts of life——