Fianna Fáil “fairer Ireland” claim is beyond belief
Fianna Fáil must be bonkers this weekend if they think voters will take them seriously with their promise to “build a fairer Ireland”.
When Fianna Fáil’s economic policies failed dismally and almost destroyed the country, their immediate reaction was to kick the most vulnerable hard, and then kick them again when they were down.
It was Fianna Fáil after all who:
- Cut jobseekers benefit and allowance
- Cut supplementary welfare allowance
- Scrapped the Christmas bonus
- Cut the blind pension
- Cut medical cards for the elderly
- Scrapped 1,000 beds in our hospitals
- Cut funding to National Council for Special Education
- Introduced the savage Universal Social Charge
- Cut the minimum wage
- Slashed student maintenance grants
- Unilaterally cut the pay of all public servants and public service pensioners
- Went AWOL during the Marriage Equality campaign
In Government, Labour has worked hard to undo the havoc that Fianna Fáil wreaked on the people of Ireland.
There are now 140,000 extra people at work, we have taken 700,000 low and middle income earners out of the USC net, and wages in both public and private sectors are on the way up at last.
We increased the National Minimum Wage not once but twice, we protected core welfare payments, and we reintroduced the Christmas Bonus that was scrapped by Mary Hanafin.
Fianna Fáil simply cannot be trusted to bring about a fair recovery, or any kind of recover for that matter.