Troika exit fails to cheer baffled and bewildered TDs

Michael Colreavy is the Sinn Féin TD for Sligo-North Leitrim.

He is not a man given to histrionics in the Dáil chamber. There is no posturing, no outbreaks of hyperbole when he speaks. He is always measured and focused.

It was no surprise, therefore, that he raised the question Irish people are asking in the aftermath of the departure of those pleasant people from the troika.

The Finance Bill was being debated in the Dáil and the euphoria from the nearby Department of Finance was thin on the ground.

Colreavy set the scene: “As we are meeting today, representatives of the troika are packing their bags.” he said. “Indeed, they may well be at the airport by now, on their way back to their homes or offices.”

Then he asked what he thought was the “one key question”. Would their departure mean that members of the Dáil could, at long last, begin to build an economy that worked for all of the Irish people ? The answer is that the troika’s exit will not make a whit of difference, not a whit,” he said.

Colreavy said the entire austerity programme, and all that had flowed from it and the harm it had done, had been necessitated by the bank bailout.

The other members of Leinster House will, no doubt, hope that the answer Colreavy gave to his own question will prove wrong. But there was no great optimism to emerge from the debate which was presided over by Minister for Finance Michael Noonan after returning from his press conference in the department.

Independent Colm Keaveney, formerly of Labour, was in a confessional mode about the budget's implications.

He claimed the Bill was making an arrangement to protect many of the gold-plated pensions of people like many former ministers and senior civil servants. “Senior politicians are protected and, as a relatively well-paid public servant, I am no worse off as a result of this budget, which I am ashamed to say,” he added.

Keaveney received some looks from fellow TDs.

Fellow Independent Peter Mathews, formerly of Fine Gael, was mourning what he considered a lost era for his one-time party.

Dismissing “short-termism”, he called for long-term redistribution of wealth to make society more equal.

"That is what Declan Costello advocated long ago," he added. "The just society is the type of approach I thought I would get when I joined Fine Gael."

Mathews was reminded by Ceann Comhairle Sean Barrett that his time was up.

“There is so much to say and so little time to say it,” said Mathews.

It seems that the left has an ally in the man never short of a word until the clock is against him.