Below, the full text of Stephen Donnelly's Dáil statement on Budget 2013, delivered yesterday (5 December). 

The entire approach to this budget is flawed. The Government is taking €3.5 billion from the Irish people and handing it to Anglo Irish Bank as payment on a debt we never owed. The Government is taking €3.5 billion from the Irish people but the deficit will fall by less than €1 billion. Why is that? It is because of the payment of almost €2 billion of interest to Anglo Irish Bank on a debt we never owed. The Government will allow AIB to retain a €1.1 billion top-up to its pension fund. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, stated that tax compliance is a core principle of our democracy. He lectures the people on their obligation to pay a property tax, the entire benefit of which he will hand to Anglo Irish Bank.

Below, Clare Daly's Dáil statement in response to Budget 2013. Scroll to the bottom of the piece to view a video of the speech.

There is a huge element of the annual Christmas pantomime about this debate. There are the usual set pieces and routines. We have heard it all before. There is mock indignation from the people who started the austerity and robust defence of the measures from the other side of the House. For the people outside the gates and in their homes, however, this is not a pantomime and there will not be a happy ending. People are terrified and angry. We can say what we like in here and the Government can dress it up, but everything has got worse for people. Any leeway they had is gone. There are people who were in work and are no longer in work. There are people who are in work who are working harder for considerably less.

Below, the full text of Sinn Féin deputy leader Mary Lou McDonald's budget speech, delivered yesterday (5 December) in the Dáil. Scroll to the bottom to view a video of the speech.

Here we go again. This is the sixth successive austerity budget, the sixth time that Ministers have announced a vicious attack on the living standards of low and middle income people and their families. This Labour-Fine Gael Government shares the same perverse instincts as the last Fianna Fáil-led Administration and the same unshakable belief that punishing struggling families is somehow fair. It is not. Neither is it acceptable.

It is deeply insulting to the wellbeing, not to mention the intelligence, of citizens to parrot the rhetoric of fairness constantly while delivering policies that devastate their standard of living and their morale. It is a bad joke to speak the language of economic growth and jobs while introducing another contractionary budget that will further damage the domestic economy, lengthen the dole queues and send more of our people onto the emigration trail.

There is a clear division between the two government parties on abortion, and also a clear necessity to bring clarity to the law. By Vincent Browne.

On Monday, 14 May 2007, during that year's general election campaign, I did an interview with Enda Kenny on behalf of Village magazine, which I then edited.

The interview - which is available to read here - took place in his car, which was being driven from New Ross to somewhere in Co Kilkenny. As we travelled, Kenny sat in the front with the driver. I sat in the back with one of Kenny's advisers, who intervened quite a bit in the course of the interview. One of the issues I raised was abortion, which resulted in the following exchanges:

Enda Kenny has reflected the prevailing political consensus throughout his career. By Vincent Browne. 

On the day that yet another piece of bungling by this government was identified by the Supreme Court ("acted wrongfully. . . in a manner that was not fair, equal or impartial"), Enda Kenny was being feted in Berlin as the "European of the Year" - essentially because of the docility of the Irish people surrendering to the troika's austerity diktats.

In the same week, Kenny was conferred with some biographical gravitas, via the publication of the first book on himself, Enda Kenny: The Unlikely Taoiseach, by the highly regarded political commentator, John Downing.

The spectacle of our lavishly rewarded Government taking the 'tough' decisions to reduce the living standards of the less well off is a grotesque one. By Vincent Browne.

This week and over the next few weeks the prospective €36 million pensioners (Cabinet members) will deliberate on the amount by which the living standards of the populace will be reduced, in particular the living standards, the welfare entitlements and the health and social supports of people living on incomes and supports that are a fraction of ministerial and TD incomes and supports. And then lavishly remunerated Fine Gael and Labour TDs will troop through the lobbies or press the relevant buttons from their Dáil benches to approve uncritically what their betters have decided on to make life more miserable for the unwell remunerated.

On 12 September 2012, Labour MEP Nessa Childers raised the prospect of the Labour party splitting, when she made the following comments in an interview on Newstalk, saying, “I think there is a risk in the medium term of a breakaway political party forming, of people who feel that they’re, if you like, more representative of the Labour Party. This is very evident all over Europe with centre-left parties.”

Splits, splinters and breakaway movements are nothing new in the history of the Labour Party in Ireland, but what might have spurred Childers to raise the prospect of a breakaway organisation?

'Opposition' in government

Since Labour has entered government, three of their TDs have chosen to vote against the coalition. Junior Minister Wille Penrose lost the party whip in November 2011 due to his opposition to the closure of Columb Barracks in Mullingar. This, it could be argued, was a local politician, thinking locally and protecting his Dáil seat. Two more Labour TDs followed Mr. Penrose in losing the whip, but both claimed matters of policy principle as the reason. For Tommy Broughan, the extension of the bank guarantee scheme was the policy he could not stomach, and less than a week later Patrick Nulty was expelled from the party when he voted against the Budget.

The hissy fit engendered by Angela Merkel’s comments on 19 October arose entirely from the ludicrous spin placed on the 29 June communique. By Vincent Browne.

After the EU summit on 29 June last a statement was issued stating it was “imperative” to break the “vicious” circle between banks and sovereign states.

It said that when an effective single supervisory mechanism (for the banks) was established involving the European Central Bank, the new bailout fund, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), could be involved directly in the recapitalisation of banks.

If not quite seismic, this was certainly significant, for not until then was it suggested there would be any “burden-sharing” of the mountainous bank debt that had arisen throughout the EU since the financial crisis of 2008.