Judging by the ill-tempered comments he made to the Midlands Regional Authority this morning, the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, is clearly peeved at the underwhelming response from the public, the media and the opposition to his National Development Plan.

I would remind Minister Cowen that it is the duty of the opposition to question and challenge and that we will continue to do so. We have a particular obligation to do so in the case of a plan that is substantially a re-heat of previously published documents. The whole launch of the plan was handled with a view to extracting every possible political advantage for the government – indeed the opposition parties were the only significant element of Irish society not to have been invited to the lavish launch in Dublin Castle.

The public are unimpressed because they have seen so many similar launches before and heard so many similar promises. The public simply no longer have any confidence in the capacity of this government to deliver. The public is particularly sceptical about promises made ten weeks before the election to do things the government failed to do over the past ten years.

Finally it says a lot about Mr. Cowen’s attitude that he effectively tells the public that we should be grateful that in the EU inflation is higher in Spain and Greece than in Ireland. This will be little comfort to families who have seen costs and charges rise steadily over the past few years to the situation where the rate of inflation is now almost four times the level we had when Labour was last in government in 1997.