It is nice to see a Longford man in the Leader's chair today.

With budget day only days away, we are witnessing a government establishment desperately trying to convince the public that Ireland is thriving but, away from the spin and the smooth press conferences, the reality on the ground for ordinary working people is one of absolute survival. Let us look at what happened on Sunday in Moate, County Westmeath. I know the Acting Leader was there. Thousands of transport operators, agricultural contractors and struggling citizens packed into a crisis meeting to send a clear warning to this Administration. They are on the brink. They cannot sustain these crippling fuel costs and if this upcoming budget does not immediately abolish the carbon tax and slash VAT on fuel, our roads will be gridlocked with protest once again.

Instead of listening, how does the establishment react? The Tánaiste whimpers that the EU will not let us change our tax. We are spending over €300 million on our EU Presidency only to have no influence at the table over our own affairs. This is who the establishment really is - out-of-touch Ministers and high ranking civil servants who happily burn millions of euro on international vanity projects while local family businesses collapse at home and then the subsidised mainstream press attacks anyone who dares to point it out.

Let us look at The Irish Times editorial choices last week plastering the liquidation of a small dog day-care business across its pages, not out of sudden economic concern for small business but as a highly-targeted disproportionate focus on a local independent figure such as Nick Delehanty because he had been a vocal critic of this Government's asylum and public spending policies. It is a disgrace and an example of weaponising economic hardship to silence dissent, but while the media would gleefully print a hit piece on a critic, they remain utterly silent when the establishment's own narrative is exposed as a total failure and that critic is totally vindicated.

Where was The Irish Times or, indeed, any mainstream media coverage of the explosive figures obtained from Dublin City Council by Councillor Gavin Pepper? His official inquiry revealed a dramatic issue in our housing allocation system. Non-Irish households now make up 42% of the social housing waiting list. Furthermore, the share of accepted social housing offers going to non-Irish households was 33%. Dublin City Council admits it does not even monitor allocation outcomes by nationality. We have generations of Irish children locked out of their own communities, living in box rooms with their parents and unable to start families, yet when official data proves that the State infrastructure is buckling under the unsustainable open immigration policy, it is as if the press engages in a co-ordinated blackout. This is a two-tier Ireland. Our own citizens are left out in the cold while the political elite manages a decline it refuses to acknowledge. The public has certainly had enough.