Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The Minister for Finance made the claim today that what he has announced is a radical restructuring of Irish banking. In fact, fundamentally, nothing has changed. To recap, major European banks speculated widely in Irish property to make massive and quick profits on the backs of a generation of young working people, forced to pay astronomical prices for the basic human right of a home, chained to 30 to 40-year mortgages at horrific levels and as the appetite for private, corporate profit grew, the recklessness grew, leading to the inevitable crash and the disastrous consequences for the Irish economy.

We had a Fine Fáil-Green Party Government that then decided, in association with the economic and political establishment of the European Union, that the Irish working class, in its widest sense, middle income, low income, private and public sector workers, the unemployed and the poor, should pay for this crisis to ensure that the sharks in the financial markets who caused it would not have to pay.

The former Fianna Fáil Minister when he stood up here today should have begun his contribution with an abject apology for the culpability of his party in first blowing up the bubble of greed and then saddling the Irish people with its cost, but the Fine Gael and Labour Parties arrived today with a continuation of the Fianna Fáil policy to the letter, to continue, in other words, to ensure that the economic lifeblood of our people will continue to be transfused to rescue the European gamblers from their bad debts.

The Minister for Finance said a week ago that the debt might be unsustainable as far as this country was concerned. We heard not a word today about what this new massive infusion will do to the national debt. In fact, it will be unsustainable and by savaging the living standards of working people with draconian cuts, it will ensure an economy bouncing along the bottom, thus, making the debt unsustainable but the Government has capitulated utterly to the financial markets.

Where is the fighting talk of the Labour Party today? It is only six weeks ago that it was firing salvo after salvo in the direction of Frankfurt and the European Central Bank.

Today we have an abject and shameful capitulation without an excuse or a word of apology. The giant casinos that are the financial markets in Europe have won again as a supposedly democratic Irish Government bends the knee in submission to the faceless, unelected and unaccountable boardrooms of those markets. We should not pay a cent for the bad gambling debts of the speculators. The financial system in Ireland and Europe needs to be remade because the Greek working class, the Portuguese working class, the Spanish working class and working people throughout Europe are equally being held hostage by the same markets and gambling casinos. Financial institutions across Europe need to be remade in public ownership so that they can make major investments in infrastructure, the recovery of our natural resources and other economic activities that can create tens of thousands of jobs, remake our economy and fund our services.

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