Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

I read the Taoiseach's Davos comments very carefully. Does he agree that he should apologise to the Irish people? It was not an awkwardly phrased sentence that meant something else. He stated that people simply went mad borrowing and the extent of personal wealth created on credit was done between people and the banks, a system that spawned greed to the point where it went out of control. Does he accept that no one could have interpreted these comments as doing anything other than applying to a substantial number of people and that they were made in an indiscriminate fashion? Does he not accept that he should at least clarify, if not apologise, to the suffering people of this country for heaping that insult on them on top of what they are undergoing as a result of the crash?

Does the Taoiseach not realise that, even more recklessly, for him to use words like those is to give justification to the European political establishment to insist that the Irish people pay tens of billions of euro to cover the bad gambling debts of European and other bankers? The Taoiseach gave the impression that the people were the ones who went mad and, therefore, it was moral that they should pay. Does he not understand how reckless these remarks were? Why did the Taoiseach not use the opportunity in front of the world's media to tell the truth?

The first debate at the World Economic Forum asked whether 20th century capitalism is failing 21st century society. The Taoiseach attended the forum alongside billionaire speculators from Goldman Sachs and the rest of the people whose greed over 20 years of unrestrained profiteering and speculation in the financial markets caused the global financial collapse. Why did he not use the opportunity to attack that system and those individuals for their responsibility for a crisis that has caused endless suffering around the world, and even more so in our country? Does he agree that he lost a great opportunity?

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