Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

It stretches credibility beyond the limit that the right-wing political parties in this State and virtually the entire capitalist press hail as a glorious triumph an arrangement that shackles the Irish people to a gigantic millstone of toxic Anglo Irish Bank debt of €31 billion and interest over a 40 year period.

The consequences are ongoing savage austerity that is already destroying livelihoods, living standards, communities and individuals. It bears saying again that these were the private gambling losses of bankers and bondholders as they speculated wildly in this State during the Irish property bubble in pursuit of greed-driven super-profits. If the political establishment of this State, the capitalist press and the establishment of the European Union and the European Central Bank were ever guided by a moral compass, truly that compass has crashed irretrievably when they deem it just, or a victory, even, that generations of Irish people should be lashed to a treadmill of private debt. Truly, in putting the profits of the bondholders before the well-being of the majority in society, the present day political and media establishment in this State display a moral sense just as perverted as their predecessors in the Irish Church and State displayed in a previous era - in the era of the incarceration, for example, of young women in the Irish version of the Gulags, known as the Magdalen laundries, something which, tragically, we have heard much about in the past week.

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