Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Taoiseach's Government has again and again talked about the objective of exiting the bailout and has tried to lure the public and the media discussion into a belief in the idea that if we exit the bailout things are going well, the Government is a success and that we are on the road to recovery but what is clearly apparent now, as the Minister, Deputy Noonan, goes scurrying around meeting IMF, EU and ECB officials to discuss the conditionality around any future funding support or backstop for the Irish economy after we exit the bailout, is that the exit of the bailout is a complete mirage. There is no exit of it, there is only a technical exit of it. We will go out of the frying pan of troika control into the fire of more troika control under a different guise. Even if it is not set out in these arrangements that are now being discussed for some sort of funding line from the IMF or the troika, we have the fiscal treaty, which will also bind us in with all the same constraints. I would like a straight answer from the Government on this issue which was raised during the fiscal treaty debate, namely, when does the conditionality and the requirements of the fiscal treaty start to kick in after we exit the bailout? As I understand the treaty, we have to pay down our debt at 5% over a 20-year period. That is a massive pay down of an enormous debt that has been loaded onto the backs of the people of this country. As I recall the provisions of the treaty, there is a transition period of a few years before we have to stick strictly to that timeline but according to the treaty we have to start to move towards it immediately. We have to begin to move in that direction. Why does the Taoiseach not come clean and tell the people that we are now tied into a situation where we will have to enforce even more austerity for decades to come to pay down this enormous mountain of debt that has been loaded onto their backs?

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