Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Seán Fleming for sharing his time with me. It is appreciated.

I would like to refer to the text of the statement, on which we will be voting later tonight. The Minister stated the Government's decision to exit the EU-IMF programme of financial support in December without applying for a precautionary credit line "is the right decision for Ireland and now is the right time to make that decision." That is a long sentence and clumsy. It is possibly illogical because if one makes a decision, its timing, by definition, needs to be right, rather than it being the right time to make it. There is cloudy thinking. We are exiting a programme. It is the effluxion of time and our arrival at a calendar date. The programme started on 29 November 2010.

People have forgotten that what propelled the troika to come to Dublin to arrange emergency finance for the country in an orderly way was the fact that the six Irish banks had €140 billion from the ECB, the exposure of which was maddingly alarming and frightening. That is why it came. It had to stabilise the country's consolidation programme for the next three years in order to provide the finance that would meet the difference between expenditure and taxation during that period. That amounted to €67.5 billion in loans. At the end of the period of disbursement - the last disbursements finish on 15 December - there will be a period of review and surveillance. That is naturally the case because that is what lenders do after they finish disbursing a loan.

We have not come from a battlefield of austerity into a meadow of milk and honey. We must describe it truthfully to the people because we need to acknowledge in this debate that the sacrifices, resilience and patience of the people of Ireland in achieving that fiscal consolidation, mapped out in the framework of the troika, have been remarkable. The Minister of State, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, spoke about the journey on which the Government had embarked. This is like poetry. He stated it was extraordinary that the gap between spending and revenue was now nearly 3%, which was extraordinary. He spoke about the legacy debt that remained. A figure of €30 billion is odious. He referred to Deputy Shane Ross looking for a write-down of that debt, using the filthy word "default" and stating Argentina was the example that should scare us. After the Second World War in Germany there was creditor compression; all of its creditors agreed to write down the debt in an orderly way in the 1951 debt agreement. Greece also recently had an orderly negotiated debt write-down. That job remains for the Government. Deputy Lucinda Creighton referred to the expectations of the people when there was a change of Government in February 2011; they expected more than they have received to date. I am not trying to undermine what has been achieved, but we have not yet got there; we are not even halfway there. There is an odious debt of €30 billion that needs to be negotiated away.

Professor Honohan was the man who alerted the troika to enter and provide the memorandum of understanding on 29 November 2010. At the time, he saw the scariness of a debt of €140 billion outstanding to the ECB by six Irish banks and the panic button was pressed. It had to get here to enter a programme. The last Dáil - the Opposition as well as the Government parties - was hugely culpable in not understanding what had gone on with regard to policy here and that the banks had trashed the country with a turbo-charged splurge of credit. Professor Stiglitz, to whom Deputy Derek Nolan referred, explained the situation in The Price of Inequality . I am glad that the Minister of State, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, has read that book which I gave to him because it is a great analysis of economics and policy that is needed to generate growth in a western democracy to underpin a more just, fair and democratic society.

The unfinished business involves the legacy debt. I implore the Minister of State, Deputy Brian Hayes, to don the breastplate of armour and go in and negotiate on it. I would take from Professor Honohan the keys to the desk drawer that contains the bonds, rip them up and then invite Mr. Draghi to come and show him why this was the right thing to do.

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