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

I propose to share time with Deputies Seamus Healy and Maureen O'Sullivan. The Government has orchestrated a major charade around the ending of the three-year troika programme, which meant that the Irish people were saddled with overwhelming levels of debt to rescue international bondholders and bankers from their reckless pursuit of exorbitant profits through speculation in the Irish property bubble during the first decade of the 21st century. Two successive Governments in the State capitulated utterly to pressures from the European Central Bank, the European Union establishment and the International Monetary Fund to the effect that the gambling losses of private speculators should be heaped upon the shoulders of our people and a ruthless programme of austerity should be imposed to see through the execution of that decision. Throughout the saga, the troika has acted not in the interests of Irish people or in the interests of the ordinary people of Europe but in the interests of European capitalism, the financial markets and the bankers and bondholders. The troika has acted to salvage European capitalism from the chaos into which its own laws plunged it. In so doing, it has savaged the livelihoods, incomes, public services and economic security of our people.

The conclusion of the three-year programme of bank bailouts and austerity has precipitated what we can only call an outbreak of duplicitous showmanship by the Fine Gael and Labour Party Government. In a welter of spin, propaganda and stage gimmicks such as emergency Cabinet meetings and Dáil debates, the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have attempted to cast themselves as heroes in this issue. They would have us believe that they orchestrated the great escape of 2013 and our intrepid leaders would have us think that the troika jailers had been slipped and we were now free men. When we look a little closer, we find that our leaders have shackles on their ankles that lead to a gigantic millstone of debt belonging to private bankers and bondholders. When we examine it even closer, we find the millstone is resting on the shoulders of the Irish people, who continue to groan beneath its weight.

Far from being the liberators, as the leaders of the Government would have us believe, the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste are only prison trustees. They have connived in shackling the Irish people to decades of unsustainable debts and the sharks in the financial markets. They have agreed that not only children yet unborn but the children of children yet unborn should be enslaved to the financial markets for debts that the Irish people have nothing to do with amounting to 120% of gross domestic product, the majority of which is odious debt. The crushing burden of the debt can be seen and this year alone €8.5 billion is being paid in interest, with €9 billion to be paid for many future years. It is an incredible burden on the people.

The choice before this State is not between relying on the sharks in the financial markets on the one hand or on the other depending on the wolves in the European establishment who represent the interests of the market as well; working people in Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal are victims of the dictatorship of the market in front of which so-called democratic leaders have based themselves continually. We need to overthrow the financial market system, which is undemocratic, unelected and unaccountable, and we must bring the financial markets into public ownership and democratic control, with investment in the interest of the majority. We should repudiate the odious debt and join hands across the borders with working class people everywhere for a democratic and socialist alternative to this system of crisis and suffering for our people.

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