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

Like my colleagues, in all sincerity, I wish the Taoiseach and all other Deputies the best for Christmas and thank the staff for all their hard work. In doing so, I am acutely aware, as I am sure the Taoiseach is, that there are hundreds of thousands in this country who will not really be celebrating Christmas and for whom it will be a tough time, a trial, something to get through rather than enjoy. That is our responsibility, the Taoiseach's responsibility and the responsibility of European leaders.

That brings me to what I see as something of a merry-go-round of European Council meetings that have gone on for the past two and a half years. Almost invariably, such meetings are accompanied by announcements of breakthroughs, triumphs and, famously, in June of last year, game-changers, but despite all the triumphalism, the critical issue of the significant odious debt mountain and the accompanying costs of paying off that debt, which was put on the backs of the Irish people, remains unresolved. As the Taoiseach will be aware, that cost is considerable. Our citizens, many of whom will suffer this Christmas, carry 40% of the cost of the European bank bailout, or €9,000 per citizen.

That is a tough burden for anybody to carry. It is a gross injustice because we are not the ones primarily responsible for the crisis. We can argue about burden sharing and responsibility sharing but the vast majority of those citizens who will suffer this Christmas are not to blame for what happened, yet they are carrying the can. It has left us in a terrifying situation as an economy, with 120% debt, but if one takes a more accurate measure of our economy the percentage is 150% of GNP. Against that background, the Government has refused to demand, as we would like, or even to ask for a write-down of that debt, and now the promise that we got last June that there would be retrospective recapitalisation of the banks, which is not a write-down but the nearest thing to one that Europe seems to be talking about, appears to be disappearing into the fog of abandoned promises. I ask the Taoiseach how that can be allowed to happen. How can he let it happen, given the gross injustice that loading this debt onto the backs of citizens involves? It is irrefutable that this is an injustice. There is no way they can justify that level of disproportionate unloading of the cost of the European crisis onto the backs of our citizens.

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