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

This Fine Gael-Labour Party Government was tried, convicted and condemned by the ordinary people of this State at the ballot box on 23 May. Today, however, instead of expressions of remorse and a declaration of major changes to take us away from the disastrous austerity policy, we got rhetoric as usual and a continuation of destructive austerity that has wreaked havoc on our society in order to salvage the European financial market system and a sick European capitalism from crisis. This system is built on speculation, profiteering and naked greed.

Working people, pensioners and the poor continue to pay dearly. The Tánaiste and Labour Party leader had the nerve to stand up and pretend to be a champion for low-paid workers in the same week that Greyhound refuse collection workers had a blunderbuss put to their heads to take a 35% wage cut. This is legal in an Ireland that has had a supposed labour party in power for the past three and a half years. It is a little late for it to be reincarnated as a champion.

The water tax constitutes the next most serious attack on living standards of our people. The Taoiseach admitted in the House that it would be €580 per household on average when the policy of so-called full cost recovery is implemented in a few years' time. Hatred for the water tax was a major factor in the Labour Party's annihilation in the local and European elections. Today, in what must be an act of supreme arrogance, the Labour Party took direct ministerial responsibility for the implementation of this regressive bondholder's tax. What happened to the limits of austerity that the Tánaiste has been preaching about for the past few months? Today it is clear that it is austerity as usual.

Fine Gael and particularly the Labour Party should prepare for a major revolt of people power when they try to implement their water tax and for the disappearance of what little support they salvaged in the local and European elections. James Connolly and Jim Larkin set out to build a mass political movement for working-class people in this country and for the socialist transformation of society. That goal has been betrayed by generations of right-wing Labour Party leaders. The task is nevertheless as urgent as it ever was, and working people, socialists and the left will undertake that task in the teeth of what the Labour Party is doing.

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