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

In deference to the members who have been waiting a long time to contribute and the fact that I have to speak in the Chamber, I will be pointed and brief in my remarks. I ask Professor McHale to pardon me for being blunt. I do not believe he and his colleagues live in the real world. Their prescriptions are from an ivory tower but in the real world people are suffering very badly the effects of austerity and of a criminal decision to bail out a system of speculation and profiteering on a European basis on the backs of the Irish working class, pensioners, low and middle income workers, and the poor, and Professor McHale and his colleagues want to pile more misery and more austerity on them. He said his role was to analyse Government policy. Why is he not proclaiming from the rooftops that it is a disastrous failure when 14,000 fewer people are at work in the second quarter than in the first quarter, investment has collapsed catastrophically in the past four years, our young people are leaving the country, and all the economic indicators indicate that this is a disastrous policy yet he wants to take more demand out of the domestic economy which is already eviscerated?

One of Professor McHale's economic colleagues, Professor Stephen Kinsella, said in recent days that domestic demand is now at 2003 levels and that any further drops in spending will cause an increase in unemployment and further hardship for the private sector. Professor McHale's prescriptions, on top of what the Government wants in this budget, will make the situation far worse. How does Professor McHale respond to that situation? Has he read, for example, the fairly mild suggestion in the Nevin Economic Research Institute report yesterday about an additional 30,000 jobs at risk of being lost under the current budget strategy to which it suggested an alternative?

Professor Barrett referred not just to cuts but to taxation, but taxation on whom? Have the witnesses ever come up with the suggestion that there should be an audit of real wealth among the top 5% or 10% who have substantial wealth which has increased even during the recession? What about an emergency tax on wealth rather than coming back to working people again?

On the so-called property tax, it is not a property tax; it is a home tax. What is the obsession of right wing economists with a tax on people's homes and the myth that it represents a broadening of the tax system? Did they hear another colleague of theirs, Dr. Peter Bacon, on "Morning Ireland" a few weeks ago demolish the idea of a so-called broadening of the tax base and saying it is coming from the same pot of income workers get from their wages and salaries, pensions or social welfare?

That is where it is coming from; it is not coming from a secret hoard of gold that everybody has under his house and which he has been hiding heretofore. The measure would hit the same people, yet economist after economist blindly wants it. It is argued that every country in Europe has the tax. European countries have very different social and health systems, some of which are superior to those in Ireland.

One of the realities we face in Europe is that investment by big businesses and corporations has collapsed absolutely. I am sure the delegates have been reading the Financial Timesand The Wall Street Journal, for example, which argue that trillions of euro is being sat upon by major corporations, or that it is swilling around in money markets, yet the corporations will not invest in the manufacturing industry, where real jobs could be created for real people. How about an emergency tax on uninvested profits in Ireland and every other country in Europe? This would result in a turning around from the disastrous policy of austerity.

Did the delegates ever carry out a moral or democratic analysis of how and why we should tolerate a system in which faceless, unelected, unaccountable major corporate and financial entities that are sitting on top of trillions of euro are allowed to speculate daily against countries, banks and governments for their own super-profit? Their victims are the millions of unemployed people in Europe. So-called democratically elected leaders are simply bending the knee.

Dr. Donovan referred to his former employers. The prescriptions of his former employers, as with those of the troika, for example, pertain to more privatisation, cuts in public expenditure and attacks on living standards. These are similar to those that were applied in the structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s and 1990s in poorer countries in Latin America and Africa, with devastating social and economic effects. Why should we believe these prescriptions will be successful now?

I will have to leave towards the end of the meeting and my doing so should not be interpreted as my being discourteous.