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

The Minister is right that the previous Government was criminally negligent and responsible for this situation. The three institutions of the troika, the European Central Bank, the European Union and the IMF, were equally complicit in putting a gun to the head of the disastrous previous Government. That means that it put a gun to the head of the Irish people. Why should we adopt a position of justifying ourselves when the previous Government clearly placed a demand on the Irish people to pick up tens of billions of euro of private debt? It put the debt on their shoulders.