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

The Governor knows the population of the State is under 1% of the total population of the European Union and the Irish economy accounts for around 1.2% of European Union GDP. EUROSTAT, which has calculated the cost of the banking crisis in each EU country, has found 42% of the total bailout of the European banking industry was borne by the Irish people, who are paying just under €9,000 per child, woman and man per year, and the next country is Germany with a payment of €491 per capita. A child can see this level of resources being transferred from the Irish people to the European financial system is going to cause massive crisis in the domestic economy, which is the case, and drag it down. We have, however, an insistence that for ten years, the €3 billion promissory notes are honoured. Why is everyone tip-toeing around the promissory note issue when it is money the Irish people never owed the bondholders, the ECB blackmailed an Irish Government into paying those bondholders and then demanded the Irish people should pay the costs back?

I put to the Governor a simple parable from yesterday, where the straight forward sense of morality and justice of ordinary citizens was borne out. If applied in this case, it would show a clear path out of the crisis. I read in the newspapers today that a grandfather walked into a HMV store in Dublin yesterday. He had a voucher he had bought for €40 and given to his grandson as a Christmas present. It was a HMV debt to him. The shop tried to shift the debt back to him when he went in to get goods for the voucher. HMV wanted him to carry the can. He took three DVDs to the value of his voucher and walked out, entirely morally justified according to the vast majority of ordinary people in the State.

Why will the members of the establishment, with all this power in their hands, not take a lesson from that absolutely justified morality and say to their colleagues in the ECB:

You forced the Irish people to pay the bondholders, to whom they had no responsibility. Look at the Irish economy. It is not capable of meeting this and it will not meet it.

That is their pathway out of this.