Arthur Spring (Kerry North-West Limerick, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I find it very difficult to impress this on European partners. Labour Party Deputies talk to the Social Democrats. If one put it to the Germans or the French that essentially 10% of their population, 6.8 million people, were going to leave the eurozone for the purpose of gaining employment in Anglophone countries or a similar language country, and asked them what would happen in their countries, they would say there would be a revolution or that the country would collapse. They do not appear to grasp the magnitude of our problems. I am on the same chapter as every other Member of the House at present. There was talk at one stage of putting a water charge of €5 per week on a person on €188 per week. People are really at breaking point and I do not get a sense from the representatives of the OECD, the Commission and the IMF that the committee has met that they see the daily lives or feel it as badly as people do. One can talk about the political consequences of it, which are as plain as day, but the objective of everybody here is austerity avoidance. Some people believe it can be abolished or banished altogether.

Do the witnesses get a feeling from the Commission, in particular, of awareness of the level of pressure Irish people's lives are under? When I tell European representatives that there are 400,000 people in negative equity and 130,000 people in arrears with their mortgages, they ask why we own our own property and why we are not renting. They should look at the model and understand it before they ask those questions. I do not get the feeling that they comprehend how people's lives are in this country. Will the witnesses comment on that?