Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To be honest, the witnesses convinced me of their case even before they came in. I am curious about the rationale behind this because it is just bizarre, absurd and shocking as far as I can see. It is bad enough wanting to privatise water and housing let alone privatise community and voluntary services that provide services to approximately 2 million people a year, according to one of the reports. Community and voluntary groups that get a pittance provide services to 2 million of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people in the country and now they want to privatise it. That is just beyond any sort of belief. I am trying to get my head around it because I am not easily shocked about the privatisation agenda but I was pretty shocked when I heard that.

My reaction was to ask how they were planning to make money out of it. I can see how they might try to make money out of it and whatever else they want to sell off and privatise, but who is going to benefit?

I agree with the argument that communities and services will suffer. The entire idea of community and voluntary work will suffer, if it is not eliminated completely. I still do not fully understand the agenda behind it. On the face of it, it strikes me as privatisation and neoliberalism gone completely bonkers. The only commercial interests that I can think of that will benefit are private companies linked with an agenda of dragooning people into labour activation schemes. The mindset is that all of these schemes are a waste of time and run by hippy left-wingers who should be replaced by people who can get tough with disadvantaged communities by dragging them into labour activation schemes. There is no understanding that the schemes support people with serious problems who need the support of caring human beings. Do the delegates think there is a deeper logic to these proposals? Perhaps they might speak about the experience in the United Kingdom where this has already happened to some extent. If I fully understand what they said, we are even more gung-ho in this bizarre neoliberal privatisation experiment than the European Union. Normally the Union pushes us in that direction, but in this case it is pulling back from privatising these services, whereas the Government is pushing forward. Is that the case?