Liam Twomey (Wexford, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Mr. McCarthy has made some interesting comments. Does he accept that the Irish bailout programme has worked for any number of reasons and not because of austerity?

I refer to Mr. McCarthy's interesting point about Greece. He has said that when people see no light at the end of the tunnel, they will eventually vote for a more radical solution. We are talking about the politics of the crisis. He makes the point that the Greek people had lost confidence in their own institutions as much as anything else and that Syriza was, in effect, the plan B about which Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett talked. They were looking for a more radical solution, which seems to have failed miserably, in so far as they are concerned.

Mr. McCarthy has referred to our interest payments and profiling the money we borrowed. We seem to fail to explain that most of the money we have borrowed - a 120% debt-to-GDP ratio - was borrowed to maintain public services; it was not borrowed to manage the banks and it was not a bank bailout. Profiling means repayments are pushed to be made in the future when it will almost not matter and the repayments are to cover the interest, which is the big one. For example, we are paying 3.1% of GDP in interest payments. If I remember correctly, at the beginning of the year Greece's repayments were something like 3.4% or 3.5% of GDP. The profile of repayments being made by Greece was not far off ours and many of the measures it has taken such as reducing budget deficits are similar to what we did, yet the level of expenditure on pensions in Greece is still at 17.5% of GDP versus 12% in our case. Considering the state of the Greek economy at the beginning of the year, it could have worked through it over a couple of years in the same way as we did, yet the Greek people chose a solution that has landed them in an incredible disaster zone. Does responsibility lie with the Greek institutions or the Greece people? There is an element of delinquency or a refusal to accept that they were living beyond their means. I am only saying this because much of the conversation this afternoon has focused on the criticisms of the institutions in Europe and individual countries. Like Senator Aideen Hayden, in travelling around Europe I have not noted huge sympathy for the Greeks because many countries have endured their own cutbacks and changes in how they manage their public services, just as we have. The picture Mr. McCarthy paints, in which the Greeks have made huge sacrifices, has not been painted very well outside Greece. The commentary on the situation in Greece is still very poor and even the Greeks did not help with some of the comments being made by Syriza since it was elected.