Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The measures the Government took under the guise of financial emergency measures made the situation worse, prolonged the crisis and worsened the impact of the crisis on the economy and our citizens. My take is that it made things worse. The reason Greece is worse is not because the Greeks did not do that but because they did. They had even more extreme emergency income and wage gouging and that is why their economy collapsed. The IMF acknowledged that it got its multipliers wrong in this regard. It admitted the extent of the adverse impact on economies as a result of slashing the incomes of low and middle-income people was much bigger than it anticipated using its multipliers. The logic of admitting that is that cutting pay for low and middle-income people was the wrong thing to do.