Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

He would learn that the monstrous dictatorships in eastern Europe, with which Fianna Fáil Party Governments had diplomatic relations and its Ministers regularly visited, would be anathema to that for which the Socialist Party has always stood.

The Taoiseach has evaded the issues. Why are right-wing economists — not socialists — calling for the renationalisation of Eircom following the disastrous outcome of that privatisation? The Independent Deputies, not all of whom are socialists, support maintaining Aer Lingus in public ownership, as do the company's workforce and the people. It is the right-wing ideologues of Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats who are pushing the privatisation agenda and forcing our national airline into the hands of sharks.

The Taoiseach should wake up. All over Latin America, for example, people are up in arms in opposition to the privatisation of crucial services such as water. The clock is turning against the neo-liberal agenda and towards the idea of investing in public companies. The way forward for Aer Lingus is to bring workers to the heart of the company and develop it democratically with a full input, not to take the Government's route of handing it over to sharks and, inevitably, losing control of it. If in ten years the national airline has been asset-stripped by corporate vultures, with jobs, wages and working conditions ravaged, the Taoiseach may well be riding into the sunset, but it will remain as a monument of shame to the neo-liberal agenda he and his Government has pushed for the past nine years.

See this speech in context