Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I thank the Labour Party for sharing time with me and for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this important debate.

I begin my contribution by expressing Sinn Féin's support for the motion. The Government decided to amend its original amendment to include the words "the principles of fairness and equity". These are principles Fianna Fáil and the Green Party easily forget. However, it is the motion as put forward by the Labour Party that we are here to discuss. I affirm Sinn Féin's total opposition to the pension levy. We have consistently stated that any measures to address our public finances must be done on the basis that those who have the most, pay the most. Instead, all we have got from the Government is a punitive, mean spirited and fundamentally unjust attack on working people in the public sector, while the pals of Fianna Fáil in senior management in our banks and other institutions continue to get off scot free.

Through the pension levy, which is in reality a pay cut, the Government has asked public workers to pay for the boom from which they never really benefited. While the Minister for Finance has, by his own admission, spent nearly all of his time on our banks, thousands and thousands of workers throughout the country have been let go. It is not just all his time the Minister has spent on the banks, he has spent all our money on them too.

For the past five months there has been one revelation after another on corruption and fraud within our banks, one botched Government initiative after another to try to restore confidence to our financial institutions, and interview after interview that demonstrate that the senior management in our banking institutions are on a different planet and are incapable of changing their ways.

We heard again today of another scandal involving Seán FitzPatrick fraudulently moving money from Irish Nationwide and Anglo Irish, but nothing has been done by the Government to seize the money embezzled by Mr. FitzPatrick and there are no signs of criminal proceedings being brought against him. Compare that with the example just given by Deputy Jan O'Sullivan. Despite all of this, Mr. FitzPatrick still had the brass neck to refuse to come before an Oireachtas committee to answer questions from public representatives on these matters.

These banking executives will have to be dragged here, undoubtedly kicking and screaming, and made to account for their criminal behaviour. Today, I called for legislation to be introduced to compel the likes of Mr. FitzPatrick to appear before the Oireachtas or to face imprisonment. Enough is enough. People are sick and tired of the bankers getting away with it while ordinary people are being made to pay.

The claim by the Minister for Finance last week, when he handed €7 billion of taxpayers' money to the banks, that bonuses had been done away with is nonsense. Bonuses are not gone, they have simply been put on pause for 12 months. The banks will then be free to use whatever is left of the €7 billion to start paying themselves outlandish bonuses again. All we are getting for the €7 billion set to come out of the pockets of ordinary workers is a token 25% holding on the board of directors. We have already seen how ineffective the Government can be from its 25% holding on the board of Aer Lingus.

While the Government may claim that the corporate malpractice which was endemic in our banking system is rooted firmly in the past, there is no evidence to indicate change to our regulatory system. It is wrong to suggest that was then and that things have changed now. Most of our banking executives are still in place and the culture of crony capitalism, which was championed by Charlie McCreevy with his deregulation dogma, still forms the basic structure of our financial system.

While we are preoccupied with the banks, the real problems affecting the people are being ignored. We have all received hundreds of e-mails, numerous telephone calls and visits to our constituency offices from public workers who are dismayed at what is happening. The pension levy has demoralised thousands of our public sector workers and has shocked the country at this time of crisis. What Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have effectively done is to reduce the people on modest incomes to the point where they are struggling and to make already struggling families even poorer, not to mention the thousands of workers who, for a variety of reasons, have been unable to qualify for a State pension, but who must still fork out hundreds of euro every month to a pension they will never receive.

I recently received an e-mail from a woman who will now double her contribution to her pension because of this levy, but will not avail of that pension because she spent a number of years raising her family at home. These are ordinary people with modest salaries, not like the former Financial Regulator, Mr. Patrick Neary, who got a golden handshake of €630,000 for standing by while our financial system was almost destroyed through corruption.

Ordinary workers are right to feel disgusted at the Government's decision to make them pay for its mistakes and those of its friends. Apart from the damage the Government has done to my constituents and constituents of every Deputy in the House, this proposal will prove futile. The so-called €2 billion the Government has announced it will save will be completely wiped out if our unemployment continues to grow at the same rate as it did in January.

The cutbacks so desperately sought and that the Government is now implementing will do nothing to stimulate the economy or to create jobs. It is investment and planning that will create and stimulate job creation and retention, not cutbacks. It is job retention and creation that will address the public finance deficit. My colleagues and I in Sinn Féin accept that there is some wastage in the public sector, but we do not accept that it is low and middle income earners who are the cause of the difficulty. Rather, we see the outsourcing which has grown with the culture of deregulation promoted by Charlie McCreevy as the real waste. When we finally get a clear picture of how much money is being used to subsidise these corporate raiders operating on the back of our public services, it will become clear that privatisation is the biggest waste of public money of all time.

It is important to point out that this blunt object which is being used to divide public and private workers and which will lead to a reign of psychological terror on our public servants did not just happen in the past three months. The psychological war against our public servants began a long time ago, when the likes of IBEC, Ministers, certain parts of the media and, unfortunately, Fine Gael, began kicking lumps out of our public services. These forces have used the economic crisis to attack public sector workers and services.

It is opportunistic in the extreme for Fine Gael Deputies to claim they are opposed to the levy when their own leader said only last September that the public service is "bloated and inefficient". That is language very similar to language used by the Minister of State, Deputy John McGuinness, when speaking to Deputy Gilmore. The Fine Gael spokesperson on finance also used similar language and called for radical reform. We all know what he meant by that with regard to public services. It is disingenuous of Fine Gael, the Government and certain parts of the media to claim that no reform of work practices in the public service has taken place over the past ten years. What Fine Gael and IBEC are really after is not an improvement in work practices but cutbacks.

We will continue to oppose the pension levy. We will also support public sector workers in their national day of protest. We will continue to be the one party on this side of the House to call for a job creation strategy based on realistic and achievable proposals.

The effort to divide public and private sector workers did not happen by accident. It is a strategy devised to separate the working movement across the country. Never was it more important for workers to unite, whether public or private sector. As sure as night follows day, the private sector will be next to face the onslaught. This should not be accepted. It is disingenuous of the Government to take all this taxpayers' money and pour it into the bottomless pit of the banks without any control or regulation of that sector. Doing that is scandalous. It is time to put an end to this and end the attack on low and middle income families. It is time for the Government to work its way out of the economic mess created by itself, the bankers and speculators. It is time we produced a plan to work together to do so.

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