Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I apologise to the Taoiseach for missing the first part of his contribution but I was attending the Committee Stage debate on the Finance Bill. The Taoiseach will know from experience what that encounter is like.

Sinn Féin does not support the actions Greece is being asked to take by the EU Commission. Nor for that matter does it support the Irish Government's analysis and approach to our own economic woes. Sinn Féin believes there is a fairer, better way out of the global and domestic recessions. The European statement reads:

All euro area members must conduct sound national policies in line with agreed rules. They have a shared responsibility for the economic and financial stability of the area.

Let us examine this, which is the forerunner to Greece being asked to inflict economic sabotage on its people so as to fall in line with outdated EU rules in terms of the Stability and Growth Pact.

What is a "sound national policy?" The EU and, unfortunately, the Irish Government would have us believe that a sound national policy is one that deflates an economy to the point of imposing serious hardship on its people. It is one that curtails workers' rights so they cannot infringe on economic decisions and one that steadily erodes public services so that people are pushed into consuming private services, usually bought cheaply from the State in a sell-off initiated by a "sound national policy."

The Irish Government pursued its own brand of "sound national policy" in the budget of December last when it cut the wages of public sector workers, social welfare, health and education funding and took, in total, €4 billion out of the economy. The Fine Gael and Labour parties supported the Government's €4 billion analysis. Three months later, the live register continues to grow, house prices continue to fall, the banks still are not lending and our consumption sector is in free fall. The Government is happy because it appears we are no longer considered the naughty children of Europe, as though that is all that matters. This same medicine is being passed on to Greece to ensure it brings down its budgetary deficit by 4% in 2010.

I want to point out the elephant in the room. It was the EMU's one rule fits all that caused much of the problems of the small economies in Europe. The access to easy credit by these developing economies, like Ireland and Greece, combined with the loss of monetary control, fed the bubbles that arose in the PIIGS, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain, countries. The command that every economy stay within the 3% Stability and Growth Pact, when different countries have different needs, further damaged economic development. It was not true; the larger countries, for example France and Germany, broke the pact on several occasions and suffered no real consequences.

The insistence now that economies bring back their domestic deficits to within this 3% is utter madness. Attempting to reduce a structural deficit in a time of recession is counterproductive. Deficit reduction should be counter-cyclical to allow Government's the sovereign decision making needed to right an economy in decline. Borrowing for investment should be allowed if such investment is designed to stimulate an economy and, therefore, grow it. Of course, there are always exceptions made by the EU. In the Irish case, workers must suffer pay cuts and those who have lost their jobs must live on less, because we are not allowed to borrow to pay for a jobs strategy or societal needs. We can, however, borrow €54 billion to give to banks for toxic loans as long as we place that borrowing through a special purposes vehicle and keep it off the general Government balance sheet. This is the type of lunacy being allowed by the EU and now being inflicted on Greece.

The EU and this Government have turned Ireland into a debt-servicing vehicle to protect the euro. It is not important for them that unemployment and emigration will continue to rise and that our public services will fall into disarray. Given we have no monetary control over the euro and our main trading partners are non-euro members, they want us to further deflate our economy to make ourselves cost competitive, which means more hardship for people across the country. I extend my sympathy today to Greece. To have an economically inept EU leaning over one's shoulder and telling one how to run one's country is a sad reality in which to find oneself. Ireland has been run by incompetents for years and we have had our own experience of EU pressure so we can fully understand this Greek tragedy.

See this speech in context