Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

The principal lord of misrule in regard to the disaster that has overtaken the Irish economy might be identified as Deputy Bertie Ahern. Although he is still a Member of this House and is frequently reported as having speaking engagements in the Panama Canal area and around the world, he has remained silent in terms of explaining himself to the House, to his own political party or to the people. However, he gave an interview recently for a new book by David. J. Lynch, which I believe is aimed at Irish-Americans and people in the United States to help them understand what has gone wrong in Ireland. I wish to read part of the interview into the record of the House because I believe it to be a genuine expression of the voice of Deputy Ahern, as he once misruled this country. In explanation for the disaster he states:

At any time, had they come in and put the doomsday message I think we could have done a lot of things. But there was no sense, I can tell ya, of that. I mean, there wasn't one meeting with the Central Bank guys, not one meeting where they were putting the red lights on. Not one meeting. And never did Brian Cowen or the finance officials come over to me to say that the whole thing, the bottom, was going to fall out.

I know Deputy Bertie Ahern. That is so much his true and authentic voice. However, it also shows his cleverness. It is a crushing indictment of the Department of Finance, the Central Bank and of his anointed heir and successor, the present Taoiseach, Deputy Brian Cowen. That is the voice he wishes to leave on the history book records, never being a man not to get his retaliation in and to explain the situation in his own way.

It was crony capitalism that brought us to this - that golden circle of Fianna Fáil, the lord of misrule in the Galway tent and the bankers like Seanie FitzPatrick. Mr. FitzPatrick gave a lecture - an actual lecture - a year or so before we began to become familiar, in a way none of us would ever have wished for, with the inner workings of Anglo Irish Bank. In his lecture, Mr. FitzPatrick, as became a mega-billionnaire, lectured us that financial regulation in Ireland was the new McCarthyism. Shortly afterwards, he lectured the Irish Government, saying that old age pensioners and others should take cut after cut. We were all young and naive then, in the early days of the financial crisis and the collapse of the banks. Although I predicted the collapse of the bubble and was the first person to raise the Quinn affair, contracts for difference and the property based tax breaks, which are all on my record in the Dáil, I never thought the wrongdoings and the bust model of Anglo Irish Bank would bring down not only AIB but possibly Bank of Ireland. This week, despite all its efforts and despite the rights issue, it is almost back to where it was before. It gives me no pleasure to say that.

There, however, is the voice of Deputy Bertie Ahern. He comes in and votes in the House but never speaks although in his paid lectures he tells the world that the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Brian Cowen told him nothing. The Department of Finance officials also told him nothing. The Central Bank told him nothing.

What would a manager in any company do? He or she would say, "Sack the lot of them." The Government has brought such incredible destruction to this country. This is what faces the Taoiseach more than anybody else. Where is the honour in continuing when it created this disaster? As early as 2006 I had a big argument with the now Taoiseach over contracts for difference and turning the Dublin Stock Exchange into a casino. Little did I know that today Paddy Power bookmakers is a bigger element on the Irish Stock Exchange than our banks. That tells all about the Celtic tiger which has turned into the Celtic tortoise. That is why people are so angry.

David McWilliams, in his book The Pope's Children and a recent book about the crash refers to insiders and outsiders in this country. In a way, the four year plan is about insiders and outsiders. The outsiders are the little people, who have endless capacity and energy to take it on the chin and who can have a cut in the minimum wage. There is no requirement as a quid pro quo that their bosses, whether in the public or private sector - the minimum wage is mostly a matter for the private sector - should also limit their compensation packages on a parallel with what people on the lowest wage are being asked to take.

During the Dublin Theatre Festival I went to see "Enron", by a London company, in the Gaiety. It told the story of a massive energy company which became one of the biggest financial empires in the United States and which, in its destruction, has brought, among others, the state of California close to financial ruin. However, as it is in the continental US federal system it will not bring down the dollar even though it is one of the bigger states. The play told the story of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the chief executive and chief accountant. The audience comprised mostly young people from banks, insurance companies and business houses who went to the theatre after work. There was a fantastic atmosphere of excitement in the theatre.

At the end of the play the chief character, Jeffrey Skilling, the accountant who organised the tricky things to inflate the books of Enron to make it a bubble company just like our bubble economy, is in an orange jumpsuit and is obviously in jail where he will spend a lot of time. One could feel in the audience a massive wave of emotion because the outcome in Ireland, which is a result of the way we have run this crony capitalism, is unimaginable. That is the problem. There is no Madoff or Enron and Jeffrey Skilling moment in Ireland. The lords of misrule have their houses in Marbella and their little tax boltholes in Switzerland. They are around the world. They are in the pricier parts of Connecticut and New England, starting afresh or else they come back for the odd match and so on like our tax exiles.

Our tax exiles do not merit a little note in the four year plan. It is the little people who have to give and who will take it on the chin while the people who lectured us and continue to do so have the luxury of not having to do their share of the heavy lifting. What is the attitude of the Irish negotiators to the European Central Bank, the European commission and the IMF?

I, like many Irish people, had a very strange experience recently, which Deputies can try themselves. I have been texting people because I have been doing a lot of work in examining the IMF and how its structures work. When I type "IMF" into predictive text what word comes first? The word "God." Of course we have to have a rescue plan. We need rescuers and helpers but we also need to be emotionally, mentally and intellectually tough in the negotiations. I look at the sorry set of Ministers, who are mostly feeling sorry for themselves and not the rest of us. I see real emotion and pain etched on many faces but in many cases it is for themselves. I wonder about their capacity to negotiate a tough deal on behalf of this country.

Some people in the Department of Finance, and probably the Minister for Finance, have been hanging out a little bit too long and familiarly with Jean-Claude Trichet. I have listened to him and others speaking in Dublin. As a country, of course we have made terrible mistakes but if they think they can make Ireland a poster child for punishment by international finance agencies by destroying this country with terms of negotiation which are impossible to deal with, like the Germans after the Treaty of Versailles they will rue the day and set a bad example for the eurozone.

They need to pause because Ireland will not be able to pay these debts. I wish to tell the men from the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission that Ireland needs money at cheap rates of interest if it is going to have a chance to pay back, which Irish people wish and are committed to do, the sort of financial advances which are being made to us.

We can apologise for having a Government which has dealt so ineptly with the blanket guarantee. I am sure the IMF is appalled to find that the room for manoeuvre in regard to the bondholders is probably very limited because of the blanket bank guarantee. On the statement yesterday on the four year recovery plan, what is the ghost at the feast? What is the ghost, like Hamlet's father, stalking the perimeters of the plan? The ghost is the banks and the bank debts which are on our shoulders. I ask people in the eurozone not to make this a four or five act tragedy.

Act one was Greece, act two is Ireland, act three may be Portugal and, worst of all for the strategists in the eurozone, act four could be Spain. We need a serious discussion about this. People in Europe may say: "Who is a Member of the Irish Parliament, given the state in which the country is, to even dare to question us?" Solidarity is a founding principle of the European Union and the Union I support and it is a two-way street. Mrs. Merkel made a very good point in regard to bondholders bearing part of the debts. She clarified those statements to refer to the time after 2013. However, what Mrs. Merkel had to say on that is essentially sensible and reasonable in that if a bank collapses not only the shareholders, who in Ireland lost their shirts, but the bondholders, who are risk takers, should share in the losses.

I heard people here complain that Mrs. Merkel's statement fluttered the bond markets. The difficulty with the bond markets is that if one says there will be pain for them, they will react by repricing up the interest rates on one's debt. They are the epitome of market forces - market forces red in tooth and claw. Many of those market forces are prepared to take a punt on the destruction of the euro and are probably making an awful lot of money. They made an awful lot of money on Greece and I am quite sure there are people counting the hundreds of millions of euro they made on Ireland. They are stalking the eurozone to see where they can strike next.

It is time for the people in charge of the eurozone to think about strategies that not only maintain countries like Ireland, but maintain the eurozone because unless they can do both, the eurozone will have a very problematic future. Up to the current debacle, the eurozone, on balance, has actually been good for Ireland.

I refer to the interest rates. The United Kingdom and the Swedish finance minister mentioned rates of 3%. The IMF normally lends at rates of approximately 3.2%. These are the kinds of rates of interest Ireland requires in terms of its debt. Ireland also needs to spread some of this over a longer period.

The Labour Party has staked a position which is not popular with Fianna Fáil, the Green Party or the former Progressive Democrat. I know it is under consideration by Fine Gael. If one frontloads too much austerity, one gets this momentary approval from the markets around the frontloading of the austerity. The difficulty is that the frontloading of the austerity, if it is accompanied by penal rates of interest, will sink the country. If the same is done in other countries in this three or four act tragedy of the peripheral countries, there will be a fifth act which will be the destruction of the euro. Let us pause to think about what is not only in Ireland's interest, but in the mutual interest of the eurozone and the euro as a currency.

I move to the contents of the report. People have spoken to me about one of the suggestions in the report in regard to labour market reforms. There will be a 10% reduction in pay for new entrants to the public service. The Government and all the parties in this House should clarify at, or after, the next election that it includes Deputies and the incoming Government. That is my view which many of my party colleagues share. It is something about which people must think but one cannot load pain on young people coming into the public service and then say that the people at the top of it are, somehow or other, exempt from it.

I agree there needs to be measures in the social welfare system which encourage people to get back to work. One cannot have a system where young people are encouraged to see life on the dole as some kind of permanent position. When the Labour Party was last in government, I was a Minister of State in the Department of Social Welfare. We created the back to work scheme and a series of returns to health, education, training and work in the community. Much of that was done away with during the years of the Celtic tiger. The feeling among agencies like FÁS was that the people on the unemployment register were somehow unfit for work. We must change all of that.

We have extraordinarily well qualified people on the register, many of whom have fine professional qualifications. The challenge for us and the smart economy, which is mentioned in the plan, is to think smart about how those people can contribute. We have suggested graduate internship schemes and various return to work experience schemes. All those options must be activated.

We have suggested rents should be reviewable downwards as well as upwards. There is a hint of that in the plan but it is not spelled out. The Government has refrained from spelling out the details of the tax and pension changes.

I was in a debate not so long ago with the Minister for Justice and Law Reform, Deputy Dermot Ahern, and I talked about property-based tax breaks being capable of producing €800 million in savings over a couple of years. As he does, the Minister got a bit annoyed and said he had advice from the Attorney General that this was impossible. I am glad the winding down of tax breaks has finally been acknowledged and included in this document. That is a bipartisan move on the part of the Government which I welcome.

There must be a new kind of bipartisan politics in which there is robust debate. Some of the Ministers who have been in government for 13 years must acknowledge that the monopoly on wisdom is not held by Fianna Fáil and that Fianna Fáil must yield to others and acknowledge that our ideas have merit. After all, we advised Fianna Fáil correctly on the bank guarantee. For its own reasons, it did not accept that advice.

People in Ireland can be very robust in their opposition to any or all of the measures. That is a democratic right. However, I plead with people not to be photo fodder for some of the international media stalking Dublin and various buildings. Ireland is not just ghost estates and piebald ponies left to run in fields, even though those images are appealing. In Greece, the impact of the violence that occurred has been to really damaged its tourism trade. Tourism is a really important earner in this country and it will help it to recover. I appeal to people in some of the smaller political organisations - I know some people are mad as hell and do not want to take anymore - not to be used as photo fodder presenting the worst imagine of Ireland.

There are good things about Ireland. We are in a difficult place but we have great people and we will recover. Our Administration is acting like the Hoover administration in the Great Depression. We need a Rooseveltian administration which will produce a New Deal for this country and will help it to recover.

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