Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

Many of the arguments about the debate that happened at the European Council have been gone through and I have a short time to make my points. As Deputy Doherty stated, no doubt all of us want to sort out the mess we are in, but what seems to me extraordinary is that there is no willingness on the part of the Government to recognise that the path we are being asked to go down by the IMF and the EU is a path that makes matters worse, not better. It is essentially the path that led us to this crisis in the first place. I do not understand why the Government does not acknowledge that.

In simple terms, this crisis happened because banks in Europe - French, German, British banks - lent money to Irish banks to speculate on the property bubble and they were happy with the unregulated financial and banking sector. The philosophy was "no regulation" or "light regulation", let the market rip and remove anything that gets in the way of making profits. We know where that got us.

The bankers here, in blind competition with one another to get a piece of the action, cheered on by the Fianna Fáil Government, stoked up a property bubble and the bankers in Europe knew what it was all about - if they did not, they were grossly incompetent. They knew, but they were happy to stoke up that sort of bubble and to make profits in the sort of unregulated Celtic tiger environment which they might not even have got away with in their own countries, and the inevitable crash came. Europe, having been very significantly responsible for it, then told the State that it must unload the cost of this mess on to the backs of working people in the form of cutbacks and austerity, that the State must bail out the Irish banks because if it does not, the Irish banks will bring Europe's banks down and it might affect the euro, and that Europe is not having that.

The immorality and injustice of that is obvious to all. Given this crisis, which did not happen under the Taoiseach's watch but under the watch of the previous Government, Europe is now telling us that we must continue along the same road. It is a joke to talk about a bailout because they are burying this economy and society to protect the bankers who bankrolled this property bubble in the first place. In so far as they will bail us out and in so far as they are saying that they will give us money to pay off the bankers - to pay them back, essentially - they, the European banks demand more deregulation, more austerity and more cutbacks that are contracting the economy as well as causing massive injustice, hardship and suffering for ordinary people. The effects are clear. Growth in the economy is contracting continuously.

The more the Government imposes austerity, the more the economy contracts. The IMF revised downward growth forecasts prove that. When will the Government state that this is not working? When will the Government stand up and state that it is not fair and it is not working, and insist that we go down another path and stand up to them? In doing that, we will be siding with other people in Iceland who have rejected similar policies.

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