Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

That is very clear from the Government amendment, which offers no solutions either. It states more or less that the Government bailed out the banks. It gave tens of billions of euro to European bankers to pay off their gambling debts and now depends on what is called "lender forbearance". In other words, the banks should be kind towards the people they have got into such a crisis. That is supposed to be a solution. There is no solution on the basis of capitalism. Unfortunately, the situation will get much worse. The 60,000 will grow to hundreds of thousands as long-term unemployment takes its toll.

What do we need to do? The solution is that we must refuse to bail out the bondholders and speculators. We must stop paying those debts. Then we should take public ownership of the financial system, but in an entirely different way from the type of panic nationalisations we saw for the purpose of bailing out banks, speculators and developers. We must remake the financial system on the basis of public ownership and the democratic control of society - of working people generally in society - over those institutions. We must do similarly with our fellow working people on a European basis. Then we will have a solution and can recalibrate prices downwards to their real value. We can recalibrate the obscene prices working people were forced to pay and recalibrate monthly mortgages downwards, without question of evictions. Then we will have a reasonable and sane system based on public ownership of the financial institutions and social good.

That is a solution, but we will not get it from a Fine Gael-Labour Party Government, because it bases its solutions on the current market system which is the problem, not the solution.

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