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

When I heard we would be celebrating our EU membership with a special sitting of the Dáil, I thought it was a sick joke. It just beggars belief that when this country is being crucified by an EU-IMF deal, the Government thinks we should celebrate our membership of the EU. It is beyond pathetic - the sick joke of a bankrupt Government.

The EU-IMF programme is a plan to inflict untold misery on working people and the most vulnerable in our society to pay off the gambling debts of bankers and speculators. It is a demand to attack the lowest paid workers, those with special needs and the unemployed, to force our people to work longer and harder for less, and to strip the country of its vital assets. The idea that the Fine Gael-Labour Party Government thinks we should celebrate this is unbelievable. What planet is it on? Every sane economist, from left or right, says this deal will ruin Ireland. Even the Government, which has done such an unbelievable U-turn on its promises to renegotiate the deal, has admitted in recent weeks that we are in a straitjacket. The truth is that it is not a straitjacket, nor is it a bailout; it is a burial of Irish society under the terms of the deal.

If this gathering were truly to reflect our current relationship with the European Union, Jean-Claude Trichet of the ECB would be sitting in the Taoiseach's seat, flanked by the heads of the Bundesbank and the other big European banks, and all the public representatives in this Chamber would be bound and gagged.

If we want real European solidarity, we should not be celebrating what the EU is doing to us but emulating the Arab people, who are having their spring and resisting injustice and dictatorship in the Arab world. We need a European spring and an Irish spring to resist the dictatorship of the financial markets, which are seeking to crush the Irish people and our society, along with those of Portugal, Greece and elsewhere, in the name of saving bankers and bondholders.

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