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

Next week, from 6 June until 16 July, the EU-IMF delegation will come to Dublin to implement further austerity, as agreed at the European Council meeting, austerity that the Taoiseach and other European leaders appear to commend as a good thing but which is resulting in tremendous suffering for the people of Greece in so far as it is being implemented there and tremendous suffering for people here.

Notwithstanding the insistence that there is a difference between Greece and Ireland, while the EU-IMF are here, protests will commence and continue for those ten days. There will be protests over the closure of Loughlinstown Hospital accident and emergency services, a closure that is being replicated in hospital accident and emergency services all over the country and which I hope will lead to further protests. On 12 July students will protest over registration fee increases while on 13 July there will be a large protest outside the Dáil by parents of special needs children who, as a result of the cuts this Government is imposing on those resources for our most vulnerable citizens, do not know if their children will have an education come September. On 14 July communities all over Dublin will protest the axing of bus services, with hundreds of buses and dozens of routes, mostly serving the elderly, the vulnerable, the immobile and young, being taken out of service. On 16 July all of those groups, and many others affected by the austerity that the Taoiseach and the other EU leaders wish to impose on the people of the State, will mobilise in a final demonstration demanding jobs and an end to cuts and austerity as dictated by the EU-IMF.

These people will protest because they are the victims of the austerity programme European Council leaders have once again signed off and are determined to continue to inflict on the people of this country to pay off the bankers and bond holders who caused the crisis. Most of those protestors, as is the case in Greece, will feel there is a bizarre disconnect between this Government and the European leaders and the concerns and needs of ordinary people. The Greek people and the Irish people cannot understand how the Government or the other European leaders believe that savaging the incomes of ordinary people, attacking the most vulnerable and imposing austerity that is increasing unemployment in this country daily, cutting hospital services, bus services and inflicting austerity on the most vulnerable who bear no responsibility for this crisis, will achieve anything. What planet is the Taoiseach living on if he believes this will help economic recovery? Austerity in recent years has done the opposite; it has made things worse and will continue to do so. Is there any understanding that if the Government takes money out of the pockets or ordinary people or if it attacks the education system, it does not aid economic recovery, it sabotages the prospects for it?

I ask the Taoiseach to reconsider, to show a bit of spine and stand up to the economic madmen in the ECB, the IMF and the EU who are inflicting extreme suffering on people and shoving down their throats an economic strategy that is failing to a disastrous extent.

See this speech in context