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

At what point do we shout that the emperor has no clothes? The European empire that is the troika of the EU, the ECB and the IMF, has no clothes, or to put it more accurately, it has not got a clue. Everything it has done over the past two years and everything it has dictated, which it claimed would improve the situation, has made the situation worse. That is blatantly obvious for everyone. The more they ram austerity and bank bailouts down the necks of countries like Ireland, Greece and Portugal, the worse the situation gets. It gets worse for the people in those countries with more unemployment, more cuts in services, slashing of incomes, and more attacks on the vulnerable. The immorality and the hurt of it are obvious, but even in economic and financial terms, it clearly is not working. The more they say the action is to contain the crisis, the more the crisis spreads. The more they say that the action is designed to restore economic growth, the more we get economic contraction. Is it not obvious? The more they have rammed this stuff down the throats of the Greeks, the worse the position in Greece has become. It now threatens to spread into France and Italy. What will those two countries do but the same thing? The banks will be recapitalised at all costs and who will pay? French working people will pay through more austerity, economic contraction and suffering. Italy and France will not be able to pay their debts and the holders of their bonds will be faced with the same crisis six months down the line. When will someone shout "Stop the madness"? The answer is obvious and every sane and sensible commentator agrees on it. Despite this, the Government continues to live in cloud cuckoo land and tries to suggest to members of the public that we can insulate ourselves from the current problems because there has been a small number of tiny improvements in the books in a small number of export related areas and we will all be saved by export led growth. To which countries will we export when the European economy hits recession and contracts, as it is starting to do? We will not have anyone to export to, certainly not at a level that would pull us out of a recession while austerity destroys the domestic economy. Let us tell the truth and strike out in a different direction. Let us stop the austerity and the bank bailout and do what the Greek people are doing, namely, fighting on behalf of society and for fairness and pointing towards a fair way out of the economic crisis.

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