Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The process whereby the prime minister of a country goes to a European summit and then reports back to the national parliament is supposedly a democratic process. What is happening here this morning is happening in parliaments all over the European Union, but far from being an exercise in democracy, it is a masquerade and a sham because the democratically elected prime ministers, presidents and finance ministers who attend European Union summits and summits of finance ministers are not the ones making the crucial economic decisions which have such serious ramifications for hundreds of millions of Europeans. Those decisions are being made in the financial markets and the prime ministers and finance ministers of the European Union countries are slavishly bending the knee to the decisions that are made by major bankers, hedge fund operators and assorted speculators in the interest of corporate and private profit.

This morning in this Parliament we have the spectacle of one prime minister, the Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, telling the national Parliament, Dáil Éireann, that he does not know the identity of bondholders to whom €700 million from the resources of the people of this country has just been paid on his instructions. In the England of the 18th century and of the highwayman Dick Turpin, at least the victims of his robbery knew who was carrying it out and could look for their property back. It is incredible that in this era of information saturation we are denied, deliberately as a matter of policy, this most fundamental information. Shamefully, the establishment media in this State conspires with this shameful secrecy. Shamefully and with nauseating regularity the key question put by our national broadcaster, RTE, and other broadcasting media, when querying each so-called expert and economist that they bring before them to comment on the latest measure of slash and burn by governments throughout Europe, is whether these cuts or measures which hammer the living standards and livelihoods of our people are enough to convince, reassure and satisfy the markets. They never ask who are the financial markets or these institutions, individuals, profit-seeking corporations and speculators who wield such enormous power over the livelihoods and the societies of the people of Europe.

What we have is an economic dictatorship of the financial markets in front of which prime ministers, governments and finance ministers all over Europe fall on their face. It is in that context that we must see the referendum that is now being offered to the hard-pressed people of Greece. The people of Greece are being given a false choice by a Greek Prime Minister who up until now has been a messenger for the financial markets, shamefully pulverising the living standards and services of his people at the behest of those markets. The Greek left will work might and main for a "No" vote in this referendum, which is the correct thing to do. However, that is only the beginning. The false choice is either to vote for the savage austerity or, on the basis of capitalism and the ongoing financial markets, be plunged into a crisis where the markets taking their revenge would try to drive the Greek people back to the dark ages.

We must offer a fundamental and radical alternative. We must break the dictatorship of the financial markets, bondholders and bankers and recreate the financial system of Ireland and of Europe on the basis of public ownership, democratic control and accountability, where these institutions are then used to develop our society and invest in jobs and services to recreate a decent society for the people of Europe. That is the alternative, rather than the savage austerity the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance are imposing on our people, as if they were slaves to these unelected, unaccountable financial entities that they allow to wield such power over our people and the people of Europe.

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