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

I tabled six questions and the Taoiseach did not really answer them. He did not even refer to some of them in his reply. The weekend prior to the European Council meeting, and directed towards it, in approximately 2,000 cities across the world people in their tens of thousands, and in their hundreds of thousands in some cases, took to the streets to protest against the policies of bailing out banks and bondholders and imposing austerity on ordinary people. In Greece, as I am sure the Taoiseach is aware, there has been huge mobilisation of people power taking to the streets to oppose the policy of inflicting brutal austerity on the people, pensioners and workers in the country to pay off bondholders and bankers. These protests took place here too. The Taoiseach may have noticed at the weekend, reinforcing the message of these protests, opinion polls indicated a significant majority of people believe the austerity to pay off bondholders was unjustified and is not in line with public sentiment in this country. The protests across Europe indicate-----

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