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

Is the Minister of State speaking or am I? I can sit down to enable the Minister of State to have a go and I will then come back in, if he wants. I understand precisely what is contained in the Bill and I also understand what the Minister of State is saying it is supposed to do.

In the various eulogies to the legislation, we have had an attempt to repeat the ideological claptrap constantly regurgitated and recycled by the Government, the IMF gurus and our EU masters who got us into this mess. Talking about higher penalties and shifting the emphasis, while not objectionable, is a little like deliberately letting a ferocious tiger loose in society and later bemoaning the fact that it savaged people. It is like saying the zookeeper should have looked after the animal better. The real problem is that the tiger should not have been let loose because it is a dangerous creature.

The legislation is predicated on the belief that competition is good and the best way of organising an economy. I have often heard Fine Gael Ministers and representatives, in particular, using competition and sporting analogies in discussing how we should run our society. However, running a society or an economy is not like playing a football game. It is not about competition and scoring goals; rather, it is about meeting the needs of ordinary people and ensuring this is done in the most effective and efficient way possible. We are trying to do this in a deep crisis when our economic system has catastrophically failed to meet society's needs. The European economy is teetering on the edge of the abyss, while the Irish economy is in dire straits. It is, therefore, beholden on the Government to ask how we reached this point. Only somebody who is being dishonest would not acknowledge that competition played a pivotal role in getting us into this crisis. Even the Nyberg report on the banking crisis acknowledged this fact.

Competition between private banks is precisely the reason the people concerned engaged in dangerous and reckless lending practices. Financial institutions, which were cowboy operations, were allowed into the Irish market and engaged in reckless lending to individuals who were not able to afford to pay back the money loaned to them. So-called respectable financial institutions, under competitive pressure from these cowboy financial institutions, began to engage in the same reckless lending. That is what happened. That is what was stated in the Nyberg report; it is not just the leftists who said it. That is a fact. What are we going to do about it? Are we going to rein in this dangerous animal of competition that caused that crisis? In what sense will any of the measures included in the Bill prevent such actions? They will not do so and it is not just because they are inadequate or ineffective. The Bill slightly increases the penalties in place before the crisis. Therefore, there is no fundamental change.

At the same time, in their other actions, the Government and the troika state they will reward those financial institutions which, driven by competition to make a profit, engaged in reckless lending. On the one hand, the Government is stating, for the optics and public consumption, that it will take tough action against these reckless private entities who pursued only profit, regardless of the impact on the economy and society, while, on the other, it is stating it will bail them out, no matter what they do. In fact, the Government's actions in creating pillar banks are leading to the removal of competition. We are financing these pillar banks, although we do not control them, as they will still be subject to the same competitive imperatives that led them to wreck the economy, yet the Government is doing nothing about this. It is giving the banks this power, while making it absolutely clear, even though we are financing them, that as soon as they have been nursed back to health, through the pain of ordinary people, they will be allowed to float off into the market again as private entities, in other words, we will bail them out and take the pain and then they will engage in blind competition to make a profit. This issue needs to be highlighted when the Government engages in play-acting and pretends that it is doing something about the circumstances that led to the economic crisis.

If one sets the optics beside the troika demands, with which the Government is going along, to privatise State assets as part of the conditions of the so-called bailout programme, the Government is giving power to the cartels and big multinationals it states it wants to control. Who will buy the State assets? It will not be the corner shops which are going out of business. The Government waxes lyrical about how it wants to introduce competition which is the lifeblood of the economy, but has the Minister of State noticed that as a result of the austerity measures taken, small businesses which the Government claims to support are being slaughtered all over the country? Only the big entities remain. Throughout Europe the multinationals are dictating to the European Union and the IMF that our State assets should be sold in order that they can buy them. These entities include Helvetia Wealth, a money-laundering operation in Switzerland which has a subsidiary called the International Forestry Fund, of which the chairperson is Bertie Ahern. His little office is to be found in Dún Laoghaire and it is pushing to take hold of Coillte. These are the sorts of entities that will get hold of our State assets as the Government continues to obey the diktats of the European Union and the IMF. Although the Government says it is trying to take action to control cartels and price fixing, everything it is doing increasingly gives control over economic and natural resources and key enterprises to cartels. It is utterly laughable that one of the people invited to the economic forum is none other than Mr. Denis O'Brien, who is trying to obtain a complete monopoly over Irish media. To put it mildly, there are major question marks over how he became fantastically wealthy as a result of his irregular arrangements and his relationship with Deputy Michael Lowry, a former Fine Gael Minister. He got the second mobile phone licence in this country and consequently became extraordinarily rich. He lives as a tax exile and is now busy trying to obtain a monopoly over the Irish media. He is invited to give advice on the Irish economic crisis by the Government, yet the latter expects us to take seriously its statement, through this legislation, that it is trying to do something about cartels, monopolies and abuses associated with holding a dominant position. This does not add up at all. It is a question of optics and play acting to pretend it is doing something when it is doing absolutely nothing.

Big corporate entities, which are being encouraged and whose interests are being championed by the troika and Government, do not result in lower prices for the consumer; the very opposite is the case. The result is domination by those big entities of entire markets. Perhaps for a brief period there is a drop in prices as the entities try to undermine a public enterprise. This occurred in the waste management sector, where there was an effort to undermine local authority waste collection services that were free or paid for through central taxation. Central taxation is somewhat fairer than other mechanisms. Local authorities have been forced by Fine Gael, the Labour Party and Fianna Fáil to introduce charges to pave the way for competition in the waste sector. Pensioners and the poor now must pay bin charges whereas they once had a service paid for through progressive central taxation. Their circumstances are now worse. As a result of the inevitable privatisation of the waste management sector and the introduction of competition thereto, waste collection prices have increased. The waiver schemes that supposedly exist to protect the less well-off have been done away with progressively or cut substantially.

Let us consider electricity, which is pretty important because it provides heat in the homes of ordinary people. Has the opening of the electricity market to competition helped the consumer? It clearly has not because prices have increased continuously since the market was opened up. The diktats of the market and its desire for profit come first in an open market. The public, through its public representatives, can tell a State enterprise that it wants subsidised prices for the more vulnerable and less well-off sectors of society, and that this should be paid for through progressive taxation. Behind all the bogus talk of competition to encourage the economy, whose lifeblood is believed to comprise small businesses, small businesses are being wrecked by the deregulation of the electricity market. The electricity price rises were directly responsible for small businesses going out of business. That is the reality. Rising costs, attributable to control by monopoly interests in privatised markets, are killing small businesses. In every sector of the economy, small businesses are being eaten up and replaced by multiples, chains and big entities. This is what is happening in the recession. This Bill is just meaningless and will achieve absolutely nothing.

If the Government were in any way serious about dealing with the circumstances that led to the current economic crisis and the abuses and dominant position of super-wealthy individuals who use their wealth to exert power over key industries and sectors of the economy, it would take the vital sectors of the economy back into public ownership. Public ownership gave some control to ordinary people and public representatives who are at least notionally accountable to the public for industries' strategic priorities, prices and investment decisions. If the Government were serious about helping small businesses, which I agree comprise an important part of the lifeblood of the economy, it would do something about excessive rates, excessively high prices for small businesses, upward-only rent reviews and, more generally, stimulating the economy. These are the steps we need to take.

Shambolic optics, closing the door after the horse has bolted, legislating and pretence are but verbiage on paper. They achieve nothing and fly in the face of the real decisions being made by the troika to shore up and protect the interests of big corporate entities or the financial institutions whose blind competition for profit wrecks the Irish and European economies, and who are now trying to use the crisis to further centralise and consolidate their control over those economies. I have outlined for the Government what it needs to do but it has no intention of doing so because it is addicted to the failed economic dogma that got us into this mess in the first place.

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