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

The Government, at the behest of the European Union and International Monetary Fund, is pursuing the economics of the madhouse. It is bad enough that tens of billions of euro are being poured into the vaults of banks and pockets of bondholders but the price being paid for this policy is mass unemployment and extreme suffering among some of the most vulnerable sectors of society. It is not, however, only the moral injustice of this approach for which society is paying the price because, critically, we are robbing ourselves of the means to deal with the unemployment crisis and put the economy back on a sound footing which would allow us to recover and develop a sustainable economic future. Nowhere is this issue more sharply focused than in the question of capital investment. The State needs to play a key role in investing in our future and prioritising capital investment if we are to have any chance of getting out of what increasingly appears will be a 1930s style economic meltdown in Europe.

The policy of recapitalising private banks with a view to producing a flow of credit to small and medium enterprises, about which the Government argues it is seriously concerned, has been a catastrophic failure. It has utterly failed either to produce a flow of credit to the SME sector or provide relief for mortgage holders whose circumstances are massively depressing demand in the economy. If all of this were not bad enough, the one other possible avenue for moving matters forward and getting us out of the current mess, namely, State investment in key, strategic projects both in infrastructure and other areas where we could generate real wealth and employment, has been closed off. State investment is even more important in light of the fact that the other key feature of the recession across Europe and specifically in this country has been the decision of the big players in the private sector effectively to go on strike and refuse to invest. Given the collapse in private sector investment, who will make the investment that will get people back to work? Only the State can fulfil this role but instead it is cutting capital investment at the behest of the EU and IMF. There is no way forward if the Government persists with this approach. I find it somewhat laughable that the Minister speaks about the improvements in our infrastructure in recent years. Money has been spent on infrastructure and there may have been some improvements, but he only has to look at the floods last week and the devastating impact they have had on many parts of the city to realise how bad our water infrastructure is and how criminal it was that we did not invest in rehabilitating that water and drainage infrastructure. That will cost not only the victims of those floods, but society in general, if we do not invest in that. I suggest the Minister reads Ulysses, because James Joyce complained a hundred years ago about the failure of the Office of Public Works to invest in the water infrastructure.

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