Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)

Does it support ruling out any private sector involvement in burden sharing in dealing with the currency crisis? I ask these questions because these are the key elements of the proposals that Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel will bring to the EU crisis summit on Friday. These are the demands they will be making. More importantly, these are proposals that will consign this State and its people to a decade of crippling austerity. If agreed this weekend, they will have negative consequences for employment, debt and reducing the deficit. In short, they will undermine everything the Government is claiming to have achieved with this week's disastrous budget.

What will be the Government's bottom line in the crisis summit this weekend and does it even have one? What price is the Government willing to accept in exchange for wearing the economic straitjacket being proposed by Sarkozy and Merkel? Will the Taoiseach return from the summit like Albert Reynolds did in 1992 with a bag full of euro gold, hoping the electorate will be bedazzled into accepting treaty changes with long-term and damaging consequences for Ireland and the eurozone? Will this Government agree to changes in the hope of avoiding a referendum, using technical legal arguments to avoid giving the people their say? Some 90 years ago today, one of the Minister for Finance's predecessors signed a treaty that had far-reaching and negative consequences for the Irish people. Let us hope the Taoiseach does not come back to Ireland after this summit having made the same mistake.

The Government has been softening up the Irish people for months, telling them it had to deliver this budget and it had no other choices. It raised the spectre of the troika and the memorandum of understanding, which the Government indicated it would renegotiate, on every occasion to defend its own economic agenda.

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