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

I am sharing my time with Deputies Shane Ross, Mick Wallace and John Halligan.

It is evident that despite all the hoopla, last weekend's summit meeting of EU leaders was a spectacular failure. The record decline in the euro, the collapsing stock markets, rising bond yields, downgradings and threats of further downgradings of European debt, all testify to the failure of yet another summit. Summit after summit, failure after failure. The failure of the strategy being pursued by EU leaders and by the Taoiseach, has long been evident to ordinary workers and citizens and to the vulnerable, both in this country and in Europe, who are suffering mass unemployment, forced emigration, brutal austerity, cut after cut. Now, the speculators who caused the crisis, before whom the Government kneels and prostrates itself and demands that we kneel and prostrate ourselves, are betting that the Taoiseach's plan will not work. They are voting with their feet and they are betting that Europe is going down.

The Fianna Fáil Government slaughtered this country with austerity to bail out the banks and they handed us over to the troika. By the way, they did not mention the ECB mandate when they were doing all this. When those of us who campaigned against the Lisbon treaty did talk about the ECB mandate and its failure to consider anything other than inflation and profit, we were ignored and ridiculed by Fianna Fáil. Nonetheless, I welcome their conversion on the road to Damascus.

The Taoiseach's Government continues with the attacks on school children, on lone parents, on the elderly, on the disabled, resulting in unemployment - the very thing he said he would prioritise - getting worse, not better. In response to this situation, where the troika simply demands even more austerity, he comes back from this summit proposing that we support a pact based on permanently establishing a policy of bailing out the banks and permanent austerity visited on the people of this country and the people of the rest of Europe. He tries to cover that with talk of firewalls. What the hell are we talking about? Human shields would be a better description for what is happening and the policy being pursued by the European Union which is being implemented here. Our citizens' livelihoods, services and incomes are being used as shields to protect bankers, bondholders and speculators. I ask the Taoiseach if there is any destruction he will not visit on our economy and which the EU leaders will not visit on the European economy, its citizens and even now, the European Union itself, which is threatened with break-up in order to protect a currency or to protect the people behind that currency or the speculators and the bondholders. Which is more important, the people, the citizens, their services, their livelihoods, their right to a job, or a bloody currency and the bondholders who stand behind it?

As we said yesterday, with this pact the Taoiseach proposes to set in stone a Stalinist-like centralised command economy of permanent austerity and permanent inequality. I wonder whether the EU leaders are quietly looking at China where there is economic growth and thinking that dictatorship seems to work in China. A brutal regime which does not give its citizens any rights results in economic growth. Perhaps they are looking at Russia where elections are being rigged and are deciding this is the economic model we should follow. It is a very alarming thought that this is the direction in which Europe is heading. The historic gains of fighting for democracy and for the right of citizens to control their economic and political affairs, to decide on their political representatives and institutions, are being systematically demolished.

It is indicative of that sort of contempt for democracy and for the needs and wishes of our citizens that the Government is trying to do every piece of gymnastics possible to avoid a referendum. Frankly, I do not know how the Government can argue for one second that a referendum is not necessary. This deal is not even within the structures of the European Union, it has no bearing, therefore, on measures we have passed in referenda. It is a new pact of a more anti-democratic Europe which is simply a creature, an agent, for the markets, for Goldman Sachs, for the bankers and the bondholders.

I appeal to the Taoiseach and to the Tánaiste to stand up for what is right, to stand up for the citizens of this country and, indeed, for citizens across Europe whose interests should come first. Democracy, jobs, public services, equality, fairness and decency, can be achieved if there is a willingness to bring these markets under control. Is it not embarrassing for democratically elected leaders across Europe to be dictated to by the markets and financial institutions which wrecked our economy? Their actions make a mockery of the Taoiseach and our democracy. He should stop it and stand up for the people.

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