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

My contribution may be somewhat disjointed because I have been running around dealing with the consequences of IMF-inspired austerity in the form of the household charge. The bottom line - the point I wish to emphasise above all else - is that we must resist the IMF. This legislation must not be supported because it is a cosmetic attempt to make the IMF look like a benign entity rather than the vulture it really is, a vulture acting on behalf of the very corporate elites and financial speculators which wrecked the European economy and the Irish economy. The IMF represents the forces which did the same to other parts of the world in the past. Now it has moved on to the peripheral countries of Europe and will no doubt move on to the rest of the Continent in due course.

It does not at all surprise me that our Government should support the IMF and consent to do deals with it, which is essentially what the Minister's argument seems to be. If we do a little deal by supporting these so-called reforms, we will in return be thrown a few crumbs from the table in the form of small interest rate reductions. I argue strongly that we should not be doing deals with the IMF. It is not helping us and we should not be begging for crumbs from its table. The devastation to our economy is a consequence of the constraints imposed on us by the IMF and the ECB, at the behest of the private financial system, that is, the bankers and bondholders. These entities are determined to protect the people who caused the economic crisis and to unload the cost of it onto our backs. They are forcing the so-called bailout programme down our throats in order to gain control of our economy and hereafter dictate the economic policy of this State.

The pattern of IMF intervention over the years has been appalling in the extreme. It is not an exaggeration to say it has wreaked devastation across the world in every location in which it is intervened. It is not unlike a drug pusher in this regard. Its approach is to offer loans to countries in crisis at exorbitant interest rates while imposing austerity to such a severe degree that the society is devastated and its people endure severe suffering. Ultimately, these countries are placed in a position where they cannot ever repay their loans and are therefore forced perpetually to seek new loans. It is a downward debt spiral where the only winners are the IMF and the financial interests it champions and represents, namely, the banks and bondholders.

The IMF did this in Africa in the 1980s, causing utter devastation to dozens of African countries. There is always a pattern to its policies, the same policies that are now being unleashed in this country. The intent is to protect the banks at all costs by ensuring they are repaid, privatising as many state assets as possible, ratcheting down public expenditure, lowering taxes on big business and on wealth, and introducing user charges for public services. The latter inevitably leads to a devastation of those services and excludes huge sections of the population from accessing them. This process of introducing user charges opens the way to the privatisation of public services, public enterprises and public assets, which is the real prize. The IMF sets out to grab resources, create labour market pools and feed assets back to the vultures in the western corporate and financial sector. After devastating Africa, the IMF repeated that achievement in Asia following the crisis there at the end of the 1990s. It then intervened in Brazil and elsewhere, imposing the same conditionalities in return for so-called bailouts and thus imposing the same extraordinary damage on those economies.

People need to understand that the proposed changes are utterly cosmetic and that the large economic powers will remain absolutely in control of the IMF. Oxfam has roundly condemned the proposals for so-called reform as absolutely inadequate and as leaving the poorest countries in the world, including those in sub-Saharan Africa - all of the countries which have been victims of the IMF - with virtually no representation of any significance within the organisation and no opportunity to influence its policies. All that is being done is to increase very slightly the voting strength of the so-called BRIC countries. It is indicative of the notion of democracy in institutions such as the IMF and also indicative of a capitalist notion of democracy generally. Democracy to most of us means everyone having an equal vote and an equal say. This is not how it works in the IMF. It works like the democracy of a private corporation whereby those with the most shares have the most say. It is not that every voter has an equal weight but rather those with the most money have the most voting power. This shift in the structure of the board simply recognises that Brazil, China, Russia, India and South Africa, are now major players in the global economy and emerging global powers. Their economic strength has to be reflected by them being brought into the club of dominant powers within the IMF, in order to then dictate and ram down the throats of everybody else in the world the economic policies which suit their interests and which subscribe to a particular ideological doctrine which I have described, one of privatisation, the slashing of public services, smashing up protections for workers and for the environment. This is the agenda. Even that cosmetic change, which is certainly not a move towards any notion of real democracy or international co-operation or solidarity, has been forced on them. The reason it has been forced on them was that in the aftermath of the Asian crisis, Asian countries and places like Brazil, which had been devastated by IMF policies, started to pull out of the IMF. They refused to give it money, to the point that the IMF had to start selling gold in order to replenish its funds and, interestingly, move into the bond market. This is where it gets really interesting. In 2008, Dominique Strauss-Kahn talked about the IMF diversifying into investment into corporate bonds and state bonds. We do not know who are the bondholders but one has to wonder if the IMF moved into bonds in 2008, whether the IMF bondholders are in the Irish banks, in Anglo, and whether they are the ones we are repaying. The judgment of people who know a lot about the IMF is not one that gives much reason for optimism.

For example, in October, the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, said that Brazil would put more money into the fund in exchange for more voting rights but then she went on to criticise IMF conditionality. She said: "We will never accept, as participants of the IMF, that certain conditions that were imposed on us be imposed on other countries." He pointed to and understood the way the IMF works-----

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