Thomas Pringle (Donegal South West, Independent)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Private Members' motion, which has been proposed by the United Left Alliance and is being supported by Independent members of the Technical Group. I would like to start with a quotation:

What legal or moral compulsion is on Ireland, however, to honour in full debt incurred by Irish banks when there was no State involvement in the arrangements? These loans were entered into freely by willing lenders and borrowers with absolutely no State participation. The interest rate charged represented the risk at the time and there never was a State liability. It is obscene that liability for these loans is now being transferred to the Irish taxpayer, in many respects to the poorest of the Irish taxpayers... What a disaster and an obscenity... The position has now become indefensible that the Irish taxpayer, even the poorest taxpayers, should be required to underpin the speculation of hedge fund investors. There must be transparent, open, negotiated burden sharing of bank debt.

Those words were spoken in this Chamber in December 2010 not by a member of the Technical Group, but by the current Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan. What has happened since then? The Minister, Fine Gael and the Labour Party have morphed into Fianna Fáil since 25 February 2011. They are continuing the policies that had been adopted and were being pursued by Fianna Fáil prior to last year's election. We will see the outworking of those policies tomorrow when €1.25 billion is paid to the same hedge fund investors to whom the Minister referred in December 2010. It is even more galling that the bond which is being repaid was trading last year at a 60% discount. If the Government had gone into the market at that stage to buy them back, at least something laudable and positive would have been done about them. Instead, the Government sat back and waited and is now preparing to hand this money over to speculators who were betting, in the truest sense of the word, and are about to win big time tomorrow.

To add insult to injury, the Government intends to make a repayment of €3.1 billion arising from promissory notes in March. It has already been mentioned that €47 billion will be paid in that way by 2031. When the interest that will be paid on this is factored in, it is possible that up to €85 billion will be paid in the years ahead. When the money paid in this way goes into the Central Bank, Professor Patrick Honohan will press the "delete" button on his computer and that will be the end of that. The funds in question could be invested in the Irish economy in a way that would encourage job creation. If they were used as a stimulus, it would benefit everybody and put our people back to work. Just one year's payment arising from these promissory notes would pay for the provision of fibre broadband in nearly every house in the country. It would give every family in the country the ability to develop and grow. It would enable every business in the country to make the best use of the Internet and create jobs.

Every school should encourage students to be the best they can be so that we can build a knowledge economy for the future and look after the safety of everybody.

Instead, the Government will hand it into the Central Bank and watch it disappear and continue to pay through the nose to repay that money. We are facing into austerity forever. The Taoiseach will go to Brussels next week and sign up to a treaty that will put us into permanent austerity, a treaty that will hand over control of the Irish economy to the finance committee of the Bundestag. It is a treaty that will ensure we have to balance our budgets every single year and put us in permanent austerity. Already this year, we will see the devastation of rural schools, the devastation of DEIS schools, the removal of guidance counsellors from our secondary schools. We will see closure of nursing home beds in large numbers across the country, the destruction of our hospital services, including in Letterkenny General Hospital, forcing the most efficient hospital in the country to take further cuts. This is all in the name of paying back bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank, the most corrupt and defunct bank ever in the history of the world. We are doing this because the IMF, the ECB and the so-called troika, are telling us that we have to do so.

Yet, the Government will continue to attack low and middle income earners, forcing them to pay the household charge, septic tank charges and water charges over the coming years. In a few years, people will pay on average €1,300 per year, between water charges and property taxes, all so that the Government can pay back €85 billion over the next 20 years. It is a crying shame. The Government should go to Europe and to the troika and say we will not do this. At the very least, it should invoke the clause to delay the repayment of the promissory notes. However, it will not do this; instead it will continue to try to be the best boys in the class, continue to get the pat on the head from the troika when it visits every three months and forget about the Irish people and force us into permanent austerity and into permanent emigration and oversee the destruction of services. This is a shame on this Government. It should don the green jersey, stand up for the Irish people and not kowtow to the troika and to the defunct Anglo Irish Bank.

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