Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

I thank the United Left Alliance Deputies for tabling this motion and I thank the Deputies who supported it.

There is no doubt in my mind that in the major financial centres of the world, from Wall Street to London and Paris and further afield, there have been celebratory lunches and champagne receptions today organised by the sharks of the financial markets who, courtesy of the Irish Government, have just pocketed €1.25 billion in funds belonging to the Irish people. These are speculators who cannot believe their good fortune that the Irish people have now been put in a position of virtual financial serfdom by their own Government, at the diktat of the European Union and European Central Bank bureaucrats, in order to pay the toxic debts of the European financial system which recklessly lent to Anglo Irish Bank in pursuit of private profit in the crazed property market in this country.

However, while the champagne is flowing freely in the financial capitals today, while the hedge fund gamblers are toasting the capitulation of a spineless Irish Government that has channelled these huge funds into their coffers, our education system is being shorn of its teachers and other crucial supports. Children in disadvantaged areas are faced with a rowback of advances made in education over recent years. Children in rural Ireland are losing teachers in their hundreds, and children in Gaeltacht schools are even more harshly treated. All of this is for want of the very resources that are being transfused from our society into the bloated bellies of the major players of the European and world financial markets. Likewise, our health service and elderly care is being stripped, layer by painful layer.

Labour Party Deputies came to this debate with weasel words, denouncing the United Left Alliance and our motion. What was their rationale for that? It is that the Irish people should give €1.25 billion to the Anglo Irish Bank bondholders in order that we may impress those who wrongly dictated that this money should be paid in the first place, namely, the EU and the ECB, and in order that these masters would deign to allow some relief from the €47 billion in further funds from the same toxic bank that is supposed to be paid again by the Irish people over the next 20 years. Labour Deputies justify throwing €1.25 billion into the snouts of these Anglo Irish Bank speculators, with outstretched hands to the bosses of the ECB and the EU to go easy in the matter of the promissory notes. How far the Labour Party Deputies are from the founders of their party, Connolly and Larkin, and their approach to the financial markets of their day.

The crazed casinos that are the financial markets today arise from a diseased system. It is a capitalist system that is now in acute crisis. Finance capital has become a bloated parasite over the last 30 years as it moves money from productive manufacturing investment into crazed speculation and starving production. The crash and the crisis worldwide is the result.

The answer to this is a financial system that is in public ownership and democratic control, directed towards the well-being of society. Across Europe, hundreds of millions of ordinary people are the victims of this capitalist crisis. The Labour Party is part of a Europe-wide network of parties that call themselves socialists and democrats. Why do they not use that network to have a Europe-wide campaign in opposition to this crazed financial system that is lording it over the working people of Europe at the moment? It is because the Labour Party Deputies have long since bought into the capitalist markets. They have embraced financial capitalism and, therefore, they implement its law. They are, therefore, pathetically inadequate in front of this crisis. When we in the United Left Alliance say, "Don't pay" - I do not use the word "default" because they were never our debts to default on - our alternative is a financial system publicly owned and democratically controlled.

The Irish people must intervene decisively to stop these crazed policies. For three years they have endured this horrific austerity. They voted massively a year ago for change. They have been cheated in that regard. They now have an opportunity. New taxes have been put on top of them - the household tax and the septic tank tax - in order to continue this austerity and bailout. They can now say, "No". The Irish people can now organise a mass boycott of these taxes, which is what they should do and I believe they will do in their hundreds of thousands of households, which means millions of people.

The Government has set 31 March------

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