Gerry Adams (Louth, Sinn Fein)

I thought I would share that with the Taoiseach as part of the little foibles of this institution.

As the Taoiseach knows, this crisis is about more than economics, bank bailouts and promissory notes to criminal banks; it is about people. The choices Fine Gael and Labour, like Fianna Fáil before them, are making are putting unbearable pressure on our people.

The evidence is all around us. As we discussed earlier, I heard it last Friday in Mayo from rural dwellers who are at breaking point as a consequence of the Taoiseach's commitment to austerity. It is his policies which are stripping local communities of essential services – schools, guidance counsellors, hospitals, teachers, post offices and Garda stations. The Government is also adding new stealth taxes such as the universal social charge, the household charge, VAT increases, motor tax increases and septic tank charges. Almost 500,000 citizens are unemployed and, by the Government's own estimate, that figure will have changed little by 2015. Small indigenous business, including small farmers, with no real support from the Government or credit from the banks, are going under. Natural resources are given away and now State assets are to be sold off. A whole generation of young people are being forced to leave. This GAA generation is playing our Gaelic games in Brisbane, Birmingham and Baltimore instead of in their own parishes. All of this will worsen if the treaty the Taoiseach signed last week in Brussels is ratified.

The Taoiseach, the Tánaiste and Deputy Micheál Martin - the three "Yes" men of Europe - are asking the citizens to support a treaty that will enshrine the policies of austerity into our Constitution in perpetuity. Deputy Kenny said he wanted to be the Taoiseach who restored economic sovereignty to this State, but this treaty will achieve the opposite. It will seriously undermine what remains of Irish sovereignty by surrendering important fiscal and budgetary matters to unelected and unaccountable EU officials in the European Court of Justice and the European Commission. These institutions will be allowed to impose harsh economic policies on democratically elected Governments and to impose heavy fines where they believe these policies have not been adhered to. The Commission is also given new powers to impose economic partnership programmes on states in breach of its debt and deficit rules. These will be programmes of so-called structural reform similar to those in the current EU-IMF austerity programme, even where a member state is borrowing on ordinary terms from the international bond market.

By placing these rules and enforcement mechanisms in an international treaty and giving it the protection of the Constitution, the Government clearly intends to make these obligations permanent and to straitjacket future Governments and their ability to adopt different strategies. This is unacceptable. Three months ago, the Government stripped €3.8 billion out the economy, which caused real hardship. It is already committed to slashing a further €8.6 billion from the economy in the next three years to meet the troika deficit programme target of 3%. However, the austerity treaty now demands an additional structural deficit rule of 0.5%, which means a further €6 billion in cuts and new taxes will be imposed.

This does not add up. More austerity deepens the recession, increases the deficit and makes economic recovery more difficult.

The citizens of this State simply cannot afford this policy and this treaty. As part of this process the Government also agreed that ratification of the fiscal austerity treaty is necessary to access emergency funding from the European stability mechanism, ESM. The Taoiseach could have tried to stop this linkage but it was his choice and he chose not to. Now he is calling on citizens to vote for the austerity treaty to ensure access to the ESM in the future. The Taoiseach is also saying this is about "whether we wish to participate in the European community, the euro and the eurozone". That is no more than a cynical attempt to bully voters into supporting a bad treaty. It is also an empty threat. We cannot be expelled from the eurozone or the European Union. The Taoiseach knows that. He also knows the European Council will not refuse emergency funding to any eurozone member state in the future, irrespective of its position on the austerity treaty.

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