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

There is a grand deception at the heart of both the Government's description of the events at the European Council meeting of 1 and 2 March and the Council meeting itself, because the Council meeting is packaged with lots of pious and noble phrases about jobs, growth-friendly consolidation, restoring normal lending, promoting growth and tackling unemployment. One must talk about such matters because they really affect hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland and tens of millions of people across Europe. These are the issues that must be addressed but which absolutely are not being addressed. While one gets such pious phrases to make people think something is being done about those issues that really affect them, the heart of what actually happened at the Council meeting comprised signing up to a treaty that will inflict Greek-style disaster on the rest of Europe. It will spread it across Europe to Ireland and other European countries. A sort of Orwellian doublespeak lies at the heart of what the Government and European leaders are doing, as well as at the heart of the fiscal treaty and all the so-called bailout programmes. While one hears talk of bailout, solidarity, assisting other states and of stability and growth, in fact a brutal austerity attack is being planned on the living standards and public services of working people, young people and the unemployed across Europe.

This attack already has devastated Greece, which has led to hundreds of thousands of people being driven out of their jobs, the slashing of the incomes of workers and the poor by approximately 20%, the making homeless of tens of thousands of people and the robbery by multinationals of the state assets and enterprises of Greece. This has produced an economic collapse of 7% in Greece, with a similar collapse predicted this year. All this is being done simply to protect the bondholders and the banks which turned the European economy into a casino economy. This treaty now proposes to extend the same destructive logic to the rest of Europe, lock it in legally and preclude governments from doing anything other than inflicting such savage austerity on ordinary people.

On the one hand, the treaty states that under no circumstances can one borrow to finance job creation, economic development or growth. As other speakers have noted, from henceforth that will be banned. On the other hand, it is insisted that this country, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and anyone else who has debt problems must borrow to pay off the debts of the bankers and gamblers. It is a classic example of there being one law for the rich and another for the rest of us. The banks and bondholders must be protected, as must the euro, and if that means sacrificing the jobs, living standards and the economic social future of this country and the rest of Europe, then so be it.

I find it extraordinary that at the heart of the statement to emerge from this gathering, the Government somehow has managed to twist it so that a crisis caused by private financial institutions has something to do with public spending and deficits. This is not the reason we are in economic crisis. Spain and Ireland had budget surpluses before the crisis. Having a balanced budget would have made no difference to the question of whether this economy would have plunged into crisis. It was because of the activities of the banks yet it is those banks the Government seeks to protect. It makes ordinary people pay and robs them of the ability to emerge from the economic crisis.

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