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

This fiscal treaty is based on dishonesty and stupidity. The dishonesty comes from opinion on the causes of the crisis in the first place, which it is claimed the treaty is trying to address. Any honest assessment of the beginnings of the crisis would indicate that the European Central Bank's interest rate policy of pumping cheap money into the peripheral countries, with a mantra of competition and deregulation of financial markets, were two major causes. This treaty does not address such issues at all and instead the compact is dictated by precisely the ECB and EU authorities who promoted the policies that caused the crisis. It is also being promoted by political parties, such as Labour, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, who told us during the debates on the Lisbon treaty that we should vote for those changes because they would give us jobs and economic stability. It was precisely the policies of the ECB as set out in those treaties and the policies of deregulation of markets, including unrestrained competition in those markets, that led directly to the crisis.

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