Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

The European Stability Mechanism Bill 2012 is entitled a Bill to facilitate in the public interest the establishment of a so-called stability mechanism. This is a false claim. The European Stability Mechanism, ESM, is not being set up in the public interest, that is, the interest of the majority of ordinary citizens in the EU's member states. Rather, it is being set up primarily in the interests of the sharks who dominate the financial markets throughout the EU, the major investment banks, the hedge fund operators and the assorted speculators who operate within the financial markets. This fund is to underwrite their speculative loans on the backs of European taxpayers. The players in the financial markets - the speculators - gain from the fund's establishment in every way. Their loans, many of which they provided speculatively, are to be guaranteed by taxpayers, yet the funds that may be used to bail them out in the event of difficulties will be borrowed from the same markets, with governments guaranteeing those funds on the backs of taxpayers who will be bled to meet repayments.

In reflecting on this situation, all I could think of was the great song made well-known by Christy Moore, entitled "Ordinary Man". In the words of a worker referring to the boss who let him go, "the captains of industry won't let him lose ... he'll never lose" and "Well it seems to me to be such a cruel irony, he's richer now than he ever was before". This is exactly the case in that the hedge fund operators and major banks whose speculation and wild gambling in property markets and other ventures around the globe brought the world to the financial ruin that emerged three or four years ago are all now back at the same activity - speculating, profiteering and paying massive bonuses to their top echelons.

In no sense is the ESM a solidarity fund. It is a fund to underwrite the casino capitalist activities of the banks and bondholders, the same casino capitalism that created the economic and financial crisis from which many ordinary people across Europe are grievously suffering. It is the same system, driven by lust for super profits, that drove speculation in the US and Europe, was facilitated by the rating agencies, which set themselves up as arbiters of best practice in the financial affairs of nation states, and was legislated for by governments across the world. The ESM is designed by the markets for themselves and their interests.

The largest party in the European Parliament is the European People's Party, EPP, of which Fine Gael is a component and of which Chancellor Merkel of Germany is a prominent member. Europe's major political parties act as agents for the big players in the financial markets. This has been clear for the past four years. The troika, which represents the combined forces of the EU, the European Central Bank, ECB, and the International Monetary Fund, IMF, also acts as an agent. When the troika arrived in this country in November 2010, it did not do so with the interests of the Irish people at heart. Rather, it did so to salvage the EU's financial institutions and to save them from the consequences of the reckless gambling and speculation in which they indulged during the Irish property boom. Despite all of that, a Fine Gael-Labour Government, supported by Fianna Fáil, is backing the setting up of a fund that will only play the role of a bailout mechanism for the major players in the financial markets.

Ireland and Europe need a solidarity fund for the benefit of the ordinary people, the working class people and the poor. Across the EU, a shameful number of people, some 25 million, are unemployed. In the eurozone itself, approximately 17 million people are unemployed. Youth unemployment in countries like Spain is at crisis level of more than 50%. At the same time, across Europe and the eurozone, big business and the major banks refuse to invest, to bring together and make available the productive forces that could have the unemployed back to work, creating wealth, goods and services and generating taxes to protect and develop public services.

In March, The Wall Street Journal carried an article that makes illuminating reading. It pointed out that the ratio of investment to gross domestic product in Europe is now at a 60 year low while, at the same time, major corporations in the eurozone are hoarding but not investing record amounts of profits to the tune of €2 trillion. In the United Kingdom, they are sitting on £750 billion. Last autumn the European Central Bank, ECB, made €1 trillion available to European banks at miniscule interest rates. Did the banks lend these funds to society, small enterprises, the self-employed, etc, to underwrite the creation of millions of jobs? No, they either lodged it back with the ECB or bought up sovereign bonds. In other words, they put it into the safest option possible to make a profit with no downstream benefit for the majority in society.

Austerity is killing the domestic economics across Europe while at the same time big business-----

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