Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

I am being short-changed here.

Austerity is killing the domestic economies across Europe while, at the same time, big business is on an investment strike. We need a solidarity fund and we need it urgently. I propose an emergency tax of 50% on that mass of uninvested profits which were created by the labour of working people by hand and by brain. That would make trillions of euro available for a major job creation fund. Such funds should be put into major infrastructural projects in EU member states and public works projects creating necessary and useful infrastructure and services that would create millions of jobs. This would, in turn, regenerate and remake the broke economies of the so-called peripheral states but also generally across the European Union.

The European Stability Mechanism, ESM, will not be used in any sense for this purpose or to resolve the acute economic problems of Europe. It will be used simply to preserve the same rotten system that created the crisis while potentially demanding €11 billion from the Irish people and €700 billion from taxpayers across Europe. In a recent headline, the British The Independent stated, "Capitalism at a crossroads" referring to the major global economic crisis. We see the suffering it has brought about in many countries to millions of workers. These millions of workers and ordinary people are rising up against the fruits of that system and the austerity it is imposing. Workers and ordinary people in Ireland should join this to reject this austerity and the ESM bailout of financial markets. Instead, financial institutions should be in public ownership and under democratic control. There should be a socialist economy where resources are used for the benefit of society not for the greed of the same suspects who landed us in this incredible fiasco that society faces.

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