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

Despite this, the Government proposes to continue with the same austerity. The Taoiseach is living in fantasy land in terms of his speaking about investment in jobs when there are 33,000 fewer jobs than last year in the economy, there is less overall investment than there was a few years ago and ordinary people are being hammered, with their living standards and purchasing power, along with the domestic economy, declining.

Will the Taoiseach now admit what the IMF, the chief architects of this austerity, has admitted, namely, that austerity is not working, that we need an alternative path and that the myth that this level of austerity and growth were compatible, as peddled by the Taoiseach and IMF, is not correct? It is not possible to cut one's way out of a recession. That is official. It is not only the left but the mainstream parties who are saying this now. If this is the case, the Taoiseach needs to stand up and fight rather than meekly submit to the demand that we suffocate under debt and austerity. He needs to say that we will no longer do this because it is killing us, which means as of next year, we will have a primary surplus in this country, with the deficit being all interest on debt. That is the card we must play.

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