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

It is a positive thing that we have had this debate. Deputies on all sides need to take part in good faith in a serious debate about the desperate plight we are in and what we can do to get out of it. Most people find it pretty galling that these troika people come along every three months to tick all the boxes and tell us how well we are doing. If we are honest, we will admit that it grates on us. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the credit the Taoiseach does or does not deserve, it does not really help the morale of the Irish people when German magazines tell us that our Taoiseach is the European of the year or when Time says it thinks we are wonderful. Frankly, the fact that some magazines in a country that is one of the key architects of austerity and of this country's plight want to tell us how well we are doing at a time when ordinary people are suffering does no more than rub the noses of the Irish people in it. If it is up to him, the Taoiseach would be well advised to refuse such an award. If anyone deserves an award, it is the ordinary citizens of this country who are being crushed by austerity.

I do not want to waste much time on what austerity has meant for ordinary people because we are all aware of it. As we try to chart a way out of the crisis, we must start by dealing with the people and the situation they are in. If we do not start with the people and their situation, we are guaranteed to get the issue wrong.

If we start with categories such as debt, deficit and growth - economic categories - rather than starting with where the people are and what they need in order to have a civilised, dignified, decent and sustainable existence, we will get it wrong. Frankly, I believe that is part of the problem. Not just in this country but across the world for the past 25 to 30 years, we have been pursuing a philosophy that does not start with the people and what they need. There has been a doctrine that states that if profits are made, they will trickle down and it will be all right for the rest of us at some point. It has not worked. There is not really an acknowledgement of the fundamental fact that the doctrine that has been pursued almost without exception across the globe has failed catastrophically and we need to rethink. We in this country are suffering particularly badly from the consequences of that, with disastrous levels of unemployment and huge numbers of our young and talented people leaving the country. When I hear people talk about our export success, I think the biggest export out of this country - and it certainly is not a success - is our young, talented and educated people. That is a tragedy. Those are the people who would help us recover, but they are leaving. It is a failure and an indictment of our system. The cuts in public services, which are sometimes euphemistically called reform, mean that disabled people have had to sit out overnight in front of the Dáil in order to retain their personal assistants, suicide is going through the roof and despair in our society is rampant. That is the reality and the starting point of where we are at.

I put it to the Minister and - as it is not just the Irish Government - to the European leaders that the plan has not worked, however well-intentioned it might have been. I do not doubt that most of the people who pursued the strategy that has been pursued honestly believed it might work. It can be summarised as follows: bail out the banks, not particularly because we want to but because we think it is necessary to have functioning private banks in order to get the economy restarted; and pay for that with severe austerity affecting ordinary people, with the idea running behind it that if we cut costs in the economy, we will make ourselves competitive. The thinking was that these two things would lead to renewed lending and investment. We have pursued that strategy for four years and it has absolutely not worked. We have recapitalised the banks to an extraordinary extent and they are still showing no sign of lending. We have cut our costs and the result has been a contraction of our domestic economy. As the same prescription has been applied to the rest of Europe, the European economy is now contracting as well. That is a fact and even the IMF has now had to acknowledge that what it calls in its technocratic language the spillover effect and the multiplier effect have been much worse than expected. I am not saying "I told you so", but we said this two or three years ago, as the Minister of State knows. There should be some acknowledgement that the argument we and others, including Krugman and Stiglitz, made two or three years ago has turned out to be true, as the IMF is now admitting. The next question is, having acknowledged that the multiplier and spillover effects, which we could just call a vicious circle, have been worse than expected, is it or the Government planning to change course? The answer is "No; we are going to continue on the same road".

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