Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Budget 2013 constitutes a savage new twist to the pernicious austerity agenda relentlessly pursued so far by the Fine Gael and Labour Party coalition Government, but at huge cost to ordinary people and to society. It is all simply to rescue the European financial market system together with Irish bankers and speculators from their reckless super profit-seeking gambles in the Irish property bubble. Budget 2013 means that virtually every ordinary family will be hammered for at least €1,000 next year. The mantra from the Government that the budget is "tough, but fair" reeks of the most acute cynicism. It put intolerable new burdens and acute suffering onto low and middle-income workers, and social welfare recipients. However, because it imposed a few minor demands on very high-income earners, it supposedly makes it all right. It beats the living standards of working class people to a pulp and because it throws a few perfunctory shapes in the direction of the wealthy it is supposed to make the assault fair and justifiable. What cynicism. This is the logic of a government which lives in a bubble, which is being dictated to by a troika representing the interest, not of the people of Europe, but of European finance capitalism. It is a government whose moral compass is driven by the immorality that informs the European capitalist financial markets and driven by the influences of those who created first the massive orgy of speculation, liberalisation and deregulation on the world financial markets and then crashed the system at huge cost to poor and working class people throughout the world.

Budget 2013 represents a grotesque betrayal by the Labour Party in particular of working class people to whom it made utterly cynical false promises to protect them from what it termed "Fine Gael excess". Do Labour Party Deputies remember this advertisement, published in their name in every national newspaper during the general election campaign which stated, "Look what Fine Gael have in store for you!"

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