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

During Leaders' Questions on Tuesday last, I suggested to the Taoiseach that the Government was engaged in an elaborate charade designed to draw the media and the public into a heightened sense of anticipation and anxiety on whether the Government was going to get a deal on the promissory note. The carry-on that has been going on in this House tonight makes this absolutely clear. Questions on whether the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, will come into the Chamber to make a statement or whether there will be a big announcement or a deal are almost up there with the Tánaiste in Chile talking about governments collapsing. They make clear this is precisely what is going on, namely, an elaborate charade or the politics of illusion. It is an attempt to sell a puff of smoke as some sort of great victory which the Government will announce and will claim to be a great stride forward for the country. However, as the Government has stated very clearly for the past year and a half when pressed on the issue, the deal it seeks involves paying every cent of the gambling debts of Anglo Irish Bank. This is the reality and this is the deal the Government intends to announce. One should be clear about what that means. However it might be structured, each cent and euro that we pay back on the gambling debts of Anglo Irish Bank is a cent or euro that is not going into public services, infrastructure or job creation. The Government simply cannot wriggle its way out of that fact.

My point is we should not do that. We should not pay back gambling debts that are not ours, our children's or our grandchildren's, as they will be if the Government does the deal it proposes Instead, this money should go into jobs and public services and into alleviating the misery that is being inflicted on ordinary citizens in this country. The Government claims that were we to do this, there would be catastrophe because of the reaction of the markets. Even Patrick Honohan, when speaking at the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform last week, admitted the claim that money would not come out of the ATMs was nonsense. He made that point, not the members. This is a scare tactic on the part of the Government. The reality is that if we did not pay the €9.1 billion in interest next year - not just the €3.1 billion for the promissory note - we would be left with a manageable deficit of €6 billion. We could manage that by imposing taxes on wealth, on the corporations and on higher income earners and by using that money to generate growth and employment, which is the only way we can recover. One cannot recover by saddling this country with billions of euro in debts for 40 years. It is not a victory; it is a puff of smoke and I hope the public see through it.

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