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

That Ireland was a State groaning under the weight of moral strictures but at the rotten heart of the Irish establishment of that era, there was no morality. Likewise, the establishment of the EU is loudly proclaiming today that at the heart of its institutions are the values of solidarity, equality, justice and democracy. This is shameless mendacity when the cold reality reveals that the democratic rights of hundreds of millions of European citizens are subjected and subjugated to a dictatorship of the financial markets and the vindication of rights is reserved first and foremost for the bondholder, the speculator and the vulture capitalist, but 25 million citizens of the EU languish in unemployment while tens of millions more suffer from the savage austerity designed to salvage the market system.

Last June it was loudly proclaimed by the Government that an EU summit had decided to break the link between private banking debt and State debt. That promise is cynically shattered in exactly the opposite process with this deal whereby the Irish State takes all the responsibility, lock, stock and barrel, for toxic private banking debt. Yet, in the face of all this, the leadership of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions led tens of thousands of workers in marches around the country last Saturday. The leadership begged for kindness from this heartless EU financial system while being silent on and actively distracting attention from their allies in the Irish Labour Party who shamefully implement troika austerity and crush the Irish people with these toxic debts.

The most serious movement to be built against the destructive austerity in this State is the campaign against the odious property taxes and other austerity taxes. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women are participating. Yesterday they brought their opposition to many council chambers where Fine Gael and Labour councillors were in hiding, pointing to the need for working people, pensioners and the unemployed, to deploy their people power and the power of workers to withdraw their labour in order to demand not a penny more to the bondholders, an end to crushing austerity, abolition of the hated property tax and the European financial system and that the major financial institutions in public ownership, under democratic control, are run for the well-being of the majority, not the profits of the tiny elite.

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