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

The rotating Presidency is designed to give a semblance of democracy to the European Union. The reality, however, is that the Irish Government is a puppet on the string of the European Union's establishment, which represents primarily high finance and big business. Could anybody doubt that after seeing the President of the European Central Bank last Thursday morning when questioned about the legacy of Anglo Irish Bank's toxic debts? Mr. Draghi remarked that his board had "noted the Irish operation", with all the ill-concealed contempt that a Mafioso boss might display towards some troublesome villagers in his fiefdom. Mr. Draghi was vice chairman and managing director of Goldman Sachs International, the vampire squid bank which reaped obscene profits from a ten-year frenzy of speculation on the world's money markets and then with supreme cynicism bet against the crash and made a fortune on the crash as well, as the inevitable bubble burst. The European political and financial establishment rewarded this anti-social speculation by drafting the Goldman Sachs executive to the top position in European banking, just as President Bush did with his colleagues in the United States. We are supposed to believe that the ECB rules for the benefit of the majority of the ordinary people of Europe, yet two Irish Governments, made up of Fianna Fáil and the hapless Green Party, and now Fine Gael and the Labour Party, have humiliated themselves in obeying the diktats of this institution's bureaucracy and imposed savage austerity on the Irish people on its instruction. The Government has supported a cut in real terms to the 2014-2020 budget of the EU at exactly the time that more public investment is needed to address in particular the scandal of 26 million unemployed. Scandalously, some of that budget goes to the armaments industry for research into weapons of mass destruction. McKinsey Global Institute, in a report of December 2012, points out how EU private investment has collapsed catastrophically and is now 15% below 2007 levels. The international financial press reported at the same time that €3 trillion in profits accumulated by EU big business lies uninvested in bank accounts. The motor force of capitalist development was previously that it developed the productive forces of humanity. Now they stagnate, yet that is where the Government looks for a solution to the catastrophe.

Against this diseased system and its failure, working people and the unemployed all over Europe need a fundamental democratic and socialist alternative. The dictatorship of the financial markets, which brings unending misery, has to be broken. Banks in high finance should be brought into public ownership but under genuine democratic control; similarly, major industries. With democratic planning for the needs of the majority of European citizens it would be possible to bring resources together with the workers of Europe engaging the unemployed, particularly the youth unemployed. It would be possible on that basis to create a Europe with jobs for all, dignity for all, a decent life and reasonable comfort for every citizen while protecting the environment. That is the alternative to the catastrophic failure of the financial market system and the diseased failure of European capitalism at present. Working-class people all over Europe and in this country really need to mobilise behind these radical alternatives because there is no solution on the basis of the present system.

See this speech in context