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

The crisis measures imposed on the Cypriot people relating to the banking situation on that island show that the words emanating from EU leaders at their summits are utterly redundant. In June 2012, we were promised seismic changes in the way banking and sovereign debt would be dealt with in the EU. Instead, the citizens of Europe have been treated to institutional dishonesty and mendacity by a dissimulating EU leadership.

In the old days, bank robbers wore masks and waved guns around. There was no mistaking their intention. The gang leaders demanded the cash and they fled the scene fearful of capture. In today's European Union, bank robberies are planned in Brussels and Frankfurt. The godfathers united in a gang called the troika send their hitmen and hitwomen in pinstriped suits who stay in luxury hotels at the expense of their intended victims and rob with the threat of a nuclear wipe-out of bank depositors, bank workers and the very economies of the target countries.

In the old days, bank workers, aggrieved depositors and victims of bank robberies, could turn to the law for redress. In today's European Union, the bank robbers are the law. This is the surreal new world of the European Union where the establishment of the EU, Big Brother and, it would seem, the ghost of John Dillinger, have morphed into an economic Frankenstein that terrorises citizens, robs their assets and lays waste their economies.

Once, the European Union establishment used to boast loudly that it was a haven of democracy and solidarity, a beacon of light in our world and an example to be imitated by the savages unlucky enough to be outside its borders. After two weeks in which the Cypriot people - Cyprus is the smallest member state of the EU - have been threatened, terrorised and bullied by the EU, the IMF and the ECB, the moral reputation of this troika lies somewhere south of that of robber barons and economic gang rapists.

That an Irish Government as President of the EU would warmly welcome the first edict relating to Cypriot banks that literally would rob working people and pensioners in Cyprus and literally steal the widow's mite, is a grotesque betrayal of the generosity of the Irish people. We have a Government which is in a position of perpetual prostration in face of the demands of the institution of European capitalism, the IMF, the ECB and the EU bureaucracy itself. As an Irish legislator and socialist, I apologise to the people of Cyprus for the treacherous role of the Irish Government in its collusion with the modern robber barons of the troika as it seeks out a bailout of its diseased financial system.

Aggressive states invariably invent a pretext for an attack on another country; so also with the troika. The slander in this case is that Cyprus is virtually a client state of the Russian mafia. What nauseating hypocrisy. The EU was a key cheerleader for the privatisation of massive assets that belonged to the Russian people when Stalinism collapsed. This meant the pillage of the privatised assets by those who became oligarchs and billionaires.

For 20 years before the international financial crash of 2007, the EU was a key cheerleader and implementing agency for wholesale deregulation and liberalisation in the financial markets, enabling billions to be transferred freely all over the world in search of speculative profits. The people of Cyprus are the victims of these policies. If the financial markets system is sick, dysfunctional, destructive of democracy and exploitative of ordinary people and society - it is all of these - it has become so in the watch and under the legislative provision of the institutions now collectively known as the troika. The troika solution to the diseased system it has created is to burn the civilian population, leaving an economic scorched earth in its wake.

Cyprus is the last straw. It is time the victims turned. It is time that workers and the poor united across borders, from Greece to Ireland, to break this dysfunctional system, take the financial institutions into public ownership and democratic control and plan for people, not for private profit. That is the democratic socialist alternative.

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