Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Workers and Unemployed Action Group) | Oireachtas source

The promissory notes were issued in 2010 to cover a flagrant abuse of the emergency liquidity assistance fund, when €31 billion was pumped into two already insolvent institutions, namely, the former Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society. This was an abuse which the ECB approved. The group is also seeking that the EU - through the European Stability Mechanism - restore to the Irish Exchequer the €3.1 billion already destroyed on the basis of those promissory notes, the €20.7 billion taken from the National Pensions Reserve Fund to bail out the banks to which I refer and the remaining €13 billion or so borrowed from the various emergency funds to bail out the Irish banks in general. The first proposal in this regard would ease the long-term bank debt burden and the second would ease the current situation, provide money to be invested in job creation and enable us grow our way out of the recession. I support these proposals and I hope other Members of this House and the Seanad will do likewise.

The Bill before the House has been introduced on the instructions of the troika. It facilitates the implementation of the six pack and the EMS treaty and is part of a plan to hand over detailed control of our economy to the larger European powers. In other words, it is a plan to diminish Irish sovereignty.

When we joined the EU in the 1970s, we were told by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael that it was not a surrender of our sovereignty but a pooling of it. Due to the reckless lending of European banks and the collaboration with same by the wealthy Irish establishment and its political representatives, namely, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Labour Party, total control of Ireland has been handed over to international financiers.

See this speech in context