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

The European Union's austerity doctrine imposed the burden of adjustment to the post-2008 economic collapse on the labour market. It is an indefensible misuse of economics that the eurozone authorities should seek stability on the back of tens of millions of unemployed. This month's eurozone unemployment figures reached yet another record. It is equally indefensible that within an economic epoch categorised by intellectual capital and innovation, youth unemployment should now stand at an average of 25% and more than double that in some of the peripheral countries which are most in need of that intellectual capital and capability.

At this stage in the recessionary cycle there is no sense in what is being done to the economy and what is being planned for forthcoming budgets. After five austerity budgets, this country's deficit has been reduced at a terrible cost and with much further to go. Austerity policies reflect the self-interest of other, larger EU powers and are leading to the impoverishment of a growing number of countries. The only response to this has been a call for more integration or, to put it another way, a greater accrual of power and control to the centre. It is the policies dictated from the centre that are the cause of the problem and which are now subverting the original purpose of the wider European project.

The eurozone authorities were wrong in their myopic fixation on reducing debt and effectively ignoring what is the key to the whole ratio, growing gross domestic product.

It defies common sense that an Irish Government should still feel obligated to defend such policies and attempt to impose two more years of "fiscal consolidation". Talk of "exiting the bailout" is wide of the mark. The burden of "troikanomics", including onerous debt-servicing costs, stretch into a future that is dominated by those who preached the austerity doctrine in the first place. Ireland's growth capacity has been compromised; the best and brightest -- our engineers, architects, doctors, nurses, teachers, entrepreneurs -- have left and the morale of those remaining is being destroyed. This is not "adjustment"; it is tantamount to self-harm. The second reason for a managed exit by Ireland is that these same policies are doing enormous damage to two of the most fundamental pillars of a stable and functioning democratic economy... At the micro-level, in schools and local health provision, they are doing damage that will take years to reverse... Austerity has, however, reinforced German hegemony within the eurozone and there is little evidence of the solidarity that was once at the heart of the European project... There is no longer any appetite for the argument that only further integration will solve this crisis. This is a self-serving argument and finds no resonance among national populations. There is always a danger to democracy when the elite -- the "authorities" -- become semi-detached from the beliefs of the people from whom they get their legitimacy... Those who aspire to national leadership would come out from behind the barricades of "There is no alternative" and would take up again the freedoms and responsibilities of which they are trustees.

These are not my words but those of an established and prominent economist, Professor Ray Kinsella, Professor of Banking and Finance at the Smurfit Post-Graduate Business School of UCD, writing this week in the Irish Examiner. He was arguing for a managed exit from the eurozone but not the EU, effected through a meeting of peripheral countries to plan resistance to the EU central powers. This motion does not go that far. It merely seeks that the option of leaving the eurozone be made available through planned treaty changes and that is a proposal I support.

I am amazed that both Sinn Féin and Fianna Fáil seek to delete this call from the motion. The achievement of such an option would be only the start. The central EU powers should be told that Ireland's bank-related debt must be mutualised across the eurozone in proportion to GDP, otherwise Ireland will unilaterally default and encourage other peripheral countries to do likewise and that Ireland would have to consider exiting the euro irrespective of treaties. Without such a stance there will of course be no re-negotiation, just continued capitulation to the austerity policies of Germany and its allies. Today vulture finance companies are buying half the country for a song and international investors are raping the country like the British landlords of old. Davitt organised a plan of campaign and Connolly set about the re-conquest of Ireland. We are faced with a similar task today but where are the Davitts and the Connollys? Soon we will commemorate the centenary of the 1916 Rising and like Pearse, I am convinced that this generation will rediscover new leaders who will push aside the current ones on their way to the re-conquest of Ireland. I support the motion.

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