Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

There are many occasions when the issues we discuss in the Chamber could almost be amusing if they were not so serious. There has been quite a bit of that today, starting with the announcement in some media that the EU Commission is issuing what were described as "much-awaited economic guidelines for member states". I would like to know by whom they are much awaited because I did not notice many people at bus stops, in pubs or walking down Grafton Street saying they could not wait for the EU Commission to issue its new guidelines on how economies should be organised in EU member states. There is a good reason why people in this country are not waiting with bated breath for what the EU Commission might suggest for the economy. It is because for the past five years they have been victims of what the EU Commission has dictated and directed for this economy and that has had utterly disastrous consequences for the economy and for the vast majority of citizens. The EU Commission, along with its friends in the IMF and the ECB were the people who said from the outset when the crisis hit – a crisis they had to a large extent facilitated in the first place – that at all costs bondholders and banks must be protected and ordinary people must bear the cost of an unprecedented economic crisis.

Five years on even they now have to admit that the policy has been a disastrous failure with every single meaningful indicator from the point of view of ordinary citizens showing that the policy has made things far worse, not better. They have certainly succeeded in protecting the banks and the bondholders, but from the point of view of unemployment, we have a crisis that is unprecedented since the 1930s. We have a disastrous situation from the point of view of youth unemployment, the future of the economy and society with a quarter of young people across Europe left to rot and who are not allowed to contribute to society. Finally, our EU masters are forced to admit that we have reached the limits of austerity but its alternative, which we can expect to hear in the “much-awaited guidelines” is for so-called structural reforms which is a euphemism - the EU admits it does not mean more investment in the economy – for privatisation and imposing what it calls greater flexibility on workers, which in other words means sacking workers, cutting their pay and conditions and forcing young people to emigrate. That is what flexibility means. The alternative, which the EU Commission should be discussing, and which was finally discussed at the EU Council, is to get the investment funds that our economy and the European economy needs from those who are holding the money. The people who are holding the money are the corporations which this Government is facilitating in dodging their taxes. That is what we should be doing.

The Government should end its state of denial about Ireland's tax haven status, own up to its guilt in facilitating corporate tax-dodging and demand that multinationals making tens of billions in profits pay their fair share of tax in order that the country has the revenues to invest in employment and economic growth.

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