Clare Daly (Dublin North, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

We should be exiting the programme without a precautionary credit line because we should never have been in the programme in the first place, but that does not mean we are on the verge of a new dawn, that we are regaining our sovereignty, or that the Government's policies are working. The Labour Party in particular would do well to remember the words of its founder when he spoke about how it would not be enough to fly the green flag over Dublin Castle and said that unless we tackled the economic issues at the heart of Ireland, England would still rule us. He said: "She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs." If we replace England with the troika, the story remains much the same. We are conscripted into avoiding excessive deficits forever. We have signed up to everlasting surveillance of our economic affairs through various European treaties. The Minister and his Government have flown the flag for neoliberalism and will continue to do so. There is no regaining of our sovereignty. We do not have it and we will not have it.

We should remind ourselves of what this programme was about, what it achieved and where we are going. At its heart, the IMF bailout was a redistribution of wealth in favour of people who were already wealthy, rewarding them for their mistakes, paying their debts from the public purse, and making the bankers' debt the people's debt. While doing that, it facilitated the standing on its head of the welfare state and all the basic elements of decency that existed previously. It facilitated an acceleration of privatisation and dismantled the welfare state. That agenda of austerity is a political choice. It is a choice that the Government is continuing to make. Its outcome is inequality on a scale we have not seen heretofore. The top 20% of people in this State have an average income that is five times more than that of the lowest 20%, yet the top 10% of householders have an effective rate of taxation of only 25.6%. Many of our multinationals, which we are told give us so much, have an effective taxation rate of only 4% to 6%. The wealthy have not borne the brunt of austerity or the troika bailout. All of the evidence shows that the disproportionate burden of these policies has been put on the shoulders of the most vulnerable in society. Exiting the programme under the Government's policies of neoliberalism will only ensure more of the same.

We are being shackled to years of debt slavery and recession. The Minister has nothing further to offer us in that respect. This decision will leave him somewhat exposed in that he now has nowhere to hide. He is very fond of hiding behind the crimes of his predecessors in Fianna Fáil, and is fond of telling us that it was the troika that made him do things. Now that we are outside the programme, the blame will fall firmly on his shoulders and the Irish electorate will judge him accordingly. There will be nowhere to hide. That is an important lesson, because there are many people who disagree with the Government's agenda. Workers are organising in the ESB to save their pensions, junior doctors are forced to take action, young people are organising around the We're Not Leaving youth campaign, and there is an electorate that is determined to deal with the Government at the next election. These issues will persist because once we are out, the Minister will ensure that neoliberalism prevails. Ordinary people cannot afford to put up with that, so I believe he will be judged accordingly.

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