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

The Irish people are being taken for a nation of idiots. This Fine Gael-Labour Government and its predecessor piled tens of billions of euro onto their shoulders. The private property speculation debts of bankers and bondholders is to be paid for by savage austerity, cuts in public services and a gouging from working people of new taxes on their homes and on water. Irish Water-Uisce Éireann has been established on the diktat of the troika, representing the sharks in the financial markets in Europe for the purpose of extorting another bondholder's tax from the working class and to make water a market commodity in preparation for privatisation and future sale to European multinational water companies.

We recently learned that consultants have already made a massive killing on the privatisation programme, with €50 million being funnelled into their insatiable bellies from the home taxes on ordinary taxpayers and for what purpose but to advise on how these same taxpayers can be extorted for even more austerity. This is, in my view, the economic equivalent of the Chinese barbarity that forces a condemned man to pay for the bullet that blows his brains out. Who purports to be outraged at all of this? Fianna Fáil, the political party that first capitulated to the troika and set this fiasco in train. The media then cheerleads for austerity. These people really do take our people for fools.

When attempts were made in the 1990s to introduce water charges in Dublin a massive boycott by ordinary people, mobilisation and political pressure forced their abandonment. People should repeat that campaign when charges are introduced in 2015, thereby bringing down this tax, austerity and, hopefully, the Government and parties responsible for it.

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