Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

We are having a week of debate on this topic and, indeed, part of next week's schedule will be allocated to it as well, which appears to be excessive in the extreme. When we consider this week, next week, the week after St. Patrick's Day and the Easter break, and the fact that we have a big legislative programme, one can predict that by next July there will be late sittings and guillotines. That is not the way this Parliament should be run.

This debate is supposed to be about a pivotal moment, taking stock after the troika is gone and what the opportunities will be in the future. This Government will be defined two years hence not by the programme for Government but by the mandate it was given on the basis of the promises made before the general election matched against the outcome at the end of its term of office. Citizens put their faith in the ability of the new Government to achieve a debt write down; it was Frankfurt's way or the way of the Labour Party. It was tough talk and the expectation was that it would be followed by tough action. We were told that not a cent more would go to Anglo Irish Bank and that was expected to mean that the bondholders would not be paid. The relief we got was welcome but the extent of it was really crumbs from the table in terms of interest relief.

We are taking stock against the backdrop of a huge debt. This year, we will spend €8.54 billion servicing our national debt. That is just slightly less than the €8.8 billion education budget for first, second and third level education. Children born after the bank guarantee have already started primary school. They are in larger class sizes with reduced resources, which will impact on their educational outcomes. It will have an even greater impact on children with special needs. The cuts impact at several levels. The high-profile signing of the pledge not to impose third level fees was not worth the ink with which it was written. This is part of the reason people have lost faith in politicians and political parties.

There is a cost of €8.54 billion for servicing the debt, but most of it is not our debt but was imposed on us. I accept that much of it is legacy debt that this Government inherited. However, it is rising at the rate of €1,000 per second. If I speak for ten minutes, the debt will have increased by €600,000, and I know what the Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, could do in a flash with that amount of money. By 2016, the annual cost of servicing the debt will have risen to €9.1 billion. The debt is curbing the possibility of this country recovering. It is the elephant in the room which must be discussed if we are to discuss recovery. Our current debt is approximately €205 billion, of which 20% went straight to the banks. However, the banks are still not lending to the small and medium businesses that will be at the heart of job creation. The deal struck a year ago on the legacy Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, IBRC, promissory note knocked approximately €1 billion from that sum and while that is important, it is definitely not a game changer. I have drawn on Sinead Pentony's excellent article on debt domination in February's edition of "Village" magazine for updated figures.

The last main recessionary periods in Ireland in the 1980s and 1950s had the same patterns as the current recession - large scale emigration, widespread unemployment, high levels of taxation and cutbacks in vital services. We see those cutbacks in all walks of life. Whenever we discuss something in the House, that is the dominant issue. We are highly dependent on the European Union and the most powerful countries within the Union to achieve a sustainable recovery. I agree with the influential German sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas who said in a major paper last year:

If one wants to preserve the Monetary Union, it is no longer enough, given the structural imbalances between the national economies, to provide loans to over-indebted states so that each should improve its competitiveness by its own efforts. What is required is solidarity instead, a cooperative effort from a shared political perspective to promote growth and competitiveness in the euro zone as whole. Such on effort would require Germany and several other countries to accept short- and medium-term negative redistribution effects in its own longer-term self-interest - a classic example of solidarity ....

He went on to state, "The actual course of the crisis management is pushed and implemented in the first place by the large camp of pragmatic politicians who pursue an incremental agenda but lack a comprehensive perspective ... They are oriented towards More Europe because they want to avoid the far more dramatic and presumably costly alternative of abandoning the euro." He has also stated the German Government insists on priority being accorded to stabilising the budgets of individual states by national administrations, mainly at the expense of their social security systems, public services and collective good. We are pitting people against each other, almost blaming them for their predicament. We have become familiar with initiatives aimed at the unemployed. In the most recent budget there was a reduction in the rate for those under the age of 25 years; it was more or less positioned to suggest it was good for them and would get them off their couches and away from their big plasma screen televisions and out to work, as if their unemployment was of their own making. It is very dangerous to start blaming people in society for something in which they had no hand, act or part in causing. It is very destructive of society to go this way.

The big issue of mortgage arrears has not been grappled with in any serious way. The can kicked down the road is now in the ditch for many. We have run out of road and the people concerned are at the end game. I am sure every Deputy has met very stressed individuals beholden to organisations such as the Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation and New Beginning. We see families presenting as homeless. This is in the bailiwick of the Minister of State, Deputy Jan O'Sullivan, and I will keep raising the issue. Families are presenting as homeless or at risk of homelessness in increasing numbers. On Monday the homeless officer in Kildare County Council saw 16 families. I know this because I rang to make an appointment for others and could not do so. They are generally families with children. On Monday I spoke to a woman with five children and she and her husband are at their wits' end. They have been renting for nine years in the one location and on the local authority list all that time. Their children are settled in school. The Government has done good work in protecting children, but I see them becoming the new vulnerable. They are worried about their parents because they are in an absolute panic. Some of them have been searching for houses for three or four months. This happens every day of the week in my constituency and we must deal with this because it is a crisis. I do not know how to resolve it in the short term, other than through long leases or purchasing houses. It is self-evident that we cannot have ever-increasing rents. We are putting children and their families in a very vulnerable position and displacing those who traditionally have used homeless shelters. More and more people are on the street because they are being displaced in the shelters by others who should not have become homeless.

Nobody should be homeless and we need a plan of action. One reason for homelessness is that people cannot afford their rent. I have met people who work and who are unemployed and who cannot afford their rent. Some of this is for the good reason that recovery is taking place in some locations and I absolutely acknowledge that people in my area are gaining employment, but there is a downside in that those who are not gaining are suffering from a negative effect. It must be managed and seen as a crisis. In my area a family which is moved will be lucky to find a school place and the situation becomes impossible. It is also difficult for people to find work in such an environment as they spend the day traipsing between one school and another to collect their children. There is a serious crisis and I hope it will be acknowledged that we almost need a War Cabinet to deal with it in some locations. I cannot stress this point more strongly.

To date, the word "reform" with regard to public services has really been a code for cuts. Some services are at breaking point. I have no doubt there was room to tighten up and cut down on waste, but there is a point when one moves beyond this and it becomes counter-productive. We are very much at that point in some services. We have class sizes of between 32 and 35 children, including classes of tiny tots. In such cases teachers began to speak about crowd control. If education is to be one of the cornerstones of the future, we cannot be short-sighted. It all comes down not to what we can achieve ourselves but the extent of the debt which inhibits our ability to deal with very important social services. We signed up to the charter of fundamental rights under the Lisbon treaty, but we have very much become subservient to paying back bondholders and the ECB and being good Europeans. There is a point when the citizen of the country must come first, not second. That is my concern.

Our debt is 120% of GDP. If we use the more realistic GNP figure, it is 145%, which in anybody's terms is unsustainable. The noises we hear from the ECB and others contain very little about retrospective recapitalisation of the banks. Our debt does not seem to feature as an issue for debate in the half-term review or the remaining time the Government will be in office. A comparable situation is that in post-war Europe. Much is said about hyper-inflation in Germany. This happened before the Second World War because of the debt that arose after the First World War. Germany would not be the powerhouse it is today were it not for the generosity of the United States, France and Britain and their absolute act of solidarity. Half of its debt was written off and the remaining debt was scheduled to be repaid over a much longer period. This was a remarkable act of solidarity, given what had happened and the casualties the countries in question had endured. Just as we put job creation as a central feature for the future, we must put the debt issue and its resolution centre stage. The European Commission, the ECB and others can state Ireland is fine, but it is not fine and we will not be until we get to grips with this major debt. We will not be able to deliver the education system, housing, health care or incomes required.

I refer to the level of net income at which there would be opportunities to reduce taxation while at the same time providing a decent level of public services. I believe that if there is to be a real and sustainable recovery, it will depend greatly on how matters are run here but it is most certainly positioned elsewhere. It is positioned where that debt resides and this must be dealt with as an absolute priority each and every day, as our opportunities will be greatly limited unless this issue is dealt with in a comprehensive manner.

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