Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Yet, yet, yet. We have not heard the voices of the Government. Let us get real here. The people had a decade of platitudes and false dawns, which resulted in what the IMF has called the single largest financial crisis in human history. That is quite an accolade of failure that the previous Government oversaw. This Government has stabilised the economy using the plans of others. It has cut public spending, increased taxes and reduced the gap between taxation and expenditure but this was planned anyway. Our debt mountain is such that not even Hilary and Tenzing would be able to climb it. Household debt is €172 billion and represents 105% of our GDP; non-financial corporate debt is €330 billion or 202% of our GDP; and government debt is €193 billion or 118% of our GDP. This represents a total combined debt of €695 billion or 425% of GDP, the highest in the OECD.

Ireland has a massive insurmountable debt problem that the Minister for Finance tells us is sustainable and that his junior Minister, Deputy Brian Hayes, says should be quietly negotiated behind closed doors. The bonds that the Government was forced to issue by the ECB to repay the debt it had provided to Anglo Irish Bank should be written off. Patrick Honohan should be told to cancel them because they are odious. The taxpayer did not incur these loses and does not owe this debt. We cannot afford this. Writing off this debt from the balance sheet of the ECB would be a dot on the financial ocean that is the eurozone but it would be important to ignite a sustainable economic recovery on this island.

Second, the ESM must be used as a vehicle to recapitalise retroactively the Irish taxpayer for the investments it has put into Bank of Ireland, AIB and Permanent TSB. Again, these investments of billions of euro were largely made with the aim of maintaining stability in the European financial system. We paid our price, and now taxpayers should be given relief for the sacrifice they have made. The Government has fallen completely short on its pre-election promises. I am very conscious of this, as someone who ran for Fine Gael in the last election. Since then, I have been expelled. During that campaign, the Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport, Deputy Varadkar, promised the Irish people with much gusto that "not another cent" would be given to Anglo Irish Bank. Fine Gael subsequently published a banking policy document promising the Irish electorate that, if elected, Fine Gael would unilaterally impose losses on senior bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide if our European partners did not agree. Most famous of all was the great rhetoric from the Tánaiste, who told the Irish people they had two stark choices, "Labour's way of Frankfurt's way." I question how a Minister of State at the Department of Finance who believes we should adopt the same tactics that have failed to get us a bank debt deal is in any way equipped or sufficiently fired up for the Irish people to send him to Europe to get us a deal. We have entered the realms of the twilight zone for the Irish people to even contemplate sending Eamon Ryan, the former Cabinet Minister who sunk Ireland into the economic abyss, out to Europe to negotiate for us a deal on our bank debt. He would be laughed out of the European Parliament trying to convince the larger countries that even though he was the Minister who sealed our fate with the bank guarantee, he was asking them to forgive him his €400 billion mistake and compensate the error.

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