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

I am totally opposed to the Central Bank Bill 2014 which proposes to compel the sale of €1 billion in mortgages and €1 billion in matching mortgages of ICS Building Society. The Minister of State said the Bill would support new entities in entering the Irish market and increase competition to ultimately benefit the consumer. That is palpably a false premise on which to base the substantial banking measure proposed in the Bill.

The boot prints of the European Commission and the European Central Bank are all over this proposal. They are dictating it to the Government which has fallen to its knees in front of these European agencies, as usual. The Commission and the ECB are the very agencies which insisted that the private bad gambling debts of the speculators, the developers, the bankers and the bond holders in the Irish property bubble be paid for by bleeding the people dry in the six year austerity programme through which we have come. Why should we believe or accept anything these agencies say, given their record of compelling the people to take on their shoulders the debts of the sharks in the European financial markets who recklessly gambled in the Irish property bubble as they chased super profits? The people had nothing to do with these actions. The Commission and the ECB protect, first and foremost, the interests of the sharks in the financial markets, the major financial institutions and the bond holders, not the interests of the Irish people, the Greek people or working class people anywhere in Europe.

What did so-called competition between banks and mortgage providers do for the people between 2000 and 2008? They piled in here to blow even bigger the property bubble that was developing and outdid each other, not in the interests of consumers or ordinary people but in gouging as much as they could from unfortunate young working people in the main who needed to put a roof over their heads and were made by these gougers, with the developers and other speculators, to pay exorbitant amounts of money for the basic human right to a home and condemned to unsustainable mortgages. Unlike their parents who had repaid their mortgages over 20 years, they took out mortgages of 40 years duration.

That is the record of the entities the Government now seeks to bring here in the interests of the consumer. Who is it fooling? These entities blew the bubble sky high until it shattered, with disastrous consequences for the people. The sharks then got the European Union and the ECB to force two Governments - Fianna Fáil and the Green Party in the first and Fine Gael and the Labour Party in the second - to fall flat on their faces in front of the laws of the financial markets to defend the sharks' interests and bail them out from the crashed casino of the Irish property market.

Therefore, I am totally opposed to this proposal and to the sale of one sixth of the mortgage book of ICS. These unfortunate mortgage holders, perhaps 6,000, 7,000 or 8,000, could end up in the hands of vulture capitalists from anywhere in the world, exactly as has happened to the unfortunate mortgage holders with Irish Nationwide, who found themselves parcelled and sold off a few weeks ago by the IBRC to American vulture capitalists. The latter are now in the hands of international speculators. They stood outside the Dáil to beg the Government to give them an opportunity to buy back their mortgages at the discounted rate that was being offered to the speculators, but the Government refused, because that was also in the interests of the sharks in the financial markets.

The capitalist financial system is a diseased system from start to finish, run in the interests of super profits and of tiny elites in the financial markets who are unelected, unaccountable and invisible to ordinary people. Now we are told that a further inoculation of the bacteria causing that disease will somehow cure it. What incredible logic. I stand instead for complete public ownership of the financial system in this country and in Europe under the democratic control and management of ordinary people so that these institutions are utilised entirely for the benefit of society to build the homes that our people so desperately need at present, to give investment to small enterprises and the self-employed, to create the jobs and reboot the economy destroyed by austerity, and, in general, to work for the benefit of society. That is what would be in the interests of our people.

The second part of this Bill deals with provisions pertaining to the European Stability Mechanism with regard to loans to Greece. No Irish socialist could support anything that supports the architecture of the bank bailout and, in particular, the bailout that was forced on the Greek people but has enslaved them for the past five years. The Minister of State had the audacity to state that "Greece and the other euro area member states agree that it is only through the full and strict implementation of the fiscal consolidation" - that is, austerity - that Greece will be able to recover. The Minister of State went on to make further statements with regard to how matters are going well in Greece.

I will bring an air of reality to the Dáil. The EU and the ECB, with the complicity of the Irish Government, have condemned the Greek people to a never-ending Gethsemane of suffering through the economic policies that have been forced on them. The Greek people have been forced for five years to sweat their lifeblood in order to satisfy the sharks in the financial markets and, like the Irish people, forced to salvage the big players in those markets. The catastrophic austerity agenda of savage cuts in Greek public services, wages and incomes has ground the Greek economy into the dust. There is a humanitarian crisis of horrific proportions. Workers have lost 50% of their purchasing power since 2009. Unemployment is at 28%. Youth unemployment is at 61%. A full 50% of hospital beds have been closed down under the austerity programme. Children are coming to school malnourished. That is the reality of EU policy in Greece. This horror has created conditions in which even the fascist right are garnering a foothold.

As in Ireland, these are not solutions. As in Ireland, the only solution is a socialist transformation of the economy of Greece in the interests of the Greek people. I urge the Greek working people, who, joined with the Irish, the Italians, the Portuguese and the Spanish, all are victims of this system, to overthrow this rotten system and put in its place a system that is run in the interests of society and of humanity. That is the alternative to the Government's Bill.

See this speech in context