Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The jobs matter a lot. I do not think it is a good idea for the future of employment in this country or for a sustainable economy for us to become hostage to these people, which is what we have become. At the moment the world is claiming that these corporate entities that are avoiding tax - the big multinationals, the wealthiest corporations in the history of the world - are doing everything they possibly can to pay little or no tax. Everyone says we should do something about this. Then everyone says it is very difficult for us to do anything on our own, that we cannot do anything about it because it is an international problem. What does it mean that we cannot do anything on our own? It means we are hostages to them. We cannot do the right thing because we are afraid of them. We are afraid of them because we have allowed ourselves essentially to become hostage to them and to become prisoners of their money. That is not a very good idea.

First, it is grossly unfair. Second, it greatly disadvantages domestic industry, real industry, the small and medium-sized enterprises, which are the big employers and could develop a sustainable economy that would not be vulnerable to massive shocks of the sort we have seen in recent years. That is what we need to build up. That is the strength that will get us through the casino ups and downs of the global markets. Instead we have a Government policy that is disproportionately and overwhelmingly geared towards making Ireland an attractive option for the very forces that have created such instability and crisis in the European and global economy.

It is crazy from every point of view, from a moral point of view and from an economic point of view. I accept it is possible to get temporary ups from it. Capitalism is a system of booms and slumps. The problem is the Government is cheering on the boom and when the slump comes, everyone is asking what the hell happened. It might just look like ups and downs on a graph, but real lives are being destroyed by it. This stuff represents the economics of the lemming. We should move away from the economics of the lemming before we charge over the cliff once again.

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