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

Our deficit is now debt interest because we now have a primary surplus. We have achieved this surplus because of a cruel and unjust six years of austerity. Given this surplus has been achieved through the suffering of the people, we now have an unanswerable moral case to tell the EU it should either give us a good deal and some retrospective justice for what has been done to us, or we will not pay the interest, because it is interest to cover the deficit. It is not interest to cover day to day spending, but interest to cover a deficit made up of debt interest. I believe we should do that, but the Minister has not given any indication he will do it. Therefore, this amendment is justified. It proposes that we demand this.

Think of the worst case scenario. We do not get any recapitalisation, but we end up on the hook when other people's banks go bang. We have a potential liability of €11 billion and that amount can be varied upwards. If there was a serious crash in one of the big or moderate sized economies of Europe we, although beggared by the consequences of the crisis that happened here without any relief from Europe, could end up paying off debt for other people's economic problems. That is not an impossible scenario.

I do not accept that this is just about €1 billion, that just €1 billion of the deficit relates to the bank bailout. Our debt was 25% debt to GDP in 2007 before the crash, approximately €40 billion. Almost overnight, it ballooned to more than 100% debt to GDP and is now up to approximately 200%. This was all the consequence of the banking collapse, but then washed out into the rest of the economy and affected employment and so on. Europe has a responsibility for all of that, not just for the amount that went directly into the banks.

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