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

I would like to repeat a question I asked the Taoiseach earlier. I did not get much of an answer. It has been asked again by other Deputies. Maybe the Minister of State, Deputy Dara Murphy, can enlighten us. Why on earth is the Government not joining Syriza and the people of Greece in supporting the idea of a debt conference? It is absolutely beyond belief. Frankly, it is economic treason, to use a phrase that the former Tánaiste once used in a different context. Next year, we will have to pay €8 billion in interest on a debt that was inflicted on the people of this country because of the activities of bankers, bondholders, developers and the political establishment here. That figure is slightly less than this country's entire education budget. Such moneys could be used to provide a decent social housing programme, reverse the cuts that have been inflicted on the health service and stimulate a real economic and job creation programme in this country. However, the Government has said it is not interested and would prefer to have to fork out this money, thereby starving the public services and inflicting misery and suffering on the people. The effect of what it is doing in the process is to scab on the Greek people's fight for debt relief.

For the first time in a number of years, there exists a real prospect of a united front of the victims of austerity across Europe, particularly in Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, where very soon we will see a similar election result to the one we saw in Greece. The same thing applies to the so-called central countries. I ask Members to believe me when I say that most Germans are not to happy with Angela Merkel's economics and politics. There is a real chance of a revolt against what Dr. Paul Krugman has rightly described as the "fantasy economics" of the troika, which believed the imposition of cruel and vicious austerity would somehow produce economic growth and jobs. It has produced the exact opposite. It has produced Europe-wide stagnation and brought Greece to its knees. Now that we finally have a chance to look in another direction, the Government is saying it is not interested. How can it possibly justify saying that? It beggars belief.

I wish to raise an issue that we will discuss again in the context of the motion on the association agreements. It is beyond belief that the situation in eastern Europe is getting close to terrifying. I refer not only to the serious political and economic crisis in Russia but also to the alarming rise of the far right in a number of places in Europe, including Ukraine. Figures in the far right have been included in the Ukrainian Government. Shock troops have been used to terrorise Jewish people and whip up ethnic divisions in Ukraine. On Holocaust remembrance day, we should be considering where all this stuff led in the 1930s and 1940s. We are seeing alarming echoes of all that happening again. What is the EU doing? It is involved in an expansionist agenda. It is competing with an equally rotten, corrupt, totalitarian and brutal regime in Russia. I do not think anyone who is criticising the policy of the EU and NATO with regard to Ukraine is a supporter of Russia or Mr. Putin, whose regime is rotten.

The point is that two big powers are playing geopolitical games over the heads of the Ukrainian people. Sadly, this is happening against a background in which opinion polls in Ukraine in recent years had consistently shown that sectarian or ethnic differences between Russian speakers and Ukrainians were breaking down. The majority of people in the east and the west of Ukraine actually wanted independence. They were overcoming some of the historic divisions that existed in that country. However, the interference of the EU and NATO on one side and Russia on the other has stirred up a hornet's nest that threatens to worsen the alarming situation in Ukraine and right across eastern Europe. Why are we a party to this? As a neutral country with a credible reputation, Ireland should make it clear that it is standing not with either of these two expansionist powers, but with the self-determination of the Ukrainian people.

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