Derek Nolan (Galway West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will never forget the election of 2011 or the horror and despair at the state of our economy I encountered while canvassing in Galway city. I recall calling to a house in Renmore and meeting a woman in her 50s who was in tears because all of her savings had been wiped out. Her livelihood and retirement prospects had been completely undermined and she could see no way forward. That was the experience for many people around the country in a context of humiliation at the arrival of the IMF in the midst of sky-rocketing unemployment. These problems did not emerge as a result of banking debt; they were caused by the collapse of a false economy that existed in this country for a number of years. We had a housing bubble that took with it livelihoods, jobs, mortgages and hopes and dreams of a generation of Irish people when it burst. We are still trying to pick up the pieces from that collapse. As so many people lost their jobs and required help social expenditure exploded. We had to pay more to provide medical cards, social welfare and supports for people to go to college. We did our best to maintain the welfare state but even as expenditure increased dramatically our income collapsed because people were not working and paying taxes, and because the revenue to the Exchequer from the bubble dried up. While 20% of our debt relates to the banks, 80% is because we had to borrow to fill the gap between what we were taking in and what we were doing to maintain a decent standard of living for our people.

What we have done to make our debt sustainable has been remarkable. People said we would be unable to reduce the interest rates but we managed to get them decreased from 6% to 3%. Others said we would not be able to renegotiate anything with the troika but we extended the maturities, got rid of promissory notes and changed the repayment methods to make our debt more affordable.

I welcome the election of Syriza in Greece and wish it the best of luck. It has great potential to bolster the cause in Europe for the growth model, which is being pushed by countries like Ireland, France and Italy. However, the champions of its victory in Ireland, including Sinn Féin, are trying to portray it as something it is not. Sinn Féin advocates default but Syriza has gone to the pin of its collar to say Greece is not going to default unilaterally. Already the split has occurred between the two camps. Sinn Féin supported the bank guarantee in 2008 but just last week it denied that it happened.

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