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

That is not what our office told us. I have a schedule which I can show the Acting Chairman and which indicates that I was down to speak at 3.30 p.m. About six or seven speakers did not turn up. I was told that they were on the Government side, which was very unfortunate since we were dealing with the very important issue of personal insolvency.

On this issue the same central points can be made. The Government has continued in the same way in terms of personal indebtedness, how the banks operate and now in the case of these entities, how, in the last analysis, these guys will call the shots. They will decide whether they are going to turf someone out. That is the bottom line and the Government has allowed this to happen and believes it is just inevitable. When is it going to get what is starting to happen in the rest of Europe? The pendulum is swinging against this approach to the problem. It is not because of a charismatic individual by the name of Alex Tsipras in Greece; rather, it is because the people of Greece have had enough. There were 26 general strikes and eventually, after everybody else had let them down, they found an organisation that stated it would stick with them on the madness being inflicted on them. Now it is spreading to Spain and there are even echoes of it in this country in the water movement, which is not just a campaign about water, as the Taoiseach rightly spotted, but about everything. It is about the housing crisis, being battered, having no money, the threat of eviction from one's home, the diktat of the bondholders, the SPVs and the entities in the financial markets. It is a case of saying, "Sorry, could you remember the human beings? Could you remember us and the simple things we need - a secure roof over our heads, a decent wage packet at the end of the week so that we are not the working poor and that, when we go to the hospital, we will not be on a trolley for a week, or on a waiting list for an operation for two years?"

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