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

The Irish Government is the scab of Europe right now. The people of Greece have risen up, finally, and said they have had enough of the madness; that they cannot take any more; that they will not allow suicide rates to go through the roof or child poverty to reach obscene proportions; that they will not allow their public services and state assets to be butchered to pieces or allow prostitution to get out of control; and that they will not allow people to starve because of the insistence of European bankers and financial institutions and their political lackeys that the interests of Europe's financial elite be protected. While I thank Deputy Catherine Murphy for tabling this motion the people to whom we owe real gratitude are the Greek people, the Spanish people who will rise up after the upcoming elections there and the people of this country who have risen up in the past couple of months against not only water charges but about the failed and bankrupt policy of austerity. The people have had it with austerity.

During the press conference on this issue yesterday, Brian Lucey, not a man associated with the radical left, reminded us of a point the Government should consider. He said we need to remember that we are talking about a political economy and not economics as if it is some dry science in respect of which there is a right and wrong answer. One does not even have to quote Marx on this. Adam Smith and David Ricardo understood that economics was about political choices and not only about obeying the rules set down by the troika or the financial elites. The following is an interesting quote from the The Wealth of Nationsby Adam Smith:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

I refer Deputies to The Bankersand The Rise of the European Corporate Elite. We have been told there was no choice. This Government has recycled the nonsense for the past seven years that there was no choice when in fact there was a choice. There was a choice between the millionaires and the millions who have suffered as a result of the choice of this Government to protect the millionaires, the bond holders and the bankers. Finally, people in Europe are rising up. They are sweeping aside a rotten political establishment that has stood by and facilitated this looting of the European economy and the savage injustice that has been inflicted on ordinary people. The Irish Government treacherously scabs on this movement. It stabs in the back not only the citizens of Greece but the citizens of Spain, of this country and all people across Europe. Deprivation is widespread across Europe. The level of deprivation now stands at 16%.

One of the Labour Deputies referred earlier to there being soup kitchens in Greece and said that Ireland is totally different from Greece. There are two soup kitchens in Dún Laoghaire.

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