John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

This motion refers to the founding principles and values of the European Union. Above all else, the Union was founded on the values of respect for human dignity, liberty, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. When in Europe last week at a meeting of the Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, it struck me, as I listened to the cases being discussed, that there is a huge moral dilemma surrounding the way the Irish people were abandoned to bear the entire cost of this unjust financial burden. The knock-on effect of this has been a series of human rights injustices that would not be out of place at a Council of Europe hearing. I will give one example of this. At a Women and Economic Inequality seminar in Dublin last week, front line workers painted a stark and deeply disturbing picture of the awful and shameful deprivation that women in this country are experiencing. Among the speakers at the conference were representatives of the National Women's Council of Ireland, Oxfam, the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission and the European Women's Lobby who noted that lone parents in particular were living in poverty and going hungry so that they could feed their children, that households with one adult and children are burdened by more debt than all other types of households, that low pay is endemic for women in the hospitality, cleaning and retail sectors and that more women are being pushed into insecurity.

They described how some desperate women are now forced to turn to prostitution to pay their household bills. Front-line workers in all these organisations noted that in the 1980s and 1990s the majority of prostitutes would have been drug addicts trying to feed their habit, whereas now educated women are resorting to it out of dire economic need. I am also aware of several cases where struggling women who took out short-term loans with illegal moneylenders have been forced into prostitution to repay spiralling interest rates on their loans. If that does not constitute a human rights injustice, I do not know what does.

The debt burden taken on during the financial crisis will pass to the next generations at the expense of investment in areas such as infrastructure, education and health. There is a strong moral and economic case for the Government to fund an ambitious programme of public investment focused on areas such as infrastructure, social housing, education, especially in early years, as well as employment services and supports. This will hardly happen with the debts we must pay back over the next 20 years, however. More urgently, there is the right to live a life of dignity and freedom from poverty, a right now denied to one in ten children in direct contravention of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

If we are to recapture the founding principles of the European Union, as this excellent motion proposes, we need a full human rights analysis of the financial crisis in Ireland. Such an analysis should be central to any European debt conference, as has been said by those in front-line services dealing with the 700,000 people in poverty, 250,000 of who are children. This is all because of what the banks and the developers have done to this country and we did not even attempt to seek a write-down of our debt.

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