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

In a peculiar way, we are going to achieve the unity of this island that we have long strived for. It will not be a unity achieved in prosperity; it will be a unity achieved by making ordinary working people North and South the victims of the austerity agenda. Is it not the case that the Stormont House Agreement which the Taoiseach, the Tory Government and now, sadly, Sinn Féin are championing is the Northern Ireland version of the troika's austerity programme inflicted on working people and the poor down here over the last six years?

Anyone, including the Taoiseach and Deputy Gerry Adams, who looks at the language of the agreement must be struck by the incredible similarity to that of the troika programme inflicted on the people of this country. It is full of all the same euphemisms such as this: "Public Sector Reform and Restructuring which will encompass a wide range of strategies, including measures to address structural differences in relation to the cost of managing a divided society, reduce pay bill costs, such as a reduction in the size of the NICS and the wider public sector". Those are lovely euphemisms and the same sort of language we had in the troika programme. They translate in reality and on the ground into pay cuts, jobs losses, fewer job opportunities for young graduates in the North and a massive hit for the domestic Northern Ireland economy which, contrary to what Deputy Adams said, is directly comparable proportionately with the axe that was taken to the public sector down here. Does the Taoiseach agree? In a region with a population of 2 million, 20,000 jobs are to go whereas with a population of just a bit over 4 million, we lost 45,000 jobs from the public sector. Does the Taoiseach acknowledge that the same level of axing is going to be unleashed in the Northern Ireland Civil Service and public sector as we saw down here with the same devastating consequences in terms of a lack of job opportunities and negative knock-on effects in the Northern Ireland domestic economy?

The following phrase is in the agreement: "Executive Departments should also consider how to best realise the value of their capital assets through reform or restructuring to realise income and longer term savings". Is not that just another euphemism for the sale of state assets, be it Ulsterbus, Northern Ireland Railways, the Belfast Harbour estate, forests, office buildings or the Northern Ireland Housing Executive's 80,000 housing units? All of these assets are potentially going to come under the hammer of privatisation in the same way we saw them come under the hammer of the troika agreement. The defence that all of this is not so bad because redundancies under the Stormont House Agreement will be voluntary is ridiculous. All of the redundancies in the public sector down here were described as "voluntary". There were no compulsory redundancies in the South, yet the public sector was slashed to the point that in many cases public services are falling apart. The same axe is now to be taken to the public service in the North.

The only upside to all this is that there is the possibility that the Border may be overcome in an unexpected way. On 13 March, we will have a massive mobilisation of the Northern Ireland trade union, labour and working class movement against the austerity programme and a week later we will have a massive demonstration in Dublin against water charges and austerity. Are we not achieving unity? It is the unity of the political establishment, North and South, to impose vicious austerity and the unity from below of working people North and South standing together against a political establishment that wishes to sacrifice them and their livelihoods, jobs and public services for a failed and cruel austerity agenda.

See this speech in context