Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

This agreement is about the deliberate humiliation of the Greek people and the Greek Government. Some of the finance Ministers at the Eurogroup admitted it. They said the reason the agreement is so harsh is because the Greek people, through an incredible act of insubordination, had a democratic referendum and opted to reject austerity.

As a result, the EU demanded more austerity. Does a sovereign state hand €50 billion worth of its assets to a supposedly independent fund? Does it hand over its assets to one that was originally proposed to be controlled by the German finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, making these presentations? Does a sovereign state agree to have automatic austerity and to cede power to an unelected fiscal council? This is about humiliation, a dictatorship of capital and the rich in Europe, and the Irish Government trying to avoid humiliation. Yanis Varoufakis said of other indebted countries:

The reason of course was their greatest nightmare was our success: were we to succeed in negotiating a better deal for Greece, that would of course obliterate them politically, they would have to answer to their own people why they didn’t negotiate like we were doing.

This was the dominant motivation of the Irish Government, which is willing to see Greek people starve and die as a result in order to enhance their political position.

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