Clare Daly (Dublin North, United Left) | Oireachtas source

I wish to speak about one aspect of the Bill that will enable ratification of the intergovernmental agreement to the Single Supervisory Mechanism in order to make it operable. As we know, this is part of a suite of measures introduced at European level to bring about banking union. As the fairy tale unwinds - we had to listen to it earlier - we are expected to believe that the great shining knights of the political establishment across Europe will come in and valiantly battle with the big, bad wolf of the banking sector and defend little Red Riding Hood; essentially, if the banks get into trouble again, the public will not be bankrupted because of it. My only answer to that is, "Yeah, right." That we are discussing this is an irony in that this week figures emerged revealing that within Europe, the Irish public suffered a per-head reduction in wealth far in excess of any of our European counterparts. The reduction was €18,000 per head. The ordinary people of Spain and Greece were similarly decimated, but at the same time wealth in the Netherlands and Germany rocketed. Given that we know that Ireland's wealthiest citizens have seen their wealth rise substantially, the overall loss is doubly hard to take, as the ordinary citizens would have paid a price even beyond the reported figure.

If this was truly a solution to the bank bailout issue, it would be great, but it is not. It is appropriate to examine bailouts that took place across the eurozone since 2008, which cost €1.7 trillion. The cost to the Irish public was €64 billion, and we spent €2.3 billion this year alone servicing the debts to the banks, which were paid for by the unrelenting cuts in public services, social welfare, housing, jobs and decent pay and conditions for workers. It is a very painful and vivid memory that the poorest and weakest of our citizens have had to endure. Across Europe there is a structural reorganisation of society or, in some instances, a political counter-revolution. Many of the gains in social welfare and post-war reforms that were delivered have been rowed back on in the name of finance capital. Many people do not want to remember the bank bailout - it is a painful memory for Fianna Fáil - but the Government told us before the last election that not one red cent would be paid. It would be Labour's way or Frankfurt's way and so on. As it has developed, history has turned out radically different.

While on the face of it a system to bring about an orderly resolution of the banks seems like a great idea, we have to be very clear that the proposal on the table is not that and has little promise of delivering an end to the bailouts by the public. The Single Resolution Fund is only €55 billion, which is chicken feed in the world of banking. According to back-of-an-envelope calculations by one of the Financial Timeseconomists, the banks could be holding bad assets to the tune of about €2.6 trillion. In that context, €55 billion is a pittance.

It is inevitable that the public will be called upon again to bail out the banks. The fund will only come in eight years from now. If a bank gets into trouble before then or if there is a need for a bailout beyond the €55 billion provided, the only backstop is the ESM and we all know what that means because we only have to look at what happened when the Spanish Government went to the ESM to recapitalise the banks in 2012. What was the price the Spanish people had to pay? They had to sign up to massive policy conditionality, including demands to increase the cost-effectiveness of their health care sector, pension reforms, labour market reforms, reforms of public transport, massive privatisation and so on, a similar demand to that made of the population of Greece. Yes, we will give you some of this money, but in return we want you to decimate your public services, we want you to unleash privatisation and we want you to sacrifice everything to the altar of neoliberalism.

What we are looking at is a banking union with a resolution mechanism that is not near enough. That is obvious even at the start. It is likely that as the negotiations go further in terms of banking union, the banking lobby will dictate the pace because we have seen it do that throughout the process. In the meantime, there will be no end to the creation of speculative financial instruments which have caused so much damage in the first place. According to analysis from Finance Watch, with which I agree, a bank resolution system that, as in this case, does not contain ambitious preventative measures such as dealing with the "too big to fail" problem, the "too interconnected to fail" problem and the "too complex to resolve" problem is just not credible. This has not been addressed in any way by the provisions before us. We will have a European banking sector that remains as interconnected as ever and as dominated by the megabanks, which are not going to be of any benefit to the citizens of Europe and certainly not to the citizens of Ireland. As Finance Watch says, "if banks are not reformed such that they pose less of a systemic risk they will simply block the mechanisms designed to resolve them". That is what we have had from this process. The banks have blocked the mechanisms designed to resolve the problems and they will continue to do so as long as this Government and its counterparts in Europe continue to enslave themselves to the ideas of neoliberalism.

The Minister touted the slogan during his budget speech that he would deliver an end to boom and bust politics and all this, but he is not going to do that because it is an inherent part of neoliberalism. It cannot be done, and the imposition of an unrelenting sacrifice on the citizens of Europe will not be tolerated. It is guaranteed that boom and bust and the struggle to resolve that situation will be part of our history because the citizens of Europe certainly cannot afford to shoulder the burden of the banks any longer.

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