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

Much as the Government wishes to trumpet its success, stability and the so-called turnaround of the economy, the issue of the odious debt heaped on the back of this country and its citizens, the terrible cost that has imposed on our economy and people and the threat it represents to the economy continues to return. Has the Taoiseach read the most recent report from the European Commission, which points to the risks of our very high debt levels which it says are high in the medium term and are very sensitive to any significant shocks in economic growth? Such shocks are, of course, being widely predicted. Has the Taoiseach read the European Commission's report? It is extremely concerned about our debt and our vulnerability to economic shocks. I just came from the finance committee, where Philip Lane, the Governor of the Central Bank, made precisely the same point as the European Commission is making. He said, when asked about the growth projections of this Government and the so-called "fiscal space", that we need to have a "we may be wrong" scenario. Those were his words. He talked in particular about the problem of our high level of debt and the risk that poses to us if we are wrong. Given the gathering clouds of possible international recession, are we not pursuing a very dangerous strategy, given our high levels of debt?

That brings me to the last, linked question. This morning, the European Court of Auditors produced a report on the European Commission's handling of the Irish bailout. It is a very damning report because it says the European Commission got it badly wrong. It was charged with monitoring and giving warnings if there were problems in terms of people's budgets. The report quotes, for example, the very misguided and utterly wrong judgment of the European Commission in March 2008, when it said of the Irish economy, "the risks attached to the budgetary projections are broadly neutral for 2008". My God, did they get that wrong. The report from the auditors goes on to say the European Commission estimated the country's budgets to be much stronger than they turned out to be, and so on. They all said the European Commission was extremely bad at keeping records. They said there was no proper record-keeping of the post-crash programme teams, that there was no proper oversight of those programme teams and that alternative scenarios were not properly looked at in terms of burden-sharing on debt.

This is the point and the question. What the auditors are now confirming is something that some of us have been saying since the very beginning, namely, that the EU itself was very significantly responsible for the failures that led to the crash and that it should have shared the burden. The Taoiseach promised before the last election that he would make it share the burden. He promised that we would burn the bondholders and that there would be burden-sharing. Now we have the European Court of Auditors saying Europe was asleep at the wheel months before the crash was about to hit and engulf the economy. Is this not the time, on the back of this report, to go back to our friends in Europe and say-----

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