Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I think Deputy Durkan will find that we are all in Europe.

When people look at this stability programme debate, the key question they will ask is "Stability for who?". We do not all have the same interests in this State. There can be stability for some at the expense of others. That is what has happened so far. There is massive stability for the richest people in our society. The Sunday Timespublished its rich list at the weekend showing an increase of approximately 3% for the richest 250 people in personal wealth over the course of the last year alone. There is a great deal of stability for corporations whose profits have increased by 31% from €35 billion to €52 billion from 2009 to 2014. At the same time, the taxes paid by corporations increased by only 18%. There is a great deal of stability, as Deputy Boyd Barrett said, for the bondholders who get their private debts paid for by ordinary people on a yearly basis like clockwork. On the other hand, there is massive instability in people's lives. Hourly wages are still lower than they were at the start of the crisis. Of all children, 40% are living in conditions of multiple deprivation. Of workers, one quarter receive less than the living wage. We have a massive housing and homelessness crisis. How does that tally with the growth figures presented? It tallies in two ways. First, the growth figures are massively inflated because of the fact that corporations use Ireland as, in effect, a tax haven. That means GDP figures in particular, but also GNP figures due to contract manufacturing, are massively inflated. They do not reflect the reality. The increase in consumer expenditure of approximately 3% is more real in terms of what is actually happening in the economy. Second, even taking that some level of recovery exists, such recovery is fundamentally unequal. There is no greater illustration of that than the Panama papers we have seen exposing global operations by the super rich and large corporations to avoid paying tax in whatever way possible to the extent of stashing away massive amounts of money. In terms of Ireland, a recent report set out that 1,400 of the richest people here avoided paying €250 million in 2013 using legal tax breaks. For the 1%, there are Panama accounts. For us, there are deteriorating public services and attempts to take property tax from people.

The nature of stability for them at the expense of instability for ordinary people is not going to change as long as the policies and politics of neoliberalism and austerity remain in place. This whole procedure of the European semester - the two pack, the six pack and the notion of fiscal space - is all designed to ensure that stays in place. The world economy has not been discussed enough today. There will be a further shock in the world economy. It is almost nine years since the start of this massive, deep crisis of capitalism and there has been no recovery. There is persistent deflation, low levels of growth in the advanced economies and very high levels of unemployment. A further shock is going to come, most likely from China, and the unsustainable model of Irish capitalism is going to be exposed. It is a model of hoping another Celtic tiger is going to come along and of not making corporations pay their taxes instead of developing a sustainable manufacturing and industrial base here. We need an alternative model. In my view, it is a socialist model. It is about making the rich and the corporations pay their taxes but it is also about breaking the straitjacket of EU fiscal rules and of capitalism, refusing to pay the debt that is not our debt, a nationalised public banking system and public ownership of the key sections of the economy.

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