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

I did not hear all of the contributions in the earlier part of the debate. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are certainly supporting this, but I am not sure what other people are saying yet. The Competition (Amendment) Bill aids workers' interests and gives workers who need it the right to organise as trade unionists to improve their pay and conditions. It is great that we can come together and agree to pass a Bill that will do that. After the nice consensus we had on the previous Bill, I am afraid that I do not believe that the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank Bill 2017 is going to be good for workers, for the environment, for poorer countries or for the Chinese people. I do not think it is a very good way for us to invest €125 million. It is amazing, in a way, that there is such enthusiasm from the Government for this. Maybe it is not that amazing and is just in line with the Government's general philosophy and ideology.

I would have thought it might have given it a little pause for thought when one looks at the sorry history of the IMF and the World Bank and what those institutions have done to developing world countries and debtor countries, which is effectively steal the natural resources, infrastructure and public services of poorer countries around the world; wreck the environment in many poorer countries; and undermine the position of working people and the less well-off in those countries. Why on earth we would want to participate in the creation of a new Asian version of the World Bank-IMF is beyond me. I suppose it is fairly typical of the pragmatic, as the Government would see it, approach to the way the world economy is organised that we just feel that this is the way it is so we must be part of it and we do not want to be left out of the party. That is more or less what the Minister of State said.

On the other hand, the Minister of State said that not to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank would raise questions about Ireland's position on China's increasing integration in the global economy and international financial architecture. He said that such a decision could impair Ireland's growing bilateral relationship with China with potential adverse effects for Irish businesses. Would it be such a bad thing if we were critical of the Chinese regime? I often find it humorous when the Government talks about its commitment to human rights on the international stage but we then deal with dictatorships like the Chinese regime, because that is what it is. It is a brutal dictatorship in a country with no democracy that ruthlessly crushes all opposition in the most bloody way; routinely executes people for often relatively minor crimes, as the Chinese dictatorship would see them; has no respect for the human or civil rights of its own population; brutally represses people in Tibet; and brutally treats much of its rural population, which is where we get very close to the issue of the Asian Investment Bank. It has already been indicated that some of the investments of the Asian Investment Bank are in areas like hydro power and it has not ruled out coal.

Even though it pays some lip service to the Paris climate change targets and environmentalism, the bank has carefully ensured the door remains open for financing coal-powered projects, which are doing immense damage to the global environment in China and causing huge pollution that impacts on the health of the Chinese population, or hydro power projects in China, which have had a very devastating effect on rivers and have driven people out of whole swathes of the countryside they previously inhabited because of the impact of dams to develop hydro power projects. These projects have a very serious and negative impact on millions of Chinese people about whom the Chinese state does not give a damn. The Chinese Communist party does not give a damn about these people but just drives ahead with what it dictates are in the interests of China Inc. We are very keen to get involved in that and get a slice of the cake regardless of the callous and brutal disregard of the Chinese regime for the rights of its own people or minorities within China or the often devastating environmental impact of some of the big infrastructure projects in which the Chinese regime has engaged.

As a growing industrial and economic power, China wants to start to rival the other big blocs in the world in beginning to use its surplus of capital to start a form of economic colonialism much like the US and the western powers have used the IMF and the World Bank to embark on a new phase of economic colonialism. This is where they lend money to poorer countries like Bangladesh in order to do as the IMF and the World Bank have done, namely, to get those countries in hock, gain control of strategic influence over key infrastructure projects and natural resources, profiteer from them at the expense of those populations and draw those countries into the debt boomerang, as Susan George described it. The bank lends money to these countries in an apparently benign move to assist them but in reality, the bank gets them into debt and then exercises very significant control over how those projects are carried out, the conditions of employment of the workers, the need for privatisation as part of developing those infrastructure projects and crippling interest repayments which lock those countries into a debt cycle which cripples them. Susan George is one of the foremost international critics of what she calls the debt boomerang where someone throws something and it comes back and hits them in the face.

That is what debt has done to the Third World. Investment that appears to be benign ends up being a mechanism to transfer massive amounts of wealth from the poorer countries to richer countries. In one of Susan George's seminal books, The Debt Boomerang, which was written in the early 1990s, she points out how this worked. It largely involved debt owed to the IMF and the World Bank. Between 1982 and 1990, the debtor countries, which are overwhelmingly very poor countries, paid back $1,300 billion to the creditor countries mostly through the IMF and the World Bank. This is an enormous amount of money for these countries. Did that reduce the debt burden of those countries or did it increase? Have a guess. Their debt actually increased in that period. After paying out $1,300 billion, they still owed more to the western countries that were the financiers and members of these global institutions like the World Bank than they owed when they took out the loans in the first place. These literally become mechanisms to suck out billions and as we move through the 21st century with inflation, we are talking trillions. When one looks at the fire-power of this Asian Investment Bank, they are talking about $4 trillion in investment per year and one can see that this becomes the mechanism to then suck out multiples of that over long periods of time from these poor countries, gain control of their infrastructure and resources, gain very significant influence over their governments and essentially blackmail the population of those countries.

Of course, we have now seen echoes of this with the EU-IMF structural adjustment programme called austerity, which was imposed on us when we found ourselves sucked into this cycle, and we are still affected by it. Members should think about what happened with our strategic investment fund here. We have to privatise as part of those investments. We have €4 billion but we have to allow the market into those investments and somebody else have to make money out of it. We are tied into that because of the strings that are attached in fiscal treaties and so on with European arrangements to which, crazily enough, we have signed up. The severe negative impact is evident and affects, even as we speak, our capacity to invest in social housing, health care and all that. We are restricted and denied the right to invest even our own money in the social housing we desperately need, creating the incredible irony that Ireland could build more social housing in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s when it was poorer - virtually a Third World country but where we had control over our own investment and expenditure - than we can deliver in the early 21st century.

We are beginning to get a taste of this, but the poorer countries of the world have been suffering from this since at least the 1980s and the 1990s. It has had a devastating effect on those countries. Now we are planning to do an Asian version of this, with China in the lead, India playing an important role and Germany, obviously, involved as one of the other big participants. We are a minor player in it but as the Minister indicated, we want to be seen to be part of the club with these big boys. It is interesting that the United States and Japan do not want to get involved in this because they see this as a potential rival to the World Bank and as part of the intensifying competition between the big economic blocs of the United States and the western blocs on the one hand and China on the other. Do not get me wrong. I do not feel sorry for Donald Trump and the US in its fears about the growth of Chinese economic power or a rival power to the United States but the point is that we should recognise all these big, super-economic blocs, which essentially are trying to engage in forms of economic imperialism and colonialism in their regions, as being a major problem for the world. They ultimately accelerate the flow of wealth from the have-nots to the haves, from the poor countries to the rich countries, from the working people to the big bankers, the big financiers and the big corporate interests that dominate in influence and with their positions in institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, AIIB, the World Bank, the IMF and so on.

This is a power grab by a rising power, China, to get in on the act that has been monopolised by the IMF and the World Bank, and to rival it. In the competition that is intensifying between the US bloc and the rising Chinese bloc, the losers will be ordinary people in those countries, in China itself, in surrounding countries and the surrounding region and indeed the whole world with regard to the environment. They have a callous, cavalier disregard for the environment and the consequences, as well as the rapidly accelerating gap between the haves and the have-nots on a world scale. This institution will further accelerate and intensify that mode of organising global economic activity. That is what it is about, namely, about China getting in on the act and us facilitating that. I do not think we should. I think there are better ways that we could spend €125 million to do things that we need to do here. I am not saying we should not use moneys that we have to help other countries that need support and investment but not via institutions like this, which are all about squeezing as much back out as they possibly can. These institutions are not about benign aid or assistance and solidarity but are about lending money to get back extortionate interest and to gain control over governments, investment policies and countries' actual physical infrastructure and services at the expense of the people and the environment in those countries.

I will conclude on that but these points must be made because this is a significant development. The sad history of the World Bank and IMF on the global stage over the past 20 or 30 years should really make us reconsider why we would want to get involved in another project of this sort, which is destined to do the same sort of damage that the IMF and World Bank have done.

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