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

The simple-mindedness, paucity of thinking, ideological bankruptcy that lies behind this concept of a rainy day fund the Government is presenting in the Bill, which it has been arguing for some time, is staggering. It makes clear that the Government has not the faintest clue or simply does not want to acknowledge why we had an economic crisis previously and why we will have another economic crisis fairly soon. The Government had a rainy day fund prior to the previous crisis. Did it stop the crisis? No. Did it stop vicious austerity being imposed on the people of this country? No. Did it stop a virtual economic collapse in the country? No. Did it prevent us having to go begging to borrow money and impose vicious austerity in order to get money from the European Central Bank, ECB, and the International Monetary Fund, IMF? No. Did it achieve anything? The answer is "No", except – I am sorry but I forgot - that it bailed out the banks. That was the one thing it achieved. The same banks that are now selling off people's mortgages to vulture funds, repossessing their homes, and paying no tax because there is a tax loophole that incredibly allows them to write off previous losses for 20 years, even when they have restored themselves to extraordinary levels of profitability, and where the people running those banks are back earning shocking, obscene, staggering salaries of between €700,000 and €800,000. That is what it achieved. It did nothing to act as a buffer, and now the Government just wants to do it again.

Has the Government learnt anything at all? It is just mind-boggling. The Government wants to draw us into an argument about how we fight over these little crumbs rather than look at the storm that hit us the last time and the storm that will hit us again when the markets to whom the Government bows down wrecks economies overnight. Its take on the economic crash which is used to justify this is Orwellian. It peddles the myth that we were spending beyond our means. The Taoiseach goes on about it and says the nurses cannot get paid because the reason we had an economic crisis the last time was public servants were paid too much. That is not the reason we had an economic crisis; we had an economic crisis because the rich in this country, in America, across Europe and just about everywhere in the western world, had spent the previous 15 to 20 years turning housing, the most basic human need, into an object of speculation.

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