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

That is what happened. Even a child knows that. Everybody knows it but the Government pretends it is not the truth. It was something to do with the fact that public servants, apparently, were living beyond their means. That is just preposterous. I think it is happening again. All the developers who helped bankrupt the country, those greedy people who speculated on Irish housing then went into NAMA and were paid €200,000 a year to get back into business were nurtured back to profitability and then the State gave them back all the assets and property which we had at least off got them and should have kept. Now one of them, Seán Mulryan of the Ballymore Group, is selling back a property to the Central Bank. The ironies just pile up. The Central Bank moved from Dame Street a few years ago to the docklands and it is now going to buy another property beside its new headquarters from Mr. Mulryan. The total bill is €200 million. It is unbelievable. One could not make it up but it is happening. It was in the business pages of the Sunday Independent last weekend.

I do not know if anyone has even mentioned that. I find it beyond belief. All the boys are back in town and now they are backed by an even greedier bunch. The previous Irish property crash was financed by the banks and the greedy Irish property speculators. Now, having nursed them back into business, in order to hoover up everything, they have gone to America to get the big vulture funds to come in and back them financially so that they can get everything back and get even more. They will have even greater control over the Irish property sector, which is running riot, and, against that background, the Government is saying we should put €500 million a year into a rainy day fund. It is an absolute joke. Even if I thought it was a good idea, by the time the next economic crash comes, there will be bugger all in it anyway compared to the likely hit. It is just nonsense. I would not mind if the Government said we need a safety net or a buffer after we do the things that would begin to create some insulation for the economy and society against the inevitable economic crash that will be caused by those people again.

When the next economic crash comes, which it will, will the Government say it is down to the public servants or to the nurses? The Taoiseach was implying that today. He said if we concede to the nurses, we are one step closer to an economic crash. Whether the nurses get paid, an economic crash will come and it will have nothing to do with them. However, what it will have to do with is the greedy people in the financial markets and the people who have taken control of the property sector, many of whom are the same, deciding at a certain point that they are shifting their money somewhere else because it is not profitable enough for them anymore. That is when the crash will come. We have no control over what they do because we have given them more control over wealth, assets, the financial system and property than they even had before the previous crash, which they caused.

That is what the Government has done and, against that background, this Bill is pathetic. What the Government could do if it wanted some insufflation for the economy is to start to get back some of that surplus wealth those individuals control, the movement of which can destabilise this economy or the wider European or American economies. It is due to the fact that such wealth is even more concentrated than it was before the last crash that they can destabilise our economy and the global economy. Unless we address that fact we do not have a prayer of dealing with the next crash that is coming. I am amazed that nobody even asked those questions. I doubt that any economics or financial correspondents are even listening to this debate. They think they have heard it before and there is no point in discussing it. They will discuss tomorrow's crisis, whatever that is, but not provide a deeper analysis of why crashes happen and what we might do to the system that generates the crashes again and again, where they tend to get worse and where the concentration of wealth, the ingredients that generate the crises in the first place, are accumulated on a bigger scale each time there is a crisis. We will have part two tomorrow.

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