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

There are very alarming signs that both the European Union and the Irish Government are utterly failing to learn the obvious lessons of the current public health emergency and are planning to revert to the failed austerity policies that did such damage in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008 and to impose the cost and burden of this emergency once again on working people and the key public services on which we depend more than ever. The fact that the European Union is opting for loans with conditions attached to them immediately sets the alarm bells of austerity ringing. They have learned nothing. Such loans and conditions crippled this country, imposed incredible suffering and hardship on people and were utterly counterproductive the last time around, but we have the signs that they are planning to do it all over again.

The Minister, Deputy Donohoe, has warned of a so-called tapering of Covid payments, that is, cuts to these payments, when in fact the Government was forced into acknowledging that nobody could be expected to live on less than €350 per week. Now, however, we are talking about cutting that payment and pushing into poverty people who are in no way responsible for the fact that they have lost jobs and income. We are hiring the nurses we so desperately need for the health service on temporary agency contracts - hire-'em-and-fire-'em contracts - whereby they have no rights whatsoever. As I discovered from speaking to Phil Ní Sheaghdha on the phone the other day, we have still not paid most of the nurses the pay award they won as a result of the industrial action they took last year. In the majority of hospitals the nurses who are protecting us at the moment have not got their pay awards. It is disgraceful. There is the failure to intervene to support the Debenhams workers outside, who are being ditched in the most cynical way by a private company still making profits in the North, still operating online services in this country and still operating in the UK which has clearly used the Covid crisis as an opportunity to ditch its workers. I was talking to the workers outside. They have been emailing Ministers, who are saying: "Nothing to do with us. There is nothing we can do." That is a very worrying sign for the many workers who may face similar job losses as a result of this crisis. These are bad signs for the future.

It seems to me that the absolutely inescapable lesson of the current public health emergency and the absolutely indisputable conclusion one can draw is that when one is faced with a major emergency and challenge to society, one cannot let austerity and the market dictate the response. We learned, and the Government learned, that it had to be the State that marshalled all the resources necessary to respond and to take over private healthcare capacity to respond to a public health emergency. Why, then, would the Government want to revert to a two-tier health system? Why would it want to employ nurses on temporary contracts through a private agency and then be able to fire them after the crisis? It makes no sense whatsoever. If that is true of a health emergency, it is true of a climate emergency, it is true of a housing emergency and it is true of the need to prevent mass unemployment, which we could face in the aftermath of this crisis.

None of that will be necessary if the State willingly intervenes and marshals the resources that exist in our society. We have discovered during this crisis that wealth is not paper money. Wealth lies in the factories that produce ventilators, in the hospitals, in teachers, essential workers and retail workers. They are the ones who have to be protected and resourced in order that we learn the lessons that this crisis has taught. Those truths are staring us in the face and yet the Government and the EU seem intent on reverting to the mistakes of the past.

I urge the Government and the EU to learn those lessons. We do not have to face austerity and mass unemployment if we take the available wealth and resources and put them into producing a single-tier, properly-resourced health service, resolving the housing crisis, providing for smaller class sizes in schools and redeploying workers who have lost their jobs into the areas in which we need them, such as education, healthcare and public services. We do not need to repeat the mistakes of the past.

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