Eoghan Harris (Independent)

While I generally agree with Senator Doherty's desire for fairness, I am not in favour of this sort of tinkering with small aspects of the general crisis. The entire matter of remuneration, not just of the banks but across the whole public sector, will come under savage scrutiny in coming times.

Since before Christmas I have been saying unemployment will hit half a million and I have since revised that figure upwards to 700,000, with 20% unemployment, and I do not believe this is down to the Irish economy. I am totally opposed to the hysterical campaign that has been whipped up against the banking system as a whole. There are delinquents within the banking system and people who should be brought to book and, indeed, put in jail. The Bank of Ireland, however, has existed since before the Famine and been there through the land wars and two world wars. AIB Bank goes back to the Munster and Leinster Bank and no one would wish to see these two great Irish institutions which have a physical presence in every town and village go to the wall. The Government was right to support these banks systemically. Perhaps it got a bad deal. It is a pity one had to bail out the banks but it had to be done because otherwise we would have no credibility in the world.

I have stressed repeatedly the extent and depth of this crisis. It is not an Irish crisis. It has been exacerbated somewhat but not to the degree some parts of the media have been exciting themselves about. It is not confined to us. There are versions of what is happening in Ireland occurring in Japan, Australia and across Europe. This is not just a depression or a recession. It should be more closely compared to one of those historical moments such as the Black Death or the Thirty Years' War. It will outlast our lifetime. It is a systemic and deep structural crisis of the capitalist system and it will not be alleviated by recourse to the equally flawed Marxist system which has been tried and tested. It will take a long time to recover confidence. As my colleague, John Drennan, pointed out, it takes no time to pollute a river but it takes a long time to clean it up.

There is a volume of debt across the globe that is untapped and unknown, a vast, bottomless pit of debt caused by the insurance contract default system. The AIG model, not Lehman Brothers, caused the beginning of this collapse, aided and abetted by the sub-prime mortgage system. It cannot be dealt with, as many of my colleagues think, simply by regulation. That can do a lot but I am not a Platonist who believes in a perfect society, human nature being what it is. I believe in the doctrine of original sin and just because many things were legal in our society does not mean to say they were not wrong. They were wrong and we must introduce the concept of sin back into the body politic at every level.

Let us begin here. There are increasing calls for the abolition of the Seanad. These calls cannot be gainsaid much longer. In a year's time they will seem commonplace and unless we proceed to take voluntary cuts of a severe sort in our income, the people will come and take it off us. I have always believed in going forward to meet a problem, in hanging a lantern on it and not standing back from it. The Members of the Seanad should seriously consider a cut in their salaries so swingeing that it alerts the public to the fact we are sincere about it. It should be a minimum of 15% to 20%. We should stay ahead of public sector cuts.

Beyond that, Senator Doherty rightly raised the general question of equity and that should be brought up right across the board in all forms of public remuneration, not least in further reforms of the public sector. The Minister did not cut deeply enough and I understand why. I spoke to the former Taoiseach, John Bruton, lately, commiserating with him on the death of his father. There was no partisan or party element in our conversation about the economy, just a deep concern for this country. Perhaps he belongs to the trade union for Taoisigh so he empathises with the current Taoiseach but he believes, like me, that this is a deep crisis.

I value the contribution of my colleague and fellow Sunday Independent writer, Senator Shane Ross. It is clear, however, that he understands banks but does not understand politics. Perhaps I know a little bit more about politics in the same way he knows a little more about banks. I disagree with his statement yesterday when he warned Fine Gael not to get embroiled in supporting the Government. In recent days, Fine Gael has gained great credibility. I read with great interest Deputy Richard Bruton's broad outline of the plans that he is bringing to the Minister for Finance and which I hope he brings to the Taoiseach. They are credible, deep and cutting. The Government has never got ahead of this crisis and to do so, public sector pay cuts of the order of 30% will be necessary and pensions of Ministers and former Ministers should be levied severely.

Senator Doherty is right. The public must see that fairness comes first. If we are fair, the public will put up with anything. That means starting at the top with us, with the politicians and the political class, then going on to the public sector. I do not agree with Senator Ross, however, when he advises Fine Gael not to get involved because we do not know what is coming down the stream. Fine Gael knows as well as anyone else what is coming down the stream and it is not good. It is time to remember André Gide's great motto for getting through life: anything can happen.

We need a dose of European pessimism now, not American optimism. We must look at this situation and recognise that bad stuff is coming down the stream and we must assume the worst. We may need to go back to allotments before we are finished, growing our own food in our back gardens, but we can handle anything.

I am not presenting this apocalyptic vision to make the flesh creep but I am tired of people half-trying to explain it away as just another recession that was caused by a few Irish bankers or Charlie McCreevy's low tax policies, all of them correct policies at the time. The Government has nothing to apologise for and the business of these pathetic, mawkish apologies should stop. We were all in the Celtic tiger together and the infrastructure lies all around us. It is good stuff, well built.

Low tax policy is the right policy and in that respect I want to point to the ideological struggle going on in Ireland. There are elements and media commentators grouped around RTE who carry on as if increases in taxation will solve the deficit of €18 billion, which I believe is closer to €25 billion. Whatever it is, tax will not do it. One would think listening to RTE, to George Lee, Fintan O'Toole and other commentators, that this can all be done through tax increases. It cannot; some of it must be done by tax, but the bulk of it must be done by cuts in public expenditure. The national development plan should be stopped, the metro should be stopped and all State companies that can be privatised should be privatised with the exception of the courts, the Defence Forces and the security forces.

We need radical measures for these terrible and radical times. While Fine Gael has gained enormous credibility with the public in its responsible attitude, and I am glad the Minister and the Taoiseach have invited the Opposition parties in, I still believe that despite its position in the polls, the Labour Party will continue to decline in credibility if it continues to refuse to tell us where it proposes to make the cuts. Fine Gael has credibly told us where it will make cuts. The Labour Party just grandstands and swans around the place, being all things to all men, like the Quakers: friend to all, enemy to none. That sort of stuff will not last forever.

I have great sympathy with the need for fairness that drives Senator Pearse Doherty. We should not tinker with that fairness. We must look at the tax situation again, not least at the way farmers have fallen below the radar. They pay ridiculously small amounts of tax compared with the public sector. I have been a hammer on the public sector but I will be no less hard on the farming sector. There are 105,000 of them paying some ridiculously small sum in the millions compared with the 370,000 civil servants who pay €3.4 billion in tax. This must stop, there must be no protected or cushioned classes. To borrow one of the Minister's best sardonic lines from yesterday, all must aspire to the dignity of being Irish taxpayers.