Seanad debates

Thursday, 27 October 2011

11:00 am

Photo of Thomas ByrneThomas Byrne (Fianna Fail)

I also wish to call for a comprehensive debate on the agreement reached this morning. As with the Keane report, Government Senators and Deputies are rushing out to welcome this without actually reading the document. It may in fact be welcome and might require a constitutional referendum that we may support, but we do not know yet and will have to examine its implications. I would encourage the general public to read the document and to assist that process we should have a full debate here. There is a significant lessening of the Government's position on corporation tax in the document. There is also a massive budgetary oversight in this document, which has been agreed by the Government this morning, whereby we will have to stick to what the Commission tells us to do in our budget. We will have to stick to independent growth forecasts and, in addition, we will not be able to do what the Minister for Finance did last week in rejecting what the fiscal council or the Minister, Deputy Rabbitte, said.

We may have to hold a constitutional referendum on a balanced budget amendment to ensure that we cannot constitutionally go below the European targets. If a balanced budget amendment had been made to the Constitution in 2008, we would have had to slash social welfare rates by about 40%. The Government has taken absolute ownership of our sovereign debt. While they once said it was unsustainable, there is now an absolute commitment to paying every last penny of it back.

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