Seanad debates

Tuesday, 24 April 2012

Thirtieth Amendment of the Constitution (Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union) Bill 2012: Committee and Remaining Stages

 

1:00 pm

Photo of David CullinaneDavid Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

I wish to respond to some of the comments that were made because it is important we have a robust exchange of views on the treaty, on its implications for Ireland and on the positions being put forward by the respective political parties. A number of Senators referred to the real world. I remember a speech given by the Tánaiste, Deputy Eamon Gilmore, when he was an Opposition spokesperson and he talked about two different worlds. He talked about one world where bankers and developers were getting huge sums of taxpayers' money and were being bailed out. He talked about the people who benefited most from the Celtic tiger were the very people who were being bailed out and supported and the people who benefited least from the Celtic tiger were living in a different world and were those who were being asked to take the painful adjustments - the medicine - in terms of the budgets being put forward by Fianna Fáil and the Green Party at the time. He robustly opposed all those budgets because he felt that austerity would not work and that the budgets were unfair. Any of the Labour Party Senators present can correct me on this but I understand that every Labour Party Deputy voted against all the budgets in 2008, 2009, 2010 but magically voted in favour of the budget in 2011, even though it was broadly in line with all the previous budgets that were brought into play.

The real world is one in which 460,000 people are out of work and 150,000 people have left the country. It is where on going into any town, village or city in this State, one will see shops closing and empty premises. The real world is explained very clearly in the Bank of Ireland report published yesterday, which shows that our domestic economy is still floundering. The real world is where we have major problems, not only in Ireland but also in Greece, France, Holland, Portugal, Spain and right across the eurozone.

The problem is that we are not coming up with real world solutions to the problems which are evident in Ireland and the EU. That is the point we are making. That is the flaw that is at the heart of this treaty. This treaty was designed, we are told, to solve those big problems. What the treaty does not do is put in place any new regulations around how banks operate.

Everybody in this House would accept that one of the problems that led to the collapse of our economy was the fact our public finances were built up in a construction, financial and consumer bubble. When it collapsed, the bottom fell out of our public finances. We ended up with the big deficit we have had to reduce every year. The reason that happened, and we can take Anglo Irish Bank as the perfect example because everybody accepts it is a toxic bank, was that we had international lenders who were getting cheap credit and cheap money, especially from banks in Germany and France, to lend to Irish banks. Then we had the race to the bottom between all the banks, where they all rushed to get as much money as they possibly could to give out to a golden circle, an elite in this country, who used it to speculate on land which created the property bubble which was fuelled by Government policy. These guys were also behaving recklessly by giving into banks like Anglo Irish Bank which then lent recklessly and people borrowed recklessly.

The treaty does not deal with any of that. There is not one line in the treaty that puts in place any-----

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