David Norris (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I accept that the Minister, Deputy Noonan, is a decent, good, highly intelligent man and within his own parameters he has done a brilliant job, of that there is no doubt. I think it is disgraceful that we started from there. We should historically nail the situation firmly into the record that Jean Claude Trichet twisted the arm of an already ill Irish Minister for Finance, the decent late Brian Lenihan, and forced a disgraceful, immoral and illegal deal on the Irish people. We are not paying debts that we incurred; we are paying the gambling debts of others. It is absolutely fiendish and disgraceful.

I wish to quote from an article written by the former IMF mission chief to Ireland in The Irish Times yesterday. He states:

Continued, large budget cutbacks are due through 2015. Unemployment will remain disastrously high. Mortgage arrears and foreclosures will continue to climb. Even if world trade finally picks up, the largely-enclave Irish exports will draw in more imports, providing limited fillip to domestic GDP.

The last sentence of his article is instructive. He states: "The alternative is unending human pain, [this is the alternative to addressing the legacy debts which are part of the real evil] a culture of national dependency and a fraying European economic and social fabric."

We are dealing with an austerity situation. The Caritas report was launched at 10 a.m. this morning. This organisation of a wonderful combination of Roman Catholic charities and socially vested groups has done a survey across Europe, one section of which concentrates on the five programme countries. It has shown that what we will have is structural unemployment and structural poverty. That is an appalling situation.

I have started listing reasons not to celebrate the centenary of 1916 and I will need to add to them all the time and I will continue to do this. So far we have had soup kitchens, evictions, hedge schools where children are told to jump up and down to keep warm, penalties for improving one's property, what would James Fintan Lalor and Michael Davitt think of that, and now today we have informers in terms of the iniquitous property tax. I have a lot more to say and I will have another opportunity to say it.