Joe Higgins TD

Here Joe Higgins talks about TSB’s increase in mortgage rates, the bank bailout and the cutbacks in the An Bord Snip Nua report.

Well it didn’t last long, did it? The banks’ penitential mode I mean.

For a few months for the sake of appearances, they were obliged to don the sack cloth and ashes as they outstretched both hands to the taxpayer begging to be rescued from the disastrous consequences of the greed fest which they had fuelled in the property market. Acts of contrition occasionally passed the pursed lips of senior executives. Now we know how serious they were.

With its announcement of a mortgage interest rate rise, Permanent TSB has clearly signalled that the period of contrition is over. And by failing to rule out similar increases, Bank of Ireland is signalling that it is back to business as usual for all the banks.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has already surrendered to their statement of intent. The interest rate rise reflects ‘market realities’, he muttered. So that’s alright then. The world’s biggest gambling casinos that are dignified with the name ‘financial markets’ are dictating again. And political knees are genuflecting. Never mind that the gamblers are allowed to determine the fate of hundreds of millions with their throws of the dice.

It is the same dictatorship that is demanding sharp cuts in workers’ incomes and living standards. ‘Workers have priced themselves out of the market’ we are daily being told by right wing media and economists.

There is something obscene about men on incomes of a quarter million Euro a year assert that €8.65 an hour – the minimum wage – is too much and must be cut. Equally obscene is their assertion that social welfare – the dole – must also be cut. Yet that is the tune that men like Mr Lenihan and Mr Colm McCarthy, Chair of the ‘Special Group on Public Service Numbers and Expenditure Programmes’, were singing in unison at the McGill Summer during last week.

I refuse to call Mr McCarthy’s group ‘An Bord Snip Nua’ as it has been dubbed in most of the media. That name suggests something innocuous, something that involves a few minor adjustments to public services here and there. In fact the recommendations of this Special Group are monstrous and if implemented will have a devastating effect on whole swathes of Irish society.

The Special Group was appointed by the Government because it could be relied upon to promote a crude neo liberal approach to the catastrophe that is the Irish economy at the present time. But its prescriptions will merely add more catastrophe.

Everybody knows that the savage cuts in the Health Service, and especially to public hospitals, in the 1980s took a terrible toll on the ability to meet the needs of society. As a result we’ve had years of horror reports from Accident and Emergency wards and shortages of hospital beds. That’s because the cut of thousands of public beds was never reversed, even against the background of a rapidly rising population.

The Special Group report is full of equivalent prescriptions that will devastate areas of the public service. It is a litany of proposals to slash crucial services. In Education for example the proposal to savage thousands of teaching jobs including language teachers , is anti social in the extreme.

There are so many proposed cuts that many are scarcely being noticed but among those are ones that would have very detrimental effects on communities if implemented. Take the recommendation that the Institutes of Technology in Blanchardstown and Tallaght ‘should be amalgamated with the existing Dublin Institute of technology.’

Blanchardstown and Tallaght are two huge working class suburbs of Dublin. Both, but especially Blanchardstown, have seen explosive housing and apartment developments over the past ten years. This means an explosion in a youthful population over the next years. This is precisely why an Institute of technology is such a vital educational necessity and was campaigned for by local residents groups who understood its importance.

Now the Special Group lightmindedly proposes, in reality, a serious downgrading in the kind of education available to students in both suburban institutes. Inevitably the most important course would be centred in the city campuses with the poor relations left in ‘outlying’ areas. This must not be allowed to happen.

But back to the banks. They have accepted the taxpayers’ guarantees amounting to hundreds of billions. They have soaked up the recapitalisation funds again courtesy of the taxpayers. Now they turn and kick the same taxpayer, who happens to be a mortgage payer also, in the teeth. And the Minister for Finance wrings his hands.

Now there is a suggestion that the taxpayer, through the National Asset Management Agency, will be forced to pay over the current value for the toxic sites littered around the world. Time to end the rip off, nationalise them all now and let the taxpayer dictate for a change.

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