“There has been no delivery yet on whistleblowing legislation. Indeed the Labour Party presented such legislation when in opposition in 1999. The non renewal of Ms Bayliss’s contract is a loss to the psychiatric care sector and cannot but be seen as a vindictive response by the HSE, who part fund her post, to her role in exposing the mistreatment of patients.

“Similarly a member of staff in Blanchardstown Hospital has been the subject of a disciplinary hearing for allegedly sharing information related to cuts with the Defend Blanchardstown Hospital campaign.

“Whistleblowers don’t just require protection but active encouragement. More timely whistleblowing by decent people in the financial sector, the Catholic church, the nursing homes, in the Garda Siochana and many other places would have well served us in recent years.”

The workers are victims of the private equity vulture company, Lion Capital, which in the most callous way planned to walk away from its workforce to maximise its profit, handing it over to another company which will be equally ruthless, and treating these workers in the most disgusting fashion. This is capitalism red in tooth and claw and must be challenged.

Fine Gael and Labour Party Deputies come here and champion workers. They are the people who make and stand over the laws. For a change, let us have emergency laws to allow workers to receive their rights and to stop these gangsters behaving in this gangster-like fashion.

I call on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and its leaders to come out of hiding and meet fire with fire. They should mobilise the power of working people in the country to stand together with the Vita Cortex and La Senza workers. Workers standing together will show the power they have, forcing the Government to act and these companies to pay what they should.

Does he not see the significant contradiction in a supposedly sovereign Dáil meeting when, 100 metres from here, the EU, IMF and ECB are in Government Buildings enforcing the diktat of private institutions and European financial markets to the effect that their speculators must be repaid tens of billions of euro by the Irish people for gambling private debts and demanding that the Government channel these tens of billions of euro while it shreds jobs, living standards and health and education services?

Does the Taoiseach not accept that the Government is not much more than a puppet government? Does he not see that its decision to continue almost identically the bailout and austerity policy of its predecessor is poisoning every aspect of life in the State?

Is it not clear that Revenue, for example, felt under considerable pressure when it sent thousands of letters scarifying pensioners to beat out the €45 million that the Minister for Finance secretly, quietly and sneakily included in the budget?

On the wider international stage we had the heroic and repeated
mobilisation of millions of workers, peasants and the poor to overthrow the
brutal dictatorships in the Arab world. It is a complicated process of
course with the masses aspiring to a better life with democratic and human
rights, dignity and employment, while the old elites and army tops try to
reinvent themselves as democrats, the better to hang on to their wealth and
privileges at the expense of the majority.

Understandably, the masses go into revolutionary action with a palpable hatred of the old order which brutalised them so callously without necessarily having a clear view of which system would constitute a real
democratic alternative and share the wealth hitherto corralled for the elites. However, that is a debate that will now intensify as radical alternatives are seen to be needed.

In a bitter irony, while the people of north Africa and the Middle East
battled for democratic rights against dictatorial systems, the political
elite of the ‘democratic’ European Union shamefully dictated that the
people of Europe become the subjects of a new and increasingly assertive
dictatorship, that of the banking oligarchy and speculators in the
financial markets. Shamefully they capitulated before this faceless,
unelected and unaccountable cabal whose writ has been enforced openly in
Greece and Italy where their creatures have been installed in government
without reference to the democratic rights of the people.

The governments of Papademos and Monti, far from being made up of benign
and disinterested technocrats, are in reality filled with bankers and
representatives of big business put in place to salvage the fortunes of the
big players in the money markets. They are put there to ensure that the
billions gambled by these players are paid back on the backs of the
majority whose living standards services and very livelihoods are sucked
dry in the process.

‘Markets are asleep, but not for long. . . . ‘ is the ominous headline in
an editorial in yesterday’s Daily Mail which then warns, ‘but come next
week those markets will flex their muscles once again’ . The picture that
can be conjured up is of a primitive people terrorised by a ravenous ogre
which having gorged itself on the blood of innocent victims, retires to its
lair and falls into a sated sleep while the survivors await in terror its
re emergence to again stalk the land in its never ending lust for more
blood.

The question that leaps out it why the bulk of the media faithfully report
without condemnation this reign of terror in modern day Europe and far from
challenging its morality, endlessly speculate on what more must be done to
satisfy the beast. And to heap abuse on any of its intended victims among
workers and their trade union and social organisations which dare to stand
and resist its incessant demands.

The bulk of the media is of course itself a creature and tool of the
markets which is why in the Ireland of the property bubble, it cheered on
the voracious greed of the developers and bankers with disastrous
consequences for society. Which is why in response to the anger of its
readership, it may now demonise some of the more obvious agents of excess
but never admit its own culpability. But in times to come people will
clearly see the frenzied profiteering in the European financial markets as
deeply destructive of society generally in Europe as the activities of a
section of its membership was in driving the boom and making inevitable the
consequent bust in Ireland

The government of Fine Gael and the Labour Party, installed here last march
has shown itself to be as craven before the demands of the markets as any
of its counterparts in the EU. Before the General Election, these parties
pledged to bring revolutionary change from the policies pursued by Fianna
Fail and the Green Party in government. There was to be a bonfire of the
bondholders, vigorous emergency action to tackle unemployment and concrete
help for the substantial numbers of people slaving to meet unsustainable
monthly mortgage payments.

Instead we have had the same cringing capitulation to the diktats of the
IMF/EU/ECB that Irish taxpayers should be saddled with rescuing major
financial institutions in the EU from the consequences of their wild
gambling in the Irish property bubble and sacrifice our Health and
Education services while young people pile out of the country or rub
shoulders on the dole. That is a policy that will meet a head on challenge
in the New Year.

“I and my party colleagues support the action taken by the EBS workers 100%. A clear distinction must be made between the obscene rewards still given to the senior management in Ireland’s banks and the hard won pay and conditions of the ordinary employees.

“The strike by the EBS workers clearly falls into the latter category. The 13th month payment was a modest but important concession won by EBS workers 45 years ago to supplement a basic salary range which today amounts to €18,000 to €34,000, in other words below the average industrial wage.

“When I called upon Minister Noonan in the Dáil last week to intervene and give his consent to the 13th month payment he scandalously attempted to put the EBS workers in the same category as the top bankers who, incidentally, in the case of EBS received bonuses this year thanks to an exemption stood over by this government.

“The strike is a warning to senior management and the government that these workers have had enough. If there is no movement from the employer further action will likely be needed to place the necessary pressure on the employers.

“This dispute has to be understood in a wider context of an assault on the jobs and conditions of ordinary workers across the entire financial sector since the crisis began. The employers and government are opportunistically using the crisis and the justifiable anger that exists among the wider public towards the banks and financial institutions to implement sackings and cuts.

“A fighting response is needed and the lead from UNITE and the IBOA is vital in that regard. The EBS workers have set a good example to others.

“The Socialist Party will continue to give the EBS workers every practical support we can until the workers win back the payment they are rightfully due.”

For 45 years workers in the company were paid their annual wages in 13 equal instalments. Therefore, after nine years of service, a worker on a gross income of €30,000 would receive 13 instalments of €2,308, before tax deduction. The 13th instalment was paid in December, before Christmas. For decades this was accepted by everybody to be part of the basic wage and not as a Christmas bonus. It was consolidated into the wage de facto.

On 6 December, possibly as the Minister was on his feet in this Chamber announcing the budget, the workers were informed that their 13th instalment was not going to be paid. They had expected this payment the very next day in a pay packet. Obviously, they had planned for Christmas and had already spent the money on their families’ Christmas preparations, etc. They were totally reliant on the payment, given they are very low-paid or middle-paid workers. This is a devastating blow.

A loan facility at 12.5% interest offered to the workers by the management of EBS as an alleged compensation adds insult to the injury. It is because of this great outrage and the injustice the workers feel that they have called a strike on December 20. If it goes ahead, another day’s pay will be lost by those workers.

Perhaps the Minister can enlighten us but I understand the Department of Finance made that decision by virtue of powers invested either in the Department or in the Minister himself, in conjunction with AIB. In addition, senior managers on €90,000 a year who had the same arrangement are not having their 13th instalment withdrawn – not that the measure would be justified if they were.

On behalf of those workers I ask the Minister to go into immediate conclave with officials and management of AIB and EBS to ensure this decision is reversed.

The political and financial establishment in the United States responded to the financial collapse caused by the insane, greed driven, speculation in the sub prime housing market and the toxic debt packages that were traded among the world’s most ‘prestigious’ banks, by allowing the very same authors of the disaster to write their own bailout terms and ram them down the throats of the American people.

Former and serving chiefs in the world’s biggest investment bank, Goldman Sachs, were centrally involved. Goldman Sachs made a fortune on the sub prime scene at its height and then, with consummate cynicism, made another fortune speculating on the inevitable crash of this gigantic pyramid scheme built on the exploitation of poor and middle income Americans.

‘The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it is everywhere’, wrote Matt Taibi in Rolling Stone Magazine two years ago. Comparing it to a vampire squid sucking the economic lifeblood of humanity, he continues, ‘…the history of the recent financial crisis which . . .doubles as a history of . . . the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.’
After the dramatic events of the last few weeks, The Rolling Stone writer could now say much the same of the European Union response to the disaster in the Eurozone.

Silvio Berlusconi has just been peremptorily removed from office at the diktat of the speculators in the European financial markets, not because he was a despicable charlatan, but because they weren’t confident he had the authority to force through the drastic austerity on the Italian people which they see to be necessary to recovering their gambling debts. The replacement they have secured as the new Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti, is a ‘graduate’ of Goldman Sachs, having been an international adviser to the bank.

The new President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, is also a graduate, a very senior graduate in fact. He was a Vice Chairman and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs. This is the same bank which conspired with a right wing Greek government to falsify the national accounts so that Greece could join the Eurozone. The same Goldman Sachs also which specialises in speculating against the currencies and debt of weaker economies in order to make massive profits oblivious to the social dislocation and human suffering which this activity causes to working people and the poor in the affected countries.

In Greece former Prime Minister Papandreou has also been removed at the diktat of the markets and the leadership of the EU. The new Prime Minister Lucas Papademos was a major banker, Governor of the Bank of Greece in fact from 1994 to 2002. He is now tasked with bludgeoning the Greek people with a savage intensification of austerity and massive privatisations. Like Mario Monti in Italy, he is really a direct representative of the very sharks in the financial markets whose activities caused the current frightful crisis in the first place.

Monti and Papademos are both members of the Trilateral Commission a secretive organisation founded by US oligarch, David Rockefeller, to coordinate the strategies of US and European big business. In addition Monti is a member of the Bildergerg group an even more secretive and sinister strategising body for the world’s major capitalists.
Monti and Papademos have been foiseted on the Italian and Greek people respectively without ever having been elected. Monti is joined in the new Cabinet by an equally unelected conglomerate of representatives of big business and banking interests.

In all this we see the reality of what it takes to ‘satisfy the markets’, ‘give confidence to the markets’ and ‘reassaure the markets’, phrases faithfully repeated without questioning by just about every establishment commentator and journalist in Ireland and all over Europe. Shamefully the political establishment of this State, like their European counterparts,connive in this crushing of the democratic rights of millions of Europeans in the interest of the private profit of the private financial corporations which orchestrated these ‘coups d’etat’.

There is only one solution to the present crisis that is so destructive of society. The power of the financial markets must be challenged and broken by mass action of the ordinary people of Europe. The financial institutions must be brought into public ownership and democratic control and run for the benefit of the big majority.

The economic dislocation to the towns concerned, particularly Mullingar, Clonmel and Cavan with around 200 soldiers in each barracks, will be considerable. In Clonmel, PDFORRA estimate a loss of €9-10 million per annum to the town’s economy. That is a loss to shops, restaurants, small enterprises and trades and is equivalent to a small size factory or workplace closing down. There are no economic benefits to the State. No savings will be made, because moving the soldiers and their families will mean refurbishment and other extensive costs. What is the point when this is hitting the same domestic economy as the Government’s general austerity policy?

This morning, by agreement with the Irish embassy in Tel Aviv, seven of those citizens were to be put on a British Airways flight. They were brought to the airport and driven around before Israeli security forces prevented them from boarding their aircraft and brought them back to prison, where they are now being held incommunicado. For the past six days, citizens of this State, including an MEP, councillors and others of equal merit, have been kept in an Israeli jail and subjected to continuous harassment, strip searches, disorientation techniques and humiliation.

The staff of the Irish embassy have worked hard but, while they have done their job, the Tánaiste, as Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade of this State, has not acted as he should to condemn this action and demand the immediate release of these citizens. I ask him to summon the Israeli ambassador as soon as he leaves this Chamber to give him one hour to reveal the details on the release and safe return of our citizens. If he does not comply, I ask the Tánaiste to expel him. At least we can thereby make it clear to the world that the people of this country and internationally will not stand for Israel’s actions in imprisoning of the people of Gaza and acting like pirates.

The Society of St. Vincent de Paul is expecting an unprecedented level of demand for its services from desperate individuals and families this Christmas. Should the disaster that is the Greek economy not make the Tánaiste re-think his blind adherence to this policy? Three years ago, the Greek people were promised that if they accepted the savage programme of cuts they would be on the way to recovery by now. Instead, they have been plunged into greater misery and more crises. Will the Tánaiste explain the point of the Irish Labour Party given that it brings to the debate on the current crisis absolutely nothing different in the slightest from Merkel, Sarkozy and all the high priests and hawks of right wing, neoliberal capitalism?

The markets’ reacted positively’ to the last few attempts also but only for a while. As the reality dawned that none of the underlying causes of crisis in the Eurozone had been fundamentally altered, they again went into spasms. The current – temporary – ‘positive reaction’ is probably relief that they have not been forced to take anything like the extent of the burning that had been mooted.

Before the latest summit there had been open speculation in the world media that Greece would go into a total default on its huge debt causing meltdown, not just in the European financial system, but right across the world. This is what sparked the panic meetings between the Prime Ministers of Germany and France, the two main powerhouses in the EU.
It is said that the German Government was looking for a mandatory 60% write down by European banks on the money lent by them to Greece. The banks vehemently resisted and in the end they got substantially less burden to bear. The 50% write down that has been announced after the Summit is in fact ‘voluntary’ and there is already much speculation that many of the banks involved will not accept this.

Many of the headlines greeting the decisions of the summit give the impression that this is a victory for Greece. Nothing could be further from the truth as far as the Greek people are concerned. The savage austerity measures that have been inflicted on them for the last three years will not only remain but be intensified.

There has been very little real reporting here of what austerity has done to the lives of ordinary Greeks. Their economy has been wrecked with a collapse of investment and a massive increase in unemployment. Pensions have been savagely cut leaving many pensioners hanging around fruit and vegetable stalls as they close hoping to pick up some discarded food from the ground. Thousands of small enterprises have collapsed. In the public sector workers have seen their wages cut by an average of 40% over the last eighteen months and thirty thousand are being sacked by the end of this year with another 70,000 next year.

The hole into which the Greek people have been led by their political establishment and the EU/IMF/ECB, is, unfortunately, the same as where the Irish people are being directed by our own political establishment and the same ‘Troika’.

Never mind the patronising praise being heaped on the Fine Gael/Labour Government by the European Union establishment. They are, of course, infinitely grateful to have here a compliant political and media class which obediently follow the diktat that the Irish people must pay for the private gambles of the European financial institutions.

They try to cover up the effect of the savage austerity which that bailout entails. Thus the EU Summit declared that it is ‘pleased with the progress made by Ireland in the full implementation of its adjustment programme which is delivering positive results.’ The reality is that investment has plummeted while consumption is also down. The half million on the dole and the tens of thousands of forced out of their country in search of work could not agree with the Summit’s assesment.
What is desperately needed now is a break with austerity and a plan for investment and growth that would, in Ireland, put tens of thousands of people back to work, and millions on a Europe wide basis. As private capitalists go on investment strike because they do not see sufficient profits in productive investment, it is futile to continue to look there for a solution to mass unemployment.

This latest deal will not prevent more Eurozone countries from veering into further serious crisis with new panics in the financial markets, more panic responses and more sacrifices demanded from working people, pensioners and the unemployed. This is the inevitable spiral of crisis resulting from a diseased financial and economic system.
However, just like the people of Greece are doing , there will be a popular rejection and a fight back. A solution cannot be found, short of breaking the present financial markets system and the recreation of institutions that are in public ownership, under democratic control and tasked with the welfare of the majority in society as opposed to the current set up driven by private corporate profit.

The Government’s attitude to the victims of ruthless blackmail by property speculators and bankers has been insulting and begrudging. It constantly implies that an army of borrowers are waiting to cheat on their mortgages in order to excuse its inaction. Simply by an accident of birth dates, an entire generation is in mortgage bondage to the banks but the Government does not want to know.

The Taoiseach knows about the man who fell among thieves while travelling from Jerusalem to Jericho and was left dazed and badly beaten by the side of the road. The first passersby to come along were a priest and a Levite, who diverted their gaze and no doubt murmured to themselves that he must have done something to deserve it. That is the Government’s response to the victims of the bankers and the developers.

They gouged from ordinary workers who needed a home those obscene prices and the massive monthly mortgages are now creating a major crisis as workers lose their jobs and experience draconian cuts to their incomes, including budget cuts, causing enormous distress and mental suffering.

The Taoiseach knows that but the Keane report tinkers around the problem, offering guidelines to banks, which are “strongly encouraged” to follow them. Is it serious that the very institutions that were central to the profiteering and speculation that caused this crisis are now largely being looked at to resolve it? Their victims are now being thrown to the tender mercies of the banks. It is like sending a bunch of marauding foxes that had raided a henhouse back to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to their victims. Is the Government going to tolerate this situation?

Is it not clear that the substance to a solution is to revise downwards the blackmail prices people were forced to pay for their homes to real value of today and to calibrate downward the monthly repayments so workers can resume meeting their commitments and stay in their homes? These people were victims of these conspirators for profit, supported by the Government. Indeed, Fine Gael was very quiet on the speculation that was going on. Can the Taoiseach look home-owning taxpayers in the eye and say that the Government will not allow any write-down of what is tied around their necks when three weeks from now, he will authorise a €700 million payment to an unsecured Anglo Irish Bank bondholder, with €3.5 billion to be paid by the end of June? What will the Government do? Was this discussed this morning and what was the Taoiseach’s decision?

Today, however, there was devastating news. Staff in the hospital received a memo stating that 12 of 31 beds in the acute Laurel ward are closed with immediate effect and a surgical day ward with 24 beds will shortly be closed for two weeks and will return with only 8 of the 24 beds. This means that 30 to 40 day procedures will now be reduced to ten or 13. This is devastating news for the staff, the patients and especially for those suffering on waiting lists, and it arises from the most draconian cuts. In 2009 the hospital had a budget of €104 million; this year that budget is €84 million, a devastating 20% cut. The HSE acknowledges this is one of the best and most efficient hospitals in the country. In what is termed “activity” it has returned 4% over target and is supremely successful, but now it is being hammered into the ground with enormous consequences for the sick and suffering who languish for longer periods on waiting lists.

We are told that NewEra will advise on, and oversee, a restructuring of the semi states and will work with the Minister for public Service and Reform on the sale of assets.

In reality NewEra is being set up to privatise these public enterprises. That is crystal clear from the Fine Gael document dating back to early 2010 which declares baldly, ‘We will look to sell ESB International, Bord Gais and ESB PowerGen & Supply when market and other conditions are appropriate.’

This large scale push for privatisation is being propelled relentlessly by the EU/IMF/ECB. Invited into Ireland last November by the Fianna Fail/Green government, the so called Troika was supposed to come to the assistance of the Irish people in their hour of need. Their main agenda, however, has been to salvage European bankers and speculators from their disastrous gambling in the Irish property bubble when they lent tens of billions to Irish developers and banks in the hope of a quick profit.

Having got the previous and current governments to capitulate utterly to their demands that the Irish people should be made to pay the massive bad debts for which they had no responsibility whatever. Now the Troika wants a further instalment of its insatiable neoliberal agenda which is to force maximum privatisation of state assets.

The IMF has a long and inglorious record in using its clout to exert pressure in the interests of major transnational corporations. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was involved in what were known as Structural Adjustment Programmes in many African and Latin American countries which had debt difficulties. Pretending to be involved in the interests of the poorest populations on the globe, in reality the IMF acted like shock troops for Western capitalism.

It insisted on wholesale cuts to social and educational programmes which benefitted the poorest and dictated that public services and enterprises be handed over to multinational corporations. This policy left a trail of social and economic destruction in its wake.

It would be bad enough to try and force the sale of our State enterprises but worse the Troika is insisting that a substantial part of the proceeds goes into the black hole of banking debt. In other words it is almost literally like the selling off of the family solver to pay the family creditors except in this case the debts did not originate with the family members.

Semi state companies could play a key role in rescuing the Irish economy from the dire consequences of the policies of austerity being imposed on our people in order to channel their resources to rescuing the big financial gamblers . The savage assault on incomes and living standards has meant a drastic shrinking in the domestic economy and this is what is causing the live register of unemployed and seriously underemployed people to veer toward half a million. These companies now employ over 40,000 workers. However they could be developed in a way that would increase those numbers massively.

The government wants to sell off substantial parts of the ESB. Instead this company should be used to channel major investment infrastructural projects around the country. This could be in the area of alternative energy generation or related activities that could see workers of many different skills taken off the dole.

Among the sectors of infrastructure that the government would like to target for privatisation is our water production and supply service. Already it has been decided to remove responsibility for water from the local authorities and put it in the hands of one national company to be called Irish Water. The government has also announced the imposition of a water tax within the next few years. This is blatant preparation for the handing of our water distribution systems over to big business operators.

The result of these privatisations if carried through would not be radically improved services for the majority of the people. What we would have are severe rises in prices as the privateers sought a profit on their investments on the backs of ordinary people.

The trade union Unite has expressed its total opposition to the government’s privatisation programme. It has also stated its intention to fight any forced privatisation in the ESB with industrial action. Workers throughout the economy and indeed the personal customers of the ESB should join in this resistance and leave the government in no doubt but that a substantial numbers of citizens will fight to maintain public ownership but also to turn the publicly owned companies into democratically run engines of recovery for jobs and communities.

The Minister made headlines in the world’s financial media and got massive coverage in the Irish media when he declared that the Irish government would force unguaranteed bondholders in Anglo Irish Bank to take the hit for their gambling excesses in Irish and international property through that bank. The total amounts of these bonds came to €3.5 billion and the Minister said, ‘We don’t think that Irish taxpayers should redeem what has become speculative investment.’

Mr Noonan said that the IMF ‘supported the strategy’ and that banks like Anglo Irish were ‘no longer normal entities and are more like warehouses for bad debts.’ These bold statements were made to coincide with a major propaganda blitz by the government at home to coincide with the reaching of the first hundred days of the Fine Gael/Labour Coalition in office.

On Saturday last in a town in Poland, on the fringes of a meeting of EU finance ministers, the Irish Finance Minister capitulated utterly to the same speculating bondholders. Following a meeting with the President of the European Central Bank, Jean Claude Trichet, Mr Noonan announced that after all there would be no ‘burning’ of those who had recklessly loaned money to Anglo. The Minister was obediently following the diktat of the ECB laid down at that meeting.

The end result of the government’s capitulation is that massive sums of money are to be paid to the unsecured bondholders. According to Davy Stockbrokers, on November 2, one billion dollars (€740 million) will be paid over. On January 25 next year, a further €1.25 billion will be paid and in June that will be followed by €1.05 billion. The Irish taxpayer is being forced by its government to pay these exorbitant amounts for debts for which we have no more responsibility than we would have for an individual who gambles his life savings in a game of poker.

By coincidence the figure of €3.5 billion being gouged from the Irish people in this case is an almost identical amount to the savage cuts of €3.6 which the government is preparing to announce in the December Budget. This juxtaposition of cuts and payments to bondholders summarises the treachery of the policy adopted by the current government from its predecessor.

Unlike the banner headlines manufactured from Mr Noonan’s declaration in Washington, the shameful capitulation last week was barely reported in the Irish media. Even after I had trenchantly raised it with the Taoiseach in the Dail on Tuesday and demanded an explanation there was scarcely a murmur of reportage. This is doing a serious disservice to the Irish people and questions should be asked why the snatching of such a huge amount of money that should be going instead to public investment and services should be treated as a virtual non story.

In this shameful affair, the ECB should be seen clearly for what it is doing, that is salvaging the major European bankers from their speculative lending to Irish bankers and developers. The fact that this policy which has been hammered into the EU/IMF/ECB Memorandum of last November is causing mayhem in the Irish economy seems to be of no concern. The fact that nearly half a million of our people are unemployed or seriously under employed and suffering real hardship seems to be immaterial when the interests of the faceless, unelected and unaccountable financial institutions that constitute the financial markets are at stake.
Mr Noonan’s pathetic excuses for reneging on his declared intention to make the bondholders pay show which forces really rule the economies of Europe. This wouldn’t be the way forward ‘if you were trying to encourage the markets’ he declared and referred to a ‘quick knock on effect into Italy and Spain’ when there had been suggestions earlier this year that bondholders who had lent to Greece should also take a hit.
What happened is that the bankers and hedge fund operators drove up the interest they charged to Italy and Spain to exorbitant levels in order to blackmail the European political establishment from insisting that they should pay for some of the crisis of their system. It worked for them.

However the disaster in the Greek economy and the savage assault on the living standards of the Greek working class bear cruel witness that the EU policy of austerity is failing disastrously as it is in Ireland. Surely all this cries out for revolutionary changes involving the breaking of the markets system and the creation of a financial system that is brought into public ownership and democratic control and directed toward the wellbeing of society rather than private corporate profit.

Members are aware they gambled wildly on property bubbles in Spain and Ireland. Moreover, many European financial institutions were involved in the schemes that were built up around the sub-prime mortgage industry in the United States and accrued toxic debts to levels that are still unknown but which I have no doubt are being carefully covered up at present.

Last July, in a panic response to a fear that Greece might be forced to default on its borrowings, the EU leaders concocted this further extension to the European Financial Stability Mechanism. In essence it provided for the borrowing of masses of money in the financial markets, which was to be lent to the peripheral countries in crisis.
The ordinary people of those countries were then to be bled dry to meet the payments demanded by the banks, hedge fund operators and the various speculators.

Surely it should be clear to the Government and even to its backbenchers that this policy is a spectacular failure. Three years of austerity in Greece and in Ireland have yielded a dismal failure with an enormously increased crisis. All that austerity is doing, that is, the savaging of the living standards and services of the working class people who are the vast majority in society, is to pile up further crises.

As the Government has reversed plans to put €3.5 billion of losses onto Senior bondholders of Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide, Joe questions why it is ordinary people yet again who are made to bare the brunt of this economic crisis.

This is in stark contrast to the repeated bailouts of bankers and speculators.

If you agree with the video and would like to join the Socialist Party, to get involved in an organised fightback against austerity, do not hesitate to contact us at (01) 6772592 or info@socialistparty.ney

Critics may fight over the meaning of the poem but those opening lines would he highly appropriate to describe Fine Gael and Labour leaders and backbenchers as they assembled for the reopening of Dail Eireann yesterday, a meeting that began the Autumn session with a whimper when a mighty bang was called for.

Is there any other parliament where the government can return after an absence of seven weeks and sets the agenda as if nothing significant had happened in the break? Surely the very first day should have been given over to major developments that did occur and have major repercussion for the wellbeing of our people?

Surely the government should be forced to give a significant account of how its policies have affected the people they supposedly serve in the course of the summer interval and give its response to developments.? It was mostly hollowness however as the government parties ‘leaned together’ in avoiding a major accountability session.

There were indeed momentous developments while the national parliament was in recess. In the European financial markets, the speculators lined up to pile on the pressure to try and safeguard their gigantic gambles on the economies of Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy. In doing so they are prepared to drive the Eurozone into partial meltdown.

In Ireland we had the dispiriting announcement that the total number of people unemployed had continued to increase. Mass unemployment and the financial markets are closely linked of course, since our government has chosen, like its predecessor, to capitulate to the sharks in the markets and repay their bad debts rather than put the billions into urgent programmes of job creation.

The shock announcement last week that the TalkTalk corporation in Waterford would close abruptly with 575 workers thrown on the human scrap heap, underlined the tragedy of lives being wrecked by the crisis. The mechanism that was devised to deal with this dreadful situation in the Dail was really frustrating. Under a new parliamentary device known as Topical Issues, three Waterford deputies were offered a total of six minutes to speak on the catastrophe while the Minister for Enterprise and Jobs had six minutes to respond. It is little wonder that the independent deputy, John Halligan, protested loudly until suspended from the Chamber.

United Left Alliance deputies did raise the crucial issues of the proposed privatisation of ESB and other crucial State assets as well as the revelation by the National Treatment Purchase Fund that the number of public patients waiting more than three months for a colonoscopy had more than doubled in the last year.

In relation to this latter issue, the fact that one of the hospitals with the longest waiting list was St Luke’s in Kilkenny will struck a particular chord since it was here that a long wait on a list in 2005/06 caused the premature death from cancer of the brave Susie Long. The solemn promise made after her death by the then Minister for Health that all those needing tests would be seen in a month has been shamefully breached.

It was appropriate to raise these issues matters of urgency but there should have been a general State of the Nation review whereby the government would have been forced to explain the disastrous economic consequences of its austerity programme. Austerity is simply crushing economic development, causing immense suffering ranging from the misery of mass unemployment to people dying while waiting to get treatment in our Health Service.

In the Dail this Autumn the Left will hammer home this message above all else. We will point to the fact that not just socialists but even capitalist institutions and economists are pointing to the failure of the austerity juggernaut. The United Nations Conference of Trade and Development(UNCTAD) last week published a document that is coruscating in its criticism of the policies being adopted by governments like Ireland’s and the leadership of the European Union and its institutions. UNCTAD’s General Secretary was former head of the World Trade Organisation.

The report states, ‘Although it is universally recognised that the crisis was the result of financial market failure, little has been learned about placing too much confidence in the judgement of financial market actors, including rating agencies.’ Yet it is to these very same actors that the economic and political establishment in Europe has been bending the knee.

What is certain is that as the Autumn progresses, the victims of austerity – ordinary working people, the unemployed, pensioners and students – will begin to see that they themselves must openly challenge and mobilise in opposition.

European and American big business interests are already jockeying shamelessly to grab what they can in post Gadaffi Libya in terms of lucrative oil and reconstruction contracts.

Wednesday’s British Independent sums it up in an article entitled , ‘Dash for profit in post-war Libya carve up.’ ‘British businesses are scrambling to return to Libya in anticipation of the end to the country’s civil war, but they are concerned that European and North American rivals are already stealing a march as a new race to turn profit out of the war torn nation begins. . . . industry figures are aware that billions could be made in the coming years from rebuilding Libya.’

This should surprise no one since, for decades, the approach to Libya adopted by western powers and western based corporations has been marked by nauseating hypocrisy.

During his forty year dictatorship over Libya’s 6.5 million people, Colonel Gaddafi harboured major delusions about his own importance as an Arab leader, striking a posture as a champion of liberation for oppressed people around the world. The reality was quite different.

Gaddafi ‘s ‘Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Republic’ was neither socialist nor a people’s democracy but brutally repressed any opposition to the regime. And in time honoured fashion, Gaddafi enriched himself, his family and cronies with the same cynicism as if he were a Russian oligarch or an American billionaire.

The claim by the NATO powers that its bombing campaign was for humanitarian reasons rang hollow from the very beginning. People hadn’t forgotten the lies that NATO leaders in the US and Britain told to justify their invasion of Iraq and the hundreds of thousands of lives that that particular ‘humanitarian’ intervention cost since 2003. Neither was there any concern for the unfortunate people in Bahrain who bravely mobilised for democracy and change a few months ago only to be massacred by Saudi Arabian troops with the unexpressed complicity of the NATO ‘humanitarians’. Nor indeed do we ever hear a protest from the same quarters in defence of the oppressed people of Saudia Arabia itself, the Western powers’ closest ally in the Arab world.

The real reason for the quick intervention by key western powers in Libya was twofold, to guarantee the flow of oil and to attempt to get control of the Arab revolution, having been caught badly off side when the magnificent movements for democracy and change exploded into the Arab spring. Let’s remember the French government’s offer to send in riot police to help the Tunisian dictatorship restore order in response to the initial uprising there. Let’s remember also that the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt was primarily supported by the United States and that virtually all the dictators in the Arab world were militarily equipped by western arms contractors and politically supported by the US, Britain and France.

Gaddafi was no exception. Once his flirtation with various terrorist groups like the IRA in Ireland and the Red Brigades in Italy petered out and attacks on US military targets ended, he was rehabilitated by the west as expressed by the obsequious visit of former British Prime Minister Blair to his tent near his hometown of Sirte. Lucrative arms deals and the guarantee of desperately needed oil has a magical way of making great advocates of democracy forgive and forget the past crimes of barbaric dictatorships and turn a blind eye to their ongoing repression and torture.

The National Transition Council based until now in the eastern city of Benghazi and claiming to represent the opposition to Gaddafi, is a creature of the NATO powers. Initially the uprising in that city was representative of the population as a whole including particularly workers and the poor. However increasingly pro big business elements and also former Gaddafi lieutenants who abandoned the sinking ship have come to dominate. Already the NTC has guaranteed that the contracts done between the Gaddafi government and western oil companies will be honoured.

Replacing an eccentric tyrant with a government that may adopt the trappings of democracy but then subjugate itself to the commercial interests of multinational corporations and to the political pressures of European and American neo liberal governments will not meet the aspirations of the Libyan people. They will demand freedom and democratic rights but also that the wealth of their country is developed for the benefit of all rather than for western big business. That can only be achieved when the policies of capitalist governments of NATO are rejected.

In fact the key to the Arab revolution as a whole – and this has yet to develop – is when working people and the poor organise to follow the overthrow of dictators with the removal of the political and economic elites on which they rested and the taking of the major wealth into democratic public ownership for the benefit of all.