Socialists lead
anti-austerity fight in Irish parliament
AFTER FEBRUARY’S historic election the new Dáil
Éireann (lower house of the Irish parliament) assembled on March 9 to
elect the Taoiseach (prime minister).
The Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny was proposed as
Taoiseach by the youngest Fine Gael TD in a gushing speech. Then
Labour’s youngest TD was very happy to second the proposal. The leader
of the defeated Fianna Fáil party, Micheál Martin, gave his own
endorsement. As people watched on live TV undoubtedly many wondered who
was going to bring some reality into these proceedings, who would oppose
the austerity consensus and fight for the victims of this crisis,
ordinary working class people?
Gerry Adams, leading a group of fourteen Sinn Féin
TDs, should have been next but in a move that will be symptomatic of the
new Dáil, he was beaten to the punch by Socialist Party and United Left
Alliance TD, Joe Higgins.
Joe saw Adams’ hesitation, rose to his feet
quicker, was duly recognised by the Ceann Comhairle (chair), and then
delivered a blistering speech that marked the cards of the new
government and outlined the role that the Socialist Party and the United
Left Alliance, a coalition only formed last October, would play in
opposing the government’s attacks and to build a real left and socialist
alternative.
In the course of the first day, new Socialist
Party TD Clare Daly and the three other ULA TDs also spoke. Printed
below are edited extracts from Joe and Clare’s speeches.
I OPPOSE the nomination of Deputy Enda Kenny as
Taoiseach of a Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition government. The very
first sentence of the programme for government states that a democratic
revolution took place in Ireland on 25 February. The Oxford dictionary
defines ‘revolution’ as the overthrow of a government or social order in
favour of a new system. That being the case, the programme presented by
Deputy Kenny is a grotesque betrayal of that revolution because it
proposes, almost to the letter, to continue the reactionary programme of
the old order of the late and unlamented regime of Fianna Fáil and the
Green Party, a regime that was rightly reviled, rejected and sent to
oblivion by the Irish people for its economic and political crimes.
Given the day that it is [Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent], I am
surprised that the remnants of that government did not return with their
brows heavily stained with penitential ash to recognise the role it
played.
The outgoing regime indulged the profiteering
speculators and grasping bankers, imprisoning a generation of young
working people in monstrous mortgages and negative equity. When that
greedfest inevitably choked on its own excess, it treacherously connived
with the EU, IMF and ECB to save the skins of the major European banks
that had their snouts deep in the feeding trough that was the Irish
property market where they slurped as frenetically as any Fianna Fáil
developer or big Irish banker.
For this, and the crash that inevitably resulted, we
see the savage attacks on the living standards of our people, which this
nominee for government intends to continue. They attack public services
and steal from the disabled and the poor. A revolution would overturn
and reverse all that. However, this nominee for Taoiseach proposes to
confirm and reinstate the discredited programme of a discredited
government. Therefore, a vote for Deputy Kenny for Taoiseach is a vote
not for revolution or change, but for counter-revolution and more of the
same. It is a vote for monstrous cuts in the living standards of workers
and the unemployed, for wholesale privatisation of public assets, for
blatant new tax burdens on ordinary people, including a water tax and
home tax, and for a health service held to ransom by profit-seeking
private insurance companies.
The first paragraph of the first chapter of a
proposal for government that would be honest would try to answer the
question: ‘Why should the Irish people have their economic life-blood
drained to salvage the tens of billions of euro gambled and lost by
private speculators in private deals for private profit in Irish
property? By what moral code does a government justify placing that
millstone on our people?’ We will put that question to them again and
again until it is answered.
This is not the first time an Irish political
establishment responded to an Irish and Europe-wide crisis by
sacrificing its people. Nearly 100 years ago, the forebears of today’s
speculating European financiers and their political clients plunged into
war in a vicious competition for markets, raw materials and profits. The
Irish Parliamentary Party of the day will forever be remembered in
infamy for its campaign to dragoon a generation of youth to feed the
insatiable appetite of the imperial war makers. Today, by sacrificing
our people, our services and our youth to feed the equally insatiable
appetite of the wolves in the European and world financial markets –
faceless, unelected and unaccountable – first Fianna Fáil and the
Greens, then Fine Gael and Labour, play an equally shameful role as the
Irish Parliamentary Party. It was a great Irish socialist, James
Connolly, who, in opposition to that conflict, called for a torch to be
lit in Ireland that would "not burn out until the last throne and the
last capitalist bond and debenture" was burned. How deeply ashamed James
Connolly would be today that the Labour Party he founded marches into
Dáil Éireann to become part of a government that will burn not the
bondholders, the speculators or the grasping big bankers but the Irish
people, the working class, the unemployed, the poor and the low and
middle-income workers.
The Socialist Party and the United Left Alliance
rejects the right wing programme proposed by Deputy Kenny. We reject the
rule of the financial markets, which is causing such crisis and
suffering among our people. We demand instead that they be brought to
heel and brought into public ownership and democratic control in Ireland
and Europe to be used instead as vehicles of major public investment to
create projects that would quickly see tens of thousands of people
returning to work from the tragedy of standing in the dole queue.
The incoming government will have a crushing
majority in this Dáil. It should not think from this that its economic
programme of savage austerity will go unchallenged. It certainly will be
challenged in this chamber and it should be remembered that we in the
United Left will facilitate the mobilisation of worker power, people
power and community power to defend the living standards of the vast
majority of people, who are attacked by this programme.
Deputy Clare Daly:
THE TAOISEACH is being remarkably
understated when he refers to a leap of faith being necessary to
convince us that the programme he has outlined somehow heralds a new
dawn. The reality is that it would require blind faith and a leap of
such epic proportions that Cú Chulainn himself [an Irish mythological
hero] would not be able to manage it. The reason we can state as much
with confidence is that the programme the Taoiseach has outlined, woolly
as it may be in parts, is virtually identical to that implemented by his
predecessors, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, for which they paid such
a heavy and justifiable price at the ballot box.
I put the government on notice that
when it attempts to implement the measures outlined it will face a
battle royal in communities and workplaces. It is okay in here today in
that there is something of a party atmosphere. But I do not see too many
people outside Leinster House partying today. Those honest mortgage
holders in their modest homes, who felt their solution was in this
government, will find themselves foisted with a home tax and water
charges on top of their existing debt burdens. We do not see too many
public sector workers celebrating the fact that 25,000 of them will lose
their jobs. Neither are there celebrations among the 300,000 workers
covered by employment regulation orders, such as those in the catering
industry, some of whom greeted us on our way into Leinster House this
morning. Their employment terms and conditions are now up for review as
a result of the government’s recommitment to the structural reform
programme outlined by its predecessor.
As colleagues earlier stated, many in
the semi-state sector, from which I came, are not happy and are fearful
the only concrete figures for revenue-generation proposed in the
programme for government will come from the sell-off of what the
government parties deem to be non-strategic state assets. The Socialist
Party and the United Left Alliance believe all state assets are
strategic and important. It is economic lunacy to attempt to dispose of
these assets. I assure the government that its efforts in this regard
will be met with vigorous opposition by those of us on this side of the
chamber, by our colleagues in the workplace and the communities which we
represent.
When they voted for this government,
people hoped they were voting for change. What they got, however, was
more of the same. The Taoiseach should be aware the people will not wait
five years to give him the same medicine they gave his predecessor. His
programme for government will be met with active opposition in the real
world, the one in which people are not partying today. I give him our
pledge that we will be to the forefront in raising these issues in the
chamber and taking the battles in here outside to communities.
I sincerely hope the Taoiseach
enjoyed today because his honeymoon will be incredibly short-lived.
