Richard Boyd Barrett warns EU and Government against austerity

Taoiseach, I think there are very alarming signs that both the European Union and the Irish Government are utterly failing to learn the lessons, the obvious lessons, of the current public health emergency and are planning to revert to the failed austerity policies that did such damage in the aftermath of the financial crash of 2008 and impose the cost and the cost of the burden of the current public health emergency, once again on working people and on the key public services on which we depend and depend more than ever. The fact that the European Union is opting for loans with conditions, immediately the alarm bells of austerity start to ring. They've learned nothing. Those loans, those conditions, crippled this country and imposed incredible suffering and hardship on people and were utterly counterproductive. The last time round, but we have the signs that they're planning to do it all over again. Pascal Donoghue's warning of a so-called tapering of Covid payments, cuts in these payments, when in fact the Government were forced to acknowledge that really nobody could be expected to live on less than €350, but now we're talking about cutting that payment and pushing people into poverty. People who are in no way responsible for the fact that they've lost jobs and income. We are hiring the nurses we so desperately need for the health service on temporary agency contracts, hire them and fire them contracts where they have no rights whatsoever. We have still, as I discovered from Phil Nihae Hay on the phone the other day, not paid the nurses, most of them, the pay award that they won as a result of the industrial action they took last year. In the majority of hospitals, the nurses who are protecting us at the moment have not got their pay awards. Disgraceful. The failure to intervene to support the Debenhams workers who are outside who are just being ditched in the most cynical way by a private company still making profits in the North, still operating online services in this country, still operating in the UK, who clearly have used the Covid crisis as an opportunity to ditch their workers and the Government. I was talking to the workers outside, they've been emailing ministers saying nothing to do with us. There's nothing we can do. That is a very worrying sign for the many workers who may face similar job losses as a result of this crisis. These are bad signs for the future Taoiseach. Now it seems to me the absolute inescapable lesson of the current public health emergency, absolutely indisputable conclusion one can draw, is when you are faced with a major emergency and challenge to society, you cannot let austerity and the market dictate the response. We learnt, we learnt, the Government learnt, it had to be the State to marshal all of the resources necessary in order to respond, to take over private healthcare capacity to respond to a public health emergency. So why would the Government want to revert to a two-tier health system? Why would it want to employ nurses on temporary contracts through a private agency and then be able to fire them after the crisis? It makes no sense whatsoever. And if that's true about a health emergency, it's true about a climate emergency. It's true about a housing emergency. It's true about the need to prevent mass unemployment, which we could be facing in the aftermath of that crisis. But none of that is necessary if the State intervenes with will and marshals the resources that exist in our society. Wealth is not paper money as we've discovered during this crisis. It's the factories that produce ventilators. It's the hospitals. It's the teachers. It's the essential workers. The retail workers. They are the wealth. They are the ones who have to be protected and resourced in order that we learn the lessons of this crisis. Those truths are staring us in the face and yet the Government seems intent, along with the EU, on reverting to the failed mistakes of the past. So I urge the Government and I urge the EU to learn those lessons. We don't have to face austerity and mass unemployment if we take the wealth and resources that exist and put them into a single-tier, properly resourced health service. into resolving the housing crisis. Smaller class sizes and redeploying workers who have lost their jobs in the areas we need them. Education, health care, public services. We don't need to repeat the mistakes of the past. DER SECRETARY MALLON