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| Sinn Féin vice president Mary Lou McDonald TD at the seminar |
By Theo Russell
SINN Féin vice president Mary Lou McDonald TD told a
seminar in London last week that
the new European “fiscal compact” is “an insidious treaty which will
institutionalise a regime of hardship overseen by the EU, institutionalise
austerity policies and emasculate the political process in Ireland”.
She was
addressing a Sinn Féin seminar, “Economic Crisis – lessons from Ireland” at the House of
Commons, on the same day as the Irish government reluctantly announced a
referendum on the pact. Two weeks ago the EU-IMF “Troika” visited Dublin and warned that
if Anglo-Irish Bank bondholders were not repaid, “a financial ‘bomb’ would go
off” in Ireland.
Sinn Féin has
welcomed the referendum decision and will mount a strong campaign against
ratifying the pact. As the only major party in the Republic against the
consensus on repaying bank debts and slashing spending, the party’s poll
ratings have leapt from 10 per cent at last year’s general election to 25 per cent
now.
Dublin is faced with
finding €63 billion for recapitalising its main banks and has agreed to issue
promissory notes for €31 billion to pay for winding up Anglo-Irish, with the
first €3 billion due at the end of March – shortly before the referendum. The
total bailout for Anglo-Irish alone including interest is €47 billion, and will
take at least the next 10 years to pay off.
McDonald
described Anglo-Irish as “a zombie bank propped up by the state” and said: “We
need to move away from a position that the banks are ‘too big to fail’, but
ordinary people can suffer the consequences.”
She called for a
debate on cancelling the debts of Ireland, Greece and other EU
countries, and said: “We need to play hardball with the EU Troika to have some
sort of structure to bringing the debt down.”
She said
unemployment in Ireland was officially
14 per cent, but this excluded many self-employed people, particularly in construction.
“Around 6,000 mainly young people are leaving the country every month, and over
100,000 households are in serious mortgage difficulties. We have now seen five
austerity budgets in a row, with the latest cutting €3.8 billion in government
spending and increasing a ‘flat’ (in other words non-progressive) tax on
households.”
Pat Doherty MP
re-affirmed the policy of not backing a referendum on Irish unity without first
gaining the confidence of unionists. He said a recent Sinn Féin conference on
Irish unity in Derry had attracted 200 people from the
unionist community, out of a total of 900.
Doherty said: “Working
class unionists feel absolutely abandoned and betrayed by the UUP and DUP, and
what we are seeing is increasing numbers of unionists coming into Sinn Féin
advice centres seeking help and support.”
He highlighted
the problems created by the coalition government’s spending cuts and said that
what they agreed on spending on infrastructure in the north of Ireland in
negotiations for the Good Friday Agreement had now been slashed by 40 per cent.
Doherty backed a
review of structures in the north which could see fewer Executive posts, Westminster and Assembly
constituencies, and the number of councils reduced from 26 to 11
“super-councils”.
“Sinn Féin’s
elected officials,” he added, “only take the average industrial wage, and have
had no salary increase in the last five years.”
