Statement by the Communist Party of Ireland
15 December 2013
Today the Irish establishment loudly proclaims that this state, and by extension the Irish people, has regained its sovereignty. This is as far from the truth as one can get. The Irish establishment has long since abandoned the little sovereignty this state ever had.
The Maastricht, Nice and Lisbon Treaties copperfastened the straitjacket on the democracy and independence of Ireland, and the current talks on banking union are for tightening the straps even further.
The EU-ECB-IMF troika and the “markets” are controlled by the same forces, the same financial speculators and the same transnational corporations. The direct and open control by identifiable global financial institutions and individuals is no longer considered desirable or necessary, but the same class and the same forces remain in charge—with the complete and abject acquiescence of the internal political troika Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and the Labour Party, and the Irish business interests they represent.
The indebtedness of this state to the amount of 125 per cent of GDP by the socialisation of the odious corporate debt imposed upon our people is simply unpayable. The programme of privatisation of state-owned companies and public services will continue. The people’s wealth will be sold off at bargain-basement prices. The so-called “markets” will have first call on the wealth created by Irish workers in the form of debt servicing.
The Irish establishment, in active collaboration with the EU, have used and will use the debt as a choke chain, imposing and intensifying savage attacks on working people, those on social welfare, pensioners, the sick, and children. They will continue to create a low-wage economy of precarious employment. The scale of the debt can only result in the constant and permanent imposition of austerity, affecting the lives of this and future generations.
It is the challenge to this generation of working people to mobilise and fight for a radical transformative economic and social strategy that is centred on the people’s needs, and not the profits of the monopolies and other parasitic elements.
The only way forward for working people is either to accept permanent debt servitude or to build an alternative political, economic and social system. Only working people can fully establish and guarantee real and meaningful national political and economic sovereignty and independence. A first step is the repudiation of this odious anti-people debt.
