Government still locked into billions in further cuts, enormous debt, falling industrial production and renewed property bubble
In a statement, Richard Boyd Barrett TD, Finance spokesperson for the People Before Profit Alliance has said that government hype and celebrations around the so-called “exit” from the EU-IMF programme is bordering on the ridiculous.
Deputy Boyd Barrett said that beyond government spin, Ireland remained fully locked into to a programme requiring billions in further budget cuts in 2014, debt re-payments of 1 billion in the coming year, an odious debt mountain, declining industrial production, flat economic growth and an alarming return of a property bubble.
He pointed out that between the various EU and Fiscal treaty budgetary requirements and troika post programme surveillance, Ireland’s economy will remain firmly in control of the same people who were in control during the bail-out programme.
Deputy Boyd Barrett said that meaningful economic recovery could not take place without large-scale public investment in strategic enterprise and infrastructure and this was precluded as a result of enormous annual interest payments on Ireland’s odious debt that would continue for the next decade, at least.
Richard Boyd Barrett said: “All this hype and spin around the so-called exit from the programme is pretty ridiculous. Next year the government is still required to make billions in further cuts and we are still totally bound into budgetary monitoring and surveillance by the EU-IMF. They do not need a programme anymore to control us because the government have signed us into a permanent troika austerity programme called the fiscal treaty.
The degree of external control over Ireland’s economy is all the greater because of a massive debt burden that we are being forced to pay down every year for the next 20 years. Next year we will have to pay 1 billion in interest alone – the equivalent of the entire education budget. So billions that should be going into education, health services, jobs programmes and strategic investment will continue to be siphoned out of the country, while the economy remains on its knees.
The news that Ireland’s industrial production fell by a massive 11.6 per cent in October and that production is slowing down in Europe as whole is very alarming. Despite all the government’s claims about new jobs, the growth we need to pay these massive debts and fuel economic recovery simply isn’t happening.
The reason the government can claim a small increase in the numbers working is because the jobs being created are all extremely low paid or are schemes that give no boost to the overall economy.
One of the most alarming things now happening is that a new property bubble is developing in Dublin in particular. Unbelievably, this is being stoked up by the government who are again putting in place property tax reliefs to encourage big property speculators to cash in on cheap property and rising rents ¨this is happening while the housing and homelessness crisis has reached historic levels and there is a massive shortage of social housing. Meanwhile, a hundred thousand building workers still languish on the dole. So instead of building the social housing we need the government is encouraging speculators to exploit a dysfunctional housing market and pump it up again. The stupidity of this is staggering and an alarming repeat of the mistakes that led to the crash in the first place.
The only way real recovery can happen is if we reduce or cancel the massive debt interest payments now being sucked out of the economy and redirect these funds into productive investment and real job creation. We also need progressive and re-distributive taxes on profits and wealth to unlock further investment funds for jobs and to lift the burden on low and middle income households”.