CPI Makes Demands!

STATEMENT ON THE CURRENT ECONOMIC SITUATION AND THE ROLE OF THE IMF

Chickens coming home to roost

The Communist Party of Ireland calls upon working people, and in the first place the organisation that claims to represent them, the trade union movement, to resist the policies that both the European Union and the International Monetary Fund are imposing and will impose in the coming period.

It would be laughable if it was not so serious for working people of this country to hear the three main establishment parties outdoing each other in their pretence of defending our national sovereignty. All of them, together with the mass media, railed against those who raised the question of the loss of sovereignty that would result if we passed the Lisbon Treaty, as well as previous EU Treaties. Did we not constantly hear the common refrain, that sovereignty was an “outmoded concept”?

The Irish people will have to shoulder a further burden of corporate debt piled upon corporate debt. The sovereign debt now being placed on the backs of the people is unsustainable and unpayable. This is a massive transfer of wealth from working people to global finance corporations through a revolving door whereby money is borrowed from institutions and is then being given back to them.

The IMF “medicine,” like that now being imposed by the European Union, will only lead to the devastation of public services. Older people will die on trolleys waiting for a bed, more children will have to forgo operations and other treatment, and many more will go to bed hungry. Schools and hospitals will close; thousands of pensioners will be driven deeper into poverty.

Their “medicine” is for making the poor, the sick, our children, working people, small businesses, the self-employed, family farmers and those receiving social welfare benefits pay for the crisis of the system itself.

This debt belongs to the speculators, the finance houses, the German and French banks. It is not the people’s debt; it is not the people’s responsibility.

The deep structural weakness, north and south, can be overcome only by taking a strategic all-Ireland approach to economic and social development, a strategy that is politically, economically and socially transformative. Only the development of a socially planned use of capital and resources can overcome the anarchy and chaos of capitalism.

Central to any such alternative must be:

• repudiating the debt; it is their debt, not ours;

• the return of fiscal powers from Brussels to the Irish people;

• the establishment of a state investment bank;

• the establishment of an all-Ireland economic development agency under democratic control;

• the social control of all natural and marine resources, to be developed in a sustainable manner by the people.