Joe Higgins MEP welcomes European Parliament’s rejection of SWIFT agreement

‘It’s only €2 per week.’ Minister for the Environment, Phil Hogan, was speaking on RTE’s Six One News on Tuesday about the new Household Tax which the Fine Gael/Labour Party Government had agreed at Cabinet earlier in the day. Then in that interview of a few minutes he repeated four more times, ‘It’s only €2 a week.’ Had Hamlet been listening, he might have declared, ‘The Minister doth protest too much.’

As recently as a year ago when I and others on the Left wrote and spoke about ‘the dictatorship of the financial markets’ many people thought we were exaggerating. However after the events of the past few weeks, can there be any doubt but that we are witnessing a full frontal assault on democratic rights by European bondholders, bankers and speculators facilitated by the leadership of the European Union?

There is only one real scandal involved in the issues surrounding Health Minister James Reilly’s problems arising from his investment in a private nursing home in County Tipperary. It is not because his name is in Stubbs Gazette as a debtor nor is it being in a financial conflict with those who invested with him in this project in 2010. The scandal is that the care of our elderly people in this State should be seen as a commercial opportunity for profit making through speculative investments by private commercial companies and individuals. An that this should be supported by massive tax breaks for wealthy investors.

‘Take the gun out of Irish politics!.’ This was the refrain of the establishment political parties for the last third of the Twentieth Century, meaning that people should be free from any threats when it came to deciding structures governing the future of this island. These are the very same parties which are now holding an economic and political weapon to the heads of the Irish people to coerce them into voting ‘Yes’ to their austerity Treaty on May 31.