State assets belong to the people

IN a recent report in your newspaper (Oct 1), Ann Cahill revealed that the EU /ECB /IMF troika had asked the Government to raise substantially more than €2 billion through the sale of state assets, even though this had been agreed in the Programme for Government.

How dare these ideology-driven bureaucrats put such arrogant demands on a sovereign, democratic state?

What makes these demands worse is that in addition to other drivers, they are driven by an ideology; fundamentalist free-market capitalism of the neo-liberal kind. This is the case with the IMF which became a neo-liberal entity in the early 1980s when the organisation was cleansed of all Keynesian influences and repopulated with neo-liberals from Wall Street.