Ballyhea protest group takes fight against bailout to Brussels

The Ballyhea protest group took their battle to write down Ireland’s banking debt to the European Commission and one of the key people in the troika.

The protesters have been holding weekly marches in Ballyhea since Mar 6, 2011, to demonstrate their anger at the bank bailout.

They brought with them to Europe a small bag of letters with people’s stories, telling how the cuts in government spending were affecting them — from a woman with multiple sclerosis to a couple with aspecial needs child.

“They seem to have thought that it was only the top 10% in Irish society that were being affected by the austerity that has been forced on us,” said group member Fiona Buckley.

“They seemed to be unaware of the extent of the effects.”

They are demanding that the €36bn the State borrowed and took from the National Pension Reserve fund to bail out the banks be given back to the State from the EU’s rescue fund.

And they want the ECB to write off the €28bn in sovereign bonds which they hold instead of the promissory notes for Anglo Irish Bank.

Organiser Diarmuid O’Flynn says the money was pumped into Anglo and the Irish Nationwide Building Society when they were already broke, in an abuse which the ECB approved.

They met with economist István Székely, who is director of economic and financial affairs in the European Commission and was part of the troika mission to Ireland.

“He told us that what we want to achieve is almost impossible, he could not do anything, but he was very helpful and told us how we could approach it, what we should do and not do,” said Mr O’Flynn.

Mr Székely said Ireland had got a very cheap loan and the decisions about how the economy is managed and budgets are framed is made by a government elected by the Irish people.

The groups from Ballyhea and Charleville have been holding weekly protest marches for around two years, and said their next stop will be the ECB in Frankfurt.

“After this we want to meet the European Council as they are the ones that can agree we should get our money back from the ESM fund,” said Mr O’Flynn.

They consulted with economists Seamus Coffey from UCC, Constantin Gurdgiev of UCD and TCD, and Jagdip Singh of the popular and recently closed blog Namawinelake.

“This is about taking it one step at a time. We are learning as we go along but we need our politicians and the rest of the country now behind us when we take the next steps,” he said.