Ballyhea candidate will call for promissory note destruction to end

Since Sunday March 2011, over four years ago, a small group of determined people have marched every week in protest at the imposition of private bank-debt on the Irish people.

During that period, recognising that this was an issue on which our government was not going to be of any assistance, the protest morphed into a self-funded, self-propelled campaign.

We have been to the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt, we’ve been to Brussels and met and argued with senior officials from The European Commission, The European Council, The European Parliament, the Troika and Patrick Honahan, the then head of the Central Bank, on the second occasion accompanied by two MEPs (Luke Ming Flanagan and Nessa Childers) and TDs, Peter Mathews and Stephen Donnelly.

Already this year the Central Bank of Ireland has destroyed €1.5bn, part of the legacy of the infamous promissory note debt, which itself is only part of the €69.7bn total bank-debt imposed on the Irish people.

The promissory note debt is the €31bn created in 2009/10 to bail out the creditors of two failed zombie Irish banks, Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society, €31bn that the ECB now insists Ireland take out of circulation, thus the ongoing destruction. To date €5.5bn has been destroyed (€3bn 2011; €1bn 2014; €1.5bn 2015). The Central Bank is still holding €25.5bn worth of promissory note bonds, all awaiting sale. All those billions will then be destroyed but all the resulting interest will be paid by the next several generations of Irish people, the principal repaid through the 2040s and into the 2050s. This must be stopped.

This week the watered-down result of the watered-down banking inquiry is emerging, one of the proposals from which is that the Irish government should bring the ECB to court on the strong-arm tactics that were used to force Ireland to accept the entirety of the bank-debt.

We agree with this proposal but we go further. The government should immediately challenge the ECB on the continued sale of the promissory note bonds, should press for their destruction and additionally, should demand the recreation of the €5.5bn already destroyed.

In the general election I will be standing as an Independent Alliance candidate in Cork North-West and if elected, one of the first priorities will be to form an all-party (or failing that, a cross-party) committee to negotiate on Ireland’s debt.

Meanwhile, this Sunday, December 13, we will march as usual .

Diarmuid O’Flynn

Ballyhea

Charleville

Co Cork