Marching for a fairer debt deal

TOMORROW’S public demonstrations around the country have been called by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to ventilate the demand for a fair deal on bank debt and to oppose one-sided austerity.

They will offer the people who have been afforded no say, but who are expected to pay, a chance to influence the outcome of an on-going battle which will determine the quality of the rest of our lives and those of our children.

The cost of bailing out private banks by the Irish taxpayer, to date, is €64bn. This is equivalent to 40% of our annual GDP. As Unite economist Michael Taft has demonstrated, using Eurostat data, we in Ireland have been shouldered with more than 40% of the total net cost of the bank debt burden across all 27 EU member states. It amounts to almost €9,000 per head of population here, as against an average of €192 per person for the EU as a whole.