A new deal for Ireland
Issued : Saturday 29 November, 2008
Speech by Eamon Gilmore TD
Leader of the Labour Party, Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs & Trade
I want to talk with you tonight about solutions. About how we can get through these troubled times. How we can overcome the recession, and secure a better future. All over our country, people are worried.
Worried about their jobs, their mortgages, and now the increase in their health insurance. Worried if their business will survive into the New Year. Nervous about the economy and fearful of the future.
I am not here tonight to tell you how bad things are, or that they might even get worse. I want to talk with you about how things can get better.
There is a way out of these tough times. There is a way to save jobs and to get business moving again; a way to get people back to work; a way to re-boot and stimulate the economy.
We are in a recession. And for many, that is a new and frightening experience! But there is one thing we know for sure about recessions. They always come to an end. Or to be more accurate, they are brought to an end. By the actions of good government, by wise political leadership, but above all, by bold and imaginative new thinking.
In 1933, on the day Franklin D. Roosevelt took up office as President of the United States, America's banks were closed, and a quarter of the workforce was unemployed. But FDR's New Deal rescued his country.
In 1945, out of the ashes and ruins of the Second World War, a Labour Government, began to reconstruct Britain, with new ideas about a Welfare State and a National Health Service.
50 years ago, a great Irish public servant, TK Whitaker, prompted a generation to lift their sights, face outwards towards the world, and shake off decades of economic failure.
Today, this generation faces our moment of crisis.
We can lose our nerve, or we can hold it.
We can surrender to fear, or we can face up to it.
We can falter under the weight of failure, or we can pick ourselves up and move forward together.
One thing we cannot do, is go on as we have before. The people, and the ideas, that brought us here have no answers now.
The era of Thatcher, and Reagan and Bush, must join the PDs in the dustbin of history.
Where have they left us, these Irish disciples of that ideology, like McCreevy and Ahern and Cowen. They allowed a clique of property speculators to play Monopoly with our good economy, our jobs and our lives.
After fifteen good economic years, where has all our money gone? What legacy have they left us from the boom?
The sick still lying on hospital trolleys.
School children in overcrowded prefabs.
Patchy public transport that doesn't join up.
Young graduates, coming out of college, who can't get a job.
And a warehouse full of unused voting machines.
And who did they ask to pay for their mistakes?
Pensioners. People who worked hard, raised their families in hard times, paid tax, when tax was high. Who now just want the peace of mind that comes with having a medical card.
Working people, who are asked to pay with their jobs and their businesses, and whom they now want to levy instead of taxing the rich.
School children. And 12 year old girls, with whose lives they are playing Russian roulette, by denying them an essential cancer vaccine.
But no pain... no pain for the high rollers who can lie offshore in their tax havens. No pain for the big bankers since the taxpayer came to their rescue.
Nor for the property speculators squatting on their idle land banks.
No, Fianna Fail does not have the answer now.
And neither does Fine Gael.
Scapegoating public sector workers will not put a single unemployed person back to work. And making the cuts even deeper will only prolong the recession.
Right-wing economics and cautious, conservative politics cannot adjust now to a global scene that has utterly changed.
Now is the time to create something new and better.
Now is the time to build a new economy. Where prosperity and growth can go hand in hand with a fair society. Where protecting the environment is not seen as a drag on growth, but a generator of new jobs.
Now is the time to replace the ignorant notion that greed is good, with the ideal of the common good.
These are troubled and uncertain times. But there is a different, and a better, way to solve our problems.
The winner of this year's Nobel Prize for economics, Professor Paul Krugman, tells us that in a depression the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply.
"Government", he says "will have to provide economic stimulus in the form of higher spending and greater aid to those in distress".
That is the very opposite to what the conservative commentators are recommending. And the opposite to what Fianna Fáil are doing.
Brian Cowen says they didn't see it coming. Then they were asleep on the job. This crisis may have started on Wall Street. But it was made much worse when it got to Kildare Street.
As Ireland moved towards recession, Labour stood alone, to argue for Government intervention.
For action to get the real economy moving, to get people back working and to renew confidence and hope.
Because the crisis in the public finances has been caused by a downturn in the wider economy, not the other way around.
The key to getting out of this economic crisis is not how much the Government can cut, but what it can create.
That is why Labour, alone among all the political parties, wants a stimulus plan for the Irish economy. That is what a Labour government is doing in Britain. What the European Commission has called for. What President-Elect Obama intends to do in the US. That is what we need to do here.
Turning the tide is about creating more jobs and businesses. Sector by sector, we can generate activity, invest in education and skills, and get people back to work.
To see opportunities instead of obstacles.
One of our biggest opportunities is on our very doorstep. In just a month's time, every house in this country will have to have an energy rating. At least one million homes will 'fail the test', because they are not adequately insulated.
That is a business opportunity, potentially worth €25b. It could put construction workers, engineers, architects, plumbers, surveyors to work; reduce the costs of heating our homes; and reduce our excessive carbon emissions. Germany is doing it - why not here?
Another opportunity is all around us: in what Yeats called the 'Great powers of falling wave and wind'. Renewable energy creates between three and five times more jobs than fossil fuel. So, let's connect to the European grid. Make this country a net exporter of clean energy to a market of 500 million people.
Ireland has enormous potential for green collar jobs, from renewable energy, to green construction, to waste. Every week, three quarters of everything we put in our green bins is loaded on ships and transported to the Far East for recycling. Isn't it time to set up a Waste Management Agency here, that will kick-start an Irish recycling industry.
And when it comes to climate change, we must put our words into action. We must give certainty to green business. That is why Labour will shortly publish a Climate Change Bill to guarantee Ireland's commitments on climate change in the years and decades ahead.
Creating jobs tomorrow, means putting in broadband today. But that hasn't happened either. Since it was privatised, Eircom has been bought and sold four times. Billions have been pocketed buying and selling the company, instead of being invested in our broadband network. As a result, Ireland languishes at the bottom of the league for connections and speed. Now the company is up for sale again.
It is time to end this sequence of rip-offs. Buy back Eircom if necessary. Rebuild this asset for the Irish people. And create high-tech jobs.
Every week, over 2,000 people are losing their jobs. To date one in every three of those has been a building worker. They want work, and not the dole.
Every day, over 40,000 children go to school in damp, cold pre-fabs. We need 400 new schools.
Over 2,000 new classrooms at primary level alone. It makes sense to get those schools built, putting building workers back to work, improving the public finances at the same time.
And it's not just schools. There are five major urban regeneration projects in Dublin waiting for a green light, because the developer pulled out of the deal.
And we need hospitals and community facilities and sports centres too.
In putting people back to work, we can be inventive about ways of improving their skills and levels of education. Why not have a new work and education initiative - call it 'Earn and Learn'. An unemployed worker takes up a job for, say, three days, going back to education or training for the other two days. There is 278 million euro lying unused in the National Training Fund, which could pay for such a scheme.
But where, you ask, will the money for our stimulus plan come from?
In the short-term borrowing will have to rise, but our national debt is low and can take the strain. That's what the OECD recommended last Monday.
But borrowing must be prudent. Used only for investment that demonstrates real return in the future. And Government should set a borrowing ceiling - a limit that must not be crossed.
The National Pension Reserve Fund contains over 18 billion euro. A full seven years ago, Labour argued that part of this money would be better put to work investing in our own infrastructure, rather than playing the market abroad.
We were right about that then. And we were right two months ago, when Labour stood alone to challenge the blanket guarantee for the banks.
A guarantee which exposed the taxpayer to enormous risks, and did nothing to reform bank practices, or to replace bankers. Or to give
small business the credit it needs.
Government cannot stand by and watch small businesses - the backbone of our economy - go to the wall for want of a normal loan. It must set up, as Labour suggested this week, a dedicated National Fund to extend credit to small business.
Now it appears, Fianna Fáil are willing to bring the worst form of vulture capitalist into Ireland, so they can do to the Banks what they did to Eircom: extract more profit, eliminate more jobs, and disappear as quickly as
they came.
Whatever way the banks are sorted out now, there must be a return for the taxpayer and for working people.
If the taxpayer can go guarantor for the banks, then we must have a guarantee for families. A guarantee that, for the duration of this recession, no family will lose their home.
There are many ways it can be done, but the principle is simple. If we can bail out the bankers and protect the property developers, then for two years at least, foreclosure and repossession should be off limits.
The one thing we all fear, even more than losing our job, is losing our home. And we will not rebuild this economy on a foundation of fear. We will rebuild it on trust.
Because from trust, comes hope.
From hope comes confidence
And confidence is the most powerful economic stimulus of all.
As taxpayers, we all understand that there are times when taxes have to be adjusted. But we expect that it will be done honestly, and not disguised as service charges, income levies, or stealth taxes. And we expect that it will be done fairly, so that those who have the most, pay the most.
And in return, we expect good quality public services.
Everybody talks about reforming the public service. But to reform the public service, you have to start at the top. Public service reform begins with a change of Government.
The public service can never be reformed by parties who do not believe in the concept of public service in the first place. Who, in good times, see public servants as fodder for decentralisation and privatisation. And, in bad times, make them the scapegoats for their own political failures.
The majority of public servants work hard. They nurse our elderly parents. They teach our children. They put themselves at risk policing our streets, and fighting our fires. But they are sometimes let down by the practices of a minority. The top executive who doesn't know the limit to a junket. The time-server, who is forever sick on Monday mornings.
But the public service will only be reformed by a Government which believes in, and values, public service. Respects public servants. And therefore has the authority to do what is needed to get quality public services, and value for money.
A Government that knows the difference between the baby and the bathwater.
Social partnership helped get this country out of bad times in the 1980s, and it can help again. If Government makes a pay agreement one week,
it can't unilaterally cancel it the next.
But the context is rapidly changing. Any sensible Government would reconvene the Social Partners, and seek agreement on a new Social and Economic Plan, to see Ireland through the full recession.
As working people, we all understand only too well the relationship between pay, tax, the cost of living and job security. How a pay rise one day can get wiped out by a hike in your VHI bill the next.
We all know that Ireland's economic problems can not be solved by ourselves alone. We have seen over the past few months how important the European Union is. We can only imagine just how bad our economy would be today if we were not part of the Euro!
Last June, the Labour Party supported the Lisbon Treaty. We were right to do so. We can stand over every single statement we made in that campaign. We did not mislead people and we did not exaggerate or tell downright lies.
I was disappointed with the result, but I respect it. The Lisbon Treaty cannot be ratified as a result of our referendum. And we can leave it like that if we wish.
But there are consequences.
Europe, at the very moment it should be concentrating on the big economic issues affecting our jobs and livelihoods, is obliged to return to institutional bargaining. We won't lose any of our rights by holding up institutional change. But let there be no doubt about it: we are already losing influence, and at the very time we most need it.
I believe that most Irish people want to remain fully engaged members of the European Union, and not to be semi-detached from it. And I believe it is possible to give expression and authority in the Irish Constitution to the kind of European Union that we want. A European Union which puts people first. Which is a force for peace in the world. And through which Ireland can play its part in making the world a safer, fairer and more humane place.
I know what it is to live through hard times. My father died when I was a year old. He was just 36.
I was raised on a widow's pension. I went through school and college on scholarships, and grants, and the selfless sacrifices of my late mother.
I graduated at a time when, like now, jobs were scarce.
We didn't have much growing up. But we never thought of ourselves as poor. Because we always hoped for a better day. And because we believed that through hard work and education, we could make a better life for ourselves, and overcome hardship.
And we weren't unique. There were many like us.
And I remember too, when I worked for a trade union in the 1980s, sitting in canteens with workers losing their jobs. Men and women in their forties,
who thought they would never work again.
But they did. And over the years, I have met many of them. With new careers. Running their own businesses. Being successful again.
We can get through this recession. If we have to endure some pain, let us make sure it has a purpose. What matters is where we will be when it is over, in three or four year's time. That we will have, at least, the schools, the better educated workforce, the broadband. The infrastructure that will ensure we can benefit from the economic upswing, when it inevitably returns.
If Irish people know what their sacrifices are for;
if they can be confident that there is a better place at the end of the recession; then no politician need call on them to be patriotic.
What the country needs now is leadership
And I believe that Labour can provide that lead.
People sometimes say to me - 'Aren't you lucky you're not in Government now'
But now is the time when Labour should be in Government.
Because people tonight who have lost their job or who are about to; People who are struggling to keep up the mortgage payments; People who need medical care, or a chance at an education; need to have Labour back in Government.
Because Labour is the Party for jobs and schools and hospitals. And for science, technology and innovation.
Because Labour knows that it is working class communities, who suffer most from criminal gangs, and the vile trade in drugs that sustains them.
Because Labour is the Party of the Common Good.
We are neither Fianna Fáil, nor Fine Gael. We are Labour.
I wish we could have a General Election now.
But Fianna Fail, and their Green poodles are not about to grant our wish.
In early June, we will all be going to the polls to vote in the European and Local Elections. That date should not pass without the people being given the opportunity to vote in a General Election. To choose who should now be leading this country.
To choose hope, over despair.
To choose those who act, not just react.
To stand in solidarity with those who have hit tough times, not abandon them to their fate.
Ireland today needs a fresh start, and a new Government. A Government driven by Labour values. And led by our ideas.
A Government which knows that, in difficult times, children still need to go to clean, warm schools; that people still need to go to hospital; that people losing their jobs need a hand up, not a hand out. That real life carries on.
We will get through these tough times. Labour's patriotism is about pulling together, not pulling back.
It's about Trust. Community. Neighbourhood. Best described in our own Irish language: an Meitheal.
Ní neart, go cur le chéile.
Is féidir linn daoine a chur ar ais ag obair. Is féidir linn gnóanna a mhéadú, agus serbhísí a leasú.
Is féidir linn an tír a chur ar ais ar a cosa.
Sea! Is féidir linne freisin!
