THE IRISH Congress of Trade Unions is to organise a series of protests as part of a campaign against Government economic policy in the run-up to the budget in December.
Yesterday around 1,500 people took part in a demonstration outside Leinster House which urged the Government to adopt a new economic strategy involving greater investment and increased taxation rather than cutbacks.
It was part of a series of protests organised by the European trade union movement against austerity measures being implemented in a number of countries.
At the event yesterday at Leinster House, senior congress figures called on the Government to abandon its current strategy for economic recovery and to adopt “a new more credible plan”.
Congress president Jack O’Connor said the Government’s current fiscal plan had not worked and was “a route to self destruction”. He said that the trade union movement was calling for “an end to the economics of failure”.
Ictu general secretary David Begg said the Government’s economic recovery strategy was “too austere and was killing any potential for growth”. He said congress had been making this argument for the past two years and its position was now being vindicated and was supported by the international press.
Mr O’Connor said that it was not the objective of congress to bring about the fall of the Government but rather to get it to change its strategy. However, he said that if the Government did not immediately “embrace the lessons of the wasted years” it should do the next decent thing by calling a general election.
As Mr O’Connor spoke he was heckled by a small number of members of left-wing political groups.
Congress said as an alternative strategy the Government should shift focus to revenue sources that would not take vast sums of money out of the economy.
It called for temporary progressive tax measures on capital and wealth and it also urged a financial injection into the economy from off-balance sheet sources.
It said this could include using a portion of money in the National Pension Reserve Fund to provide equity for new enterprises and to protect existing businesses.
It also proposed that a new State holding company should be created “to utilise the assets of our commercial semi-State bodies as a vehicle for investment and leveraging new resources for development and innovation, instead of planning to sell them off at bargain basement prices to be asset-stripped by the corporate vultures”.
Congress has also proposed that the Government should incentivise “the investment of savings through the creation of imaginative innovation and State equity support funds”.
Congress also called for the establishment of a new “euro bond” mechanism which would allow the Government to access funding raised from the markets on a transnational basis.
Mr O’Connor said savage cutbacks had been inflicted on the most vulnerable in the community along with pay and pension reductions over the last two years.
“Simultaneously hundreds of thousands have been condemned to hopelessness as unemployment has been cynically and deliberately allowed to escalate relentlessly, in order to drive down wage costs in the hope of bringing about recovery through export-led growth.” However, he said that the speculators on global money markets were not impressed. “They know it isn’t working. There is no map to the future only a set of staging posts on the road to perdition.”
The congress demonstration was by far the largest at Leinster House yesterday. Several other groups including the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed also protested. Others opposed cuts in community services, while one group called for the repeal of “anti-Christian” laws.
