Senator Bacik Calls for Debate on EU/IMF Deal, and for a Debate on the Plight of the Survivors of Magdalene Laundries

Order of Business

Senator Ivana Bacik: I support the call by Senator Buttimer for a debate today on the IMF and EU deal. It is extraordinary that we are not debating it in this House, given that it is being debated in the other House and all around the country. The parameters of the deal are well known to everyone but there has been some excellent critiques of the deal and it is very important that this House would have an opportunity to critique it. Those of us who oppose it and have argued for a renegotiation of the terms of the deal need to be able to put on the record of the House our concerns and why we think a better deal can be obtained elsewhere and what is wrong with this deal. I refer to an excellent paper from Afri which critiques the deal and which states that not only does it diminish Irish democracy, which it clearly does, but it also locks Ireland into a deflationary neo-liberal economic policy regime. Alternatives have been put forward by respected economists and I have put those alternatives on the record of the House. However, we need an opportunity to debate the terms of the deal today. Listening to Senator MacSharry, it is extraordinary also to hear the Government still accusing the Opposition of talking down the economy when it has brought down the economy and brought in the IMF and the EU. It has diminished democracy and locked us into this deflationary spiral about which representatives of Afri spoke so eloquently. It is wrong of the Government to continue to accuse the Opposition of talking down the economy in some ridiculous sense.

I ask for a debate early in the next term on the plight of the survivors of the Magdalene laundries. It is a month since the Irish Human Rights Commission issued its report and we have still not received a coherent Government response to the very serious call for redress for the survivors of Magdalene institutions. They have had no official acknowledgement by the State of the terrible wrong done to them as it was done to the victims of so much abuse in different residential institutions.