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The ‘Fermoy Says No’ group outside Fine Gael TD Tom Barry’s office.

While most eyes are on Cyprus and ECB, Ireland is supposedly the good news story for austerity. Supposedly austerity has ‘worked’ in this country. We’ve raised taxes, often by stealth and unfairly, hitting those who cannot afford to pay. We’ve cut services, even on the front-line, and stopped investing in Gardai, nurses and teachers. Education at third level has become ever more expensive, which is hardly going to promote a ‘smart-economy’.

Has this austerity worked? The government looks like only being a few billion short of breaking even on day to day spending by this December – and if Michael Noonan finds another few billion in spending cuts and tax hikes, then we are the ECB’s poster boy, the first country to exit from a bailout.

But the abacus of spending and borrowing hides the real story. Unemployment is still running at 14% and emigration is still in the thousands. There are soup kitchens in every major city, and schools are giving breakfast to hungry children. A significant proportion of people cannot afford to pay their household bills, and the mortgage crisis is just beginning. Businesses are still going bust.

It is worthwhile remembering that the interest on our national debt alone is over 5 billion; if we didn’t have such debts we wouldn’t be in such trouble. Some of these debts are due to the gap between government income and expenditure when the construction industry crashed. However, almost half of it is due to the bank bailout. And we’ve promised to pay more bank bailouts for Anglo Irish Bank for the next forty years.

So the future looks like more of the same. If this is considered success, then the bar is very very low.

What can we do?

The people of Ballyhea have marched for over one hundred weeks in succession against the use of taxpayers’ money to bail out banks and pay off rich bondholders. Bondholders are not the same as depositors – they are investors who make profit by investing, not store up money for a rainy day; they should be paid their interest but required to keep their money in the banks. In Fermoy, and in towns and counties all over Ireland, local people are taking up the flag of ‘Ireland says no’ and marching weekly in their local area.

"This week we ended our march outside Tom Barry’s office. It’s nothing personal, and if there was a Labour or even a Fianna Fail office in town, we’d be there next week. This recession and austerity is not a natural disaster, but a man-made disaster. Our elected representatives should be prepared to hear our voices and face the people. Our message is simple: these are not our debts nor should our children pay them in the decades to come.

Join us every Sunday at 12.30, marching from outside St Patrick’s Church, Fermoy. Contact fermoysaysno@gmail.com or ‘fermoy says no’ on Facebook.

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