Banks are Frankenstein’s monster that will return to haunt the Irish people

Dignam said that even capitalist bodies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – one third of the hated Troika – recognised that there has been no fundamental change in banking since the start of the crisis.

From the perspective of workers the banks, nationally and internationally, are all-powerful and continue to pose a potential risk to the stability and economic survival of countries.

“The imposition of the collective debt of Ireland’s major banks on the backs of the working class population of this state was a most egregious and unfair burden which is continuing to cause suffering to many hundreds of thousands of people every day and will do so for another generation at least. That this was allowed in the first place was criminal  but the fact that no systemic change in the way banks operate and behave has occurred is a damning indictment of this country, the EU and the international capitalist system”, said  Jimmy Dignam

The Workers Party is proposing a series of fundamental and far-reaching changes to banking in this country, as follows:-

• State control of all banking institutions. In circumstances where banks in this country are dependent on leveraging property in order to maintain liquidity, resulting in a push to re-inflate house prices, the Workers’ Party demands measures to de-leverage Irish banks from the property market to facilitate the taking into state ownership of banking institutions.
• Investment in both productive enterprise and capital and infrastructural spending
• At a time when the income gap between rich and poor is further increasing the Workers’ Party calls for the repudiation of all odious, illegitimate public debt which is not the responsibility of the working class and is an attempt by capital to make workers’ pay for the capitalist economic crisis.
• An audit and sustainable solution to Ireland’s debt crisis to free up revenue streams for reinvestment in projects that serve the interests of working people.
• In relation to the Anglo/INBS debts, this debt has been converted to bonds in the Irish Central Bank which, once sold on the open market, will begin to cost the Irish taxpayer unpredictable amounts. These bonds must be frozen and repudiated.

 

“The purpose of the banking bailout was to rescue the capitalist economic system from its own failings, from the deep chasm it had dug for itself from over-inflating the property boom to bursting point.  The Workers’ Party is under no illusions that banking can ever be tamed but it must in the short term be prevented from unleashing the type of economic terror of 2008 /2009 and our proposals can only be seen as a first step on the road to a socialist economy where the needs of workers are served by that economy”