Ordinary citizens across the island of Ireland are being hit by the economic policies of British and Irish governments who are failing to put people first, Sinn Fein has claimed.
Donegal TD Pearse Doherty told his party’s ard fheis in Belfast that working people had “paid enough” to ease the Republic’s financial crisis, calling on the Fine Gael-Labour coalition to shift the burden.
Former Stormont minister Conor Murphy also blamed what he branded the “new Thatcherites in London” for cutting funds to the Northern Ireland Executive and squeezing the welfare system.
The Newry and Armagh MP told the Waterfront Hall conference: “Like many nations we are struggling with the consequences of the global financial crisis.
"However, our ability to recover on this island is being strangled by anti-people austerity measures being pursued by the governments in Dublin and London."
Mr Murphy said the "economically illiterate in the south, whose greedy ambition for their developer friends left the country exposed to economic collapse" had accepted a bail-out which shored up a corrupt banking system, protectd international financial gamblers and imposed "savage austerity measures on ordinary citizens".
“The new Thatcherites in London, supported by willing unionist allies here, have also responded to the economic difficulties with slash and burn policies.”
Mr Doherty said the EU/IMF bailout deal was crippling the south’s economy and its society.
“Having promised to renegotiate this bad deal, the new Fine Gael-Labour government have acquiesced to the spirit and letter of the failed Fianna Fail policy,” he said.
“In exchange for EU and IMF loans our so-called partners in Europe are forcing us to starve our domestic economy of the stimulus it needs while pouring billions of tax-payers’ monies into toxic banks.
“Only a few short weeks ago Fine Gael and Labour threw another 6.4 billion euros of public money into the banks. Yet in the same month they were promising up to four billion euros in cuts and tax hikes in the December budget.
“For those of you struggling with lower wages, rising prices and the unjust Universal Social Charge, the government is saying that you must pay more; they are saying that you must now pay a new household charge, water charges, property taxes and increased income tax bills."
Mr Doherty called for investment in jobs and services and called for the “banks and bondholders to shoulder their fair share of the burden they helped create”.
He also said an independent distressed mortgage resolution body should help families in fear of losing their homes.
Mr Murphy, meanwhile, said partition worked against communities on both sides of the border, but he said in the current crisis, those in the north suffered a double disadvantage.
“The Six County economy is unsustainable, distorted, dependent on subsidy and cannot exist in isolation from the rest of the island,” he said.
“We suffer the double disadvantage of being dislocated from the southern economy and only incidental to economic decisions that are made in the interests of the island of Britain.
“An all-Ireland economy is needed to address the legacy of national dislocation resulting from partition.”
PA