THE right-wing Fine Gael party is set to form a coalition with its traditional partner, the right-wing Labour party, after a ‘political revolution’ which saw the party that has ruled the Republic for decades, Fianna Fail, smashed and reduced to third place with just 20 seats, and with just one of them in Dublin.
The Green Party, the coalition partner of Fianna Fail was completely wiped out.
This was the electors’ response to the ruling coalition’s decision to guarantee the debts of the massively indebted Irish banks, and to make the working class and the poor pay the bill with wage cuts, rising prices, pension cuts, job cuts, benefit cuts and forced emigration for the youth.
Fine Gael won 76 seats, Labour 37, while Sinn Fein came from nowhere to win 14 and the United Left Alliance, likewise took five seats.
Enda Kenny, the Fine Gael leader, has pledged that one of his first acts as prime minister will be to seek a lower interest rate on the 80 billion euros of loans from the IMF and the ECB, and other private lenders, which were forced onto Ireland to try to shore up the EU’s banking system.
Kenny is pledged to seek to reduce the draconian interest rate from a blood-curdling 5.8 per cent to the more ‘normal’ three per cent.
As well, Kenny and Fine Gael have pledged to raise Irish taxes and carry on with the savage cuts.
The new Irish government will be on a collision course with the Irish worker, as well as with the IMF and the European Central Bank, from its first day.
The workers will fight against more cuts and even bigger sacrifices, and demand a binding referendum to force the government to tell the EU that the loans and their conditions must be renegotiated.
The EU is meanwhile getting ready to drum Ireland out of the EU, as a companion for Greece, which is being measured up for the same fate.
Paying the interest to the Irish bank debt and the EU-IMF bank loans will consume 85 per cent of the Irish people’s income tax revenue by 2012!
The cost of the EU-IMF bailout in extra taxes for an average Irish family has been estimated at over £4,000 a year.
Chancellor Merkel will tell Kenny that if he wants to reduce the 5.8 per cent interest rate charged on EU loans then Ireland will have to give up its low corporate tax rates – a measure that will push unemployment, already running at 14 per cent, up to close on 20 per cent.
Just as Irish voters were polling on Friday, the European Commission issued its diktat, that the terms of the EU-IMF bailout ‘must be applied’ regardless of the will of the people since the agreement had been made by the elected government.
‘It’s an agreement between the EU and the Republic of Ireland. It’s not an agreement between an institution and the Irish people,’ said the Brussels dictatorship of the banks.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, the new government will press on with the cuts, and tax hikes, fearful of being expelled by the EU.
The incoming coalition will therefore not last long.
It will be brought down by the working class, and Ireland will move to a ‘left’ government of Sinn Fein, the United Left Alliance, independents and the dregs of Labour and Fianna Fail.
This group will also buckle when faced with the task of defying, and defeating, the ECB and the EU bosses.
Ireland requires a revolutionary government that will fight the dictatorship of the EU Central Bank alongside the Greek and other EU workers to replace the bankers and bosses EU with a Socialist United States of Europe which will nationalise the banks and the major industries and bring in a socialist planned economy.
This struggle requires a new and revolutionary leadership and the building of sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International throughout the EU to provide it.
