Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2014-03-12-Speech-3-708-000"
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"en.20140312.70.3-708-000"2
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"Madam President, I am looking at the Troika’s activities from a social and employment perspective, and I want to ask the Commission: did you take Article[nbsp ]9 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union – the social clause which guarantees social protection and which fights against social exclusion – as a core determinant in the policies you have pursued, or did you focus almost exclusively on the economic situation without trying to find a balance between the social and the economic?
I believe the Commission’s approach was that certain Member States had sinned grievously and must pay the price. They must do penance.
Commissioner Rehn, you reiterated your mantra here today: macroeconomic imbalances had built up in those countries in the decades before the crisis. Commissioner, my own country, Ireland, never broke the Stability and Growth Pact from 2000 until the crisis. Our debt-to-GDP ratio was 30[nbsp ]%; now it is 120[nbsp ]% and rising: deficits falling and debt rising. Yes, we had lax regulation in Ireland and, yes, in Ireland the tax base was much too narrow and there was a property bubble but, equally, when money flowed from the periphery, fuelled by low interest rates to suit some economies and not others, there was lax regulation at EU level. There were irresponsible lenders as well as irresponsible borrowers, and when we discovered that the euro was more of a straitjacket than a security net, we had to pay unsecured bondholders under threat from the ECB, and the Troika decided to charge us 5.8[nbsp ]% interest on the money we borrowed to help prevent contagion in the EU banking system.
Commissioner, that was our first message from the Troika, and I wonder: if you had to do it again, would you charge us the same interest rate? In all of this I am pro-European, but we need recognition of the fact that our common currency was not fit for purpose and contributed to the crisis, and also of the fact that we are not moving quickly enough to build the necessary infrastructure to sustain the currency. We need to refocus on EU[nbsp ]2020: those goals are disappearing over the horizon. And finally, we need to question the procyclical nature of policy, and to treat excessive surpluses with the same urgency as we treat excessive deficits."@en1
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