Statements on the IMF and OECD Reports - 10th July 2009

Statements on IMF and OECD Reports - 10th July 2009
Senator David Norris: I wish to share my time equally with Senator Quinn.
An Leas-Chathaoirleach: Is that agreed? Agreed.
Senator David Norris: Perhaps you might indicate when that barrier has been reached so that I can break it. This is not a tsunami and is not an inevitable naturally occurring phenomenon. It is man made and there must be a way out of it. It is a mirror image of the 1929 crash, of which people of my generation heard but had not experienced and that is worrying as we are back in the same situation. However, there are some positive developments. In additional to its report on Ireland, the IMF produced a report on Wednesday indicating that the world economy was starting a recovery but that it was likely to be weak and we might hit the double bounce situation rather than having an sustained economy and that would be extremely worrying.
There is obviously an attempt by Government to spin the IMF report, which is by and large new large neutral.
Deputy Billy Kelleher: No.
Senator David Norris: Yes, there is. The other side are spinning it furiously in the opposite direction. I am not interested in that, but I am interested in one partiuclar fact, that is, that in none of the contributions so far, either by the Minister of State and the Government speakers or Opposition speakers has there been any mention of the moral parameters which led to this. This has been instigated by greed, folly, gambling, stupidity and all these things which the western cultural tradition should have warned us against.
I find it unusual that I am in agreement with His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. It is interesting that he recently issued an encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, Charity in Truth, in which he rejects unbriddled market capitalism and the unrelated market describing them as thoroughly destructive in their abuse of the system. He indicates that every economic decision has a moral dimension and looks for forms of redistribution of wealth. This is not what I expected to hear from the Pope but I very much welcome it. One of the deficiencies is that while there is a lot of fact, some of which is disputed, a lot of economy theory, there is no recognition of the fact this difficulty was created through means that were grossly immoral, and there is recognition to the need to re-establish a moral parameter in which profit is not the only motivating consideration.
The Pope suggests international regulation and he makes the good point that, "the conviction that the econmy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from "influences" of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way". He is right.
We heard Margaret Thatcher say that there was no such thing as society, there is only the economy. Other people has said nakedly greed is good. People engage for short-term profit not the long-term perspective of business that, for all their faults, the Victorians, with their paternalism and their attempt to take care of the workers, people like Cadbury, Guiness and these sort of peple, this has all been lost.
This, and I have been saying this for some considerable time, but I am interested to see that the re is a report also in todays newspaper of the Nobel prize winning economist, Professor Amartya Sen from Harvard University and I heard him speak on the radio this morning. He gave a lecture yesterday entitled "On Global Confusion". He suggested that what we need is a new capitalism. That in my opinion makes it all the more disastrous that the Americans and conservative religious elements, including the Vatican, conspire to destroy that extraordinary and unique experiment in Nicaragua where they were attempting to pick the best out of capitalism, the best out of communism, bring them together without fear of ideological label in the interests of humanity.
It is interesting that Adam Smith is often promoted as an advocate of the free market system, yet Professor Amartya Sen quoted a sentence from Adam Smith wrote at the start of his first book in 1759. Adam Smith wrote:
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature , which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.
Professor Amartya Sen said that we have to go beyond merely the profit motive. The same extends to this notion of competitiveness and competition. it is tragic that so many people confuse competition with competitiveness. Competitiion does not always lead to competitiveness. We need only think of the disaster of Eircom where it was spun out to the capitalist moguls to be asset-stripped and then flung back. Now we have disastrous telephone system. The only reason we have access to phones is because of mobile telephones which are no responsibility of Eircom.
I was pleased to see that the Minister for Transport, Deputy Noel Dempsey, gave an assurance that the metro would go ahead. That will provide not only useful infrastructure but will also provide employment. Finally, in conclusion, and to end, as politicians always say when they are going to go on for another whiile, but I am not, it is very important that we do not dehumanise economics, that we understand that it is a moral not just a technical failure. Unless we address the moral issues we will not get back to the situation we were in. Perhaps we should not get back to precisely the same situation because it was the springboard into this mess.
My very last point is this; when this crisis has been addressed, and even while it is being addressed, we must look at the elephant in the room, which is population. Taht is what is driving every single problem; the extinction of animal species all over the planet, global warming, resource wars, the using up of fossil fuels and the basic problem of water shortages. If we do not put those things in moral perspective and learn to share and to respect this planet then we will be everlastingly in this cycle of misery and unhappiness.