Wednesday 6 June 2012

LIST OF DEMANDS FOR MR DRAGHI AND THE ECB

 
From: The Ballyhea/Charleville bank bondholder bailout protest group

To: Mr Mario Draghi, President of the European Central Bank.

Dear Mr Draghi,

For several years the ECB has been abusing its financial muscle and forcing a weak Irish government to assume for the Irish people a debt burden that is not ours. In doing so the ECB has interrupted the current of commerce and has corrupted the normal process of capitalism. 

When the Irish economy went up in flames in 2008 it burned everyone, with one glaring exception – those whose billions had fuelled those flames. The banks and financial institutions who had so recklessly loaned their excess funds into a rapidly-inflating economy, their judgement clouded by their greed, have so far not even been singed.

The ECB are the ones who have dictated that those bondholders in the failed Irish banks shouldn’t suffer their own losses, that instead we – the Irish people – should assume all that debt. We are here to say otherwise and unlike our elected representatives, we are not here to beg. In all natural justice, we are here to DEMAND the following:

1.      An immediate end to all the forced payments of bank bonds, those bonds then to be treated as they should have been treated from the beginning using the normal rules of capitalism and commerce under which they were first negotiated.

2.      The immediate destruction of all remaining Promissory Notes and the money printed by the Irish Central Bank to facilitate the payment of those failed bonds in those failed banks to be left in circulation.

3.      Permission granted to the Irish Central Bank to reprint the two instalments of those Promissory Notes already paid, totalling over €6bn.

4.      The ECB to make good the €17bn that was taken from our National Pension Reserve Fund at your behest and used to ‘recapitalise’ our bust banks.

5.      The ECB to make good the €5bn that was taken from NAMA for like purpose.

6.      The write-down of all money borrowed from you, the ECB, by the Irish Exchequer to fund those bust banks and pay off the failed bonds.

7.      The return of all interest paid to date on those bank-debt borrowings.

We are a proud people, Mr Draghi, we WILL pay – in full – all our own sovereign debt. But that bank debt is not ours, was never ours, will never rightfully be ours. We demand now that you end this imposition and allow our country and its people to properly and quickly recover.

SIGNED:
Diarmuid O'Flynn 
Fiona Buckley-Fitzpatrick 
Rob Fitzpatrick 
Cathleen Queally-Moloney 
Pat Moloney 
Phil Ryan 
Frances O'Brien 
Pat O'Brien 
Diarmaid O Cadhla 
Donncha O Briain 
Vicky Donnelly 
Richard Chapman 
Damian Moylan 
Hugh Mellerick 
Lynette O'Donoghue