SAMPLE LETTER TO YOUR LOCAL TD ON MOTION TO DÁIL SEEKING P NOTE BONDS' DESTRUCTION

It would be much better if you compose your own letter in your own words to your local TD; if you don't have the time, however (or the inclination!), you can just copy & paste the following and send as an old-fashioned letter or as an e-mail.

Send only to those who haven't yet committed, we don't want to clog the mail-boxes of those who have! The link to that list is here.

Address of your local TD: firstname.lastname@oireachtas.ie, e.g tom.barry@oireachtas.ie.

Your address

Date

Dear xxxx;

On November 26^th and 27^th 2013 the Technical Group will propose the following Motion in the Dáil chamber:

That Dáil Eireann calls on the Government to immediately lobby the ECB for a one-off exemption from the monetary financing to allow the Central Bank of Ireland destroy the €25bn in sovereign bonds issued in February of this year in lieu of the remaining Promissory Notes, plus the €3.06bn bond also being held by Central Bank of Ireland, payment for the 2012 Promissory Note; also, to further lobby the ECB that all interest payments currently being made on those bonds should end and that all Promissory Notes-related debt be cancelled in its entirety.

I support that motion. The root cause of the banking crisis in Ireland was the launch in 1999 of an incomplete currency, the euro. From the outset it was structurally flawed, a fatal lack of the kind of central controls necessary for any currency, new or old. There was no proper foresight of the damage it would cause, no proper oversight as that damage was done, no Europe-wide structures in place to then limit that damage when it began to manifest itself.

The total amount so far that we have put towards bailing out our banks is €69.7bn; the most odious element of that debt is the €31bn issued to Anglo Irish Bank and INBS through the year 2010, at which stage the EU and the ECB were forcefully involved. Those billions were printed to save the Eurozone, to save its financial institutions, to save the euro itself. It should NOT fall then on the Irish people to have to pay that €31bn but that is what is currently planned, that for the next 40 years we will pay those billions (plus interest), debt-slaves for generations to the EU and to the ECB.

According to Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Finance Minister Michael Noonan, according also to Central Bank Governor Patrick Honahan, Ireland has never asked for bank-debt write-down; I believe we should. I am asking you now to please support this Motion. 

Regards, 

(Your name)

WEEK 134 - BALLYHEA CAMPAIGN UPDATE - TAKING THE FIGHT TO EUROPE

BRIEF HISTORY

On Sunday March 6^th 2011 our campaign began, a protest march in Ballyhea with just 18 people, against the imposition of private bank-debt on the public purse, the Irish people forced into generations of debt slavery to Europe. Every week since then we have marched, sometimes twice and three times in the same week. This Sunday, September 22^nd 2013, will be week 134.

OUR CAMPAIGN GOES TO EUROPE

    On March 27^th of this year we met Sharon Bowles MEP, Chair of ECON, the EU Economics and Monetary Affairs Committee, the body to which the ECB reports every three months. That meeting has set off a chain of events which (hopefully!) hasn’t yet peaked but which has resulted in us having meetings since then with:  

1.  Patrick Honahan, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland; 
2. Two senior officials of the ECB Troika delegation in Dublin; 
3. Istvan Szekely, Director Economic and Financial Affairs, European Commission;
4. Shahin Vallée, Economic advisor, Cabinet of Herman Van Rompuy, President European Council;
5. David Harmon, European Commission, Member of the cabinet of Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn.

In the meantime we have also (and with great assistance from Paul Murphy MEP) submitted a petition for bank-debt write-off on behalf of Ballyhea, Charleville and all the other various Says No groups around Ireland, to the Europe Parliament Petitions Committee.

Handing over the Petition to MEPs (left to right): Nessa Childers, Marian Harkin, Paul Murphy, with Fiona Fitzpatrick and Cathleen Quealey

WHY WE PERSIST

It’s been an eventful few months, an eventful few years, certainly not what any of us thought we’d be doing when we took those first steps onto the road in Ballyhea. The original intention was to alert our media and our people to what was being done to us, have the whole country out in protest, force this government to do what they had said they’d do –  what we elected them to do –  and take our fight to Europe. Instead that government has taken Europe’s fight to us, Enda Kenny and his officer corps duly rewarded with slaps on the back by our new masters.

So we are forced to do this for ourselves, forced to make our own contacts in the various layers of the European administration, forced to go Europe at our own expense to meet with and talk to those contacts, presenting to them our own proposals on how the bank-debt write-down can be achieved.

We do it with a heart and a half, but a heavy heart-and-a-half. Through the two-and-a-half years of this campaign, through those same two-and-a-half years of this administration, our Taoiseach Enda Kenny and our Finance Minister Michael Noonan have both proclaimed, even boasted, that they have never asked for debt write-down. Always however people were holding out the hope that this was merely a front, that behind the scenes they were playing hardball.

They weren’t. Patrick Honahan, who as Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland and as a member of the ECB Governing Council has a foot in both camps, confirmed this himself to us. We have also had this confirmed in our far more frank and far more up-front meetings with the Europeans. 

FAILURE OF OUR GOVERNMENT TO NEGOTIATE

Those meetings have at times been hot and heavy but always, they’ve been educational. What we’ve learned above all else is this:  even in the highest echelons of the various European layers of administration the Ballyhea protest is known, our grievances acknowledged, the Promissory Notes element especially. There is a recognition that Ireland has taken a big hit in this euro-crisis, a recognition also that this hit has been disproportional. We have been told that ‘debt relief’ for Ireland is inevitable; however, debt write-down will not happen unless our government actually asks for it – we were encouraged to go back to Ireland and work on this.

So why hasn’t our government asked? One possible explanation that was offered to us – Enda Kenny, Michael Noonan and the rest have been going around the world promoting themselves as the poster-boys of Europe, the miracle-workers of Ireland, turning this economy around all on their own. Were they now to ask for debt write-down it would give the lie to all those claims. Ego, that’s what it all seems to boil down to, our government still trying to fool the world (and largely succeeding) even as they slowly crush their own people.

HALF-TRUTH, SPIN

‘Unemployment is down!’ they scream, ‘GDP is up, we’re out of recession!’ The numbers they do not broadcast, however, what they don’t tell the world – the record emigration figures, highest since the catastrophic years of the Great Hunger in the 1840s; the increase in suicides as people choose death over the life being imposed on them by this government. Families and entire communities are being ripped apart and with the proposed cuts/taxes of another €5.1bn in the next two Budgets, the full Home Tax due in January, worse is still to come. Out of recession? As economist Constantin Gurdgiev so succinctly puts it – no, this patient isn’t in recovery, we’re in an induced coma.

NEXT ON OUR AGENDA

·       Acting on the advice received in Europe, we are now

• working with a number of opposition TDs and in the process of putting direct pressure on our government to demand debt write-off – we will keep everyone posted on this;
• Working with a number of MEPs (not necessarily all Irish either) we are also going to put direct pressure on the European Parliament – likewise, we will keep ye posted;
• We will be following up on our Petition submission by asking every Irish MEP to sign up in support, but we will also extend that invitation to all other MEPs; 
• On Saturday November 9^th 2013 we will be co-hosting with Debt and Development Coalition Ireland (DDCI) an all-day event in the Charleville Park Hotel – more details later.

We are not for stopping, we are not for giving up. The backbone of all these efforts is the weekly march, not just in Ballyhea/Charleville but now in various other centres around the country – this is our campaign, all of us. Regardless of our numbers, however, regardless of the number of weeks we’ve been marching or the number of centres, the cause has never changed, remains as just as ever. As long as this burden is imposed, we will protest, we will campaign.

Regards,

Diarmuid O'Flynn.

PETITION SUBMITTED TO THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT PETITIONS COMMITTEE

(Apologies for the appearance, it was formatted in Word, hasn't copied at it originally appears)

PREFACE:   The objective of this petition is to request the Union to compensate the citizens of Ireland for the damage caused by the negligence of the EU Institutions (including the ECB, the European Commission and the European Council) in the performance of their duties relative to the euro.

RELEVANCE:       ARTICLE 2 OF THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION:

The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities.

                               

ARTICLE 3 OF THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION:

1. The Union's aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-being of its peoples.

3. The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment. It shall promote scientific and technological advance.

It shall combat social exclusion and discrimination, and shall promote social justice and protection, equality between women and men, solidarity between generations and protection of the rights of the child.

It shall promote economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States.

                               

ARTICLE 10 OF THE TREATY ON EUROPEAN UNION:

                               

3. Every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen.

ARTICLE 41 OF THE EU CHARTER – RIGHT TO GOOD ADMINISTRATION:

 1. Every person has the right to have his or her affairs handled impartially, fairly and within a reasonable time by the Institutions, bodies and agencies of the Union.

3. Every person has the right to have the Union make good any damage caused by its Institutions or by its servants in the performance of their duties, in accordance with the general principle common to the laws of the Member States.

CONTEXT:            Because of the failure of the Eurozone countries to agree on the necessary central controls, the Euro was fundamentally and seriously flawed in its design, should not have been launched without those controls.

The problems that subsequently arose in Ireland were foretold in an article by Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe from the Financial Times in 1998 in which he wrote:

‘Suppose a country, which we arbitrarily call Spain, experiences a boom which is stronger than in the rest of the euro-area. As a result of the boom, output and prices grow faster in Spain than in the other euro-countries. This also leads to a real estate boom and a general asset inflation in Spain. Since the ECB looks at euro-wide data, it cannot do anything to restrain the booming conditions in Spain. In fact the existence of a monetary union is likely to intensify the asset inflation in Spain. Unhindered by exchange risk vast amounts of capital are attracted from the rest of the euro-area. Spanish banks that still dominate the Spanish markets, are pulled into the game and increase their lending. They are driven by the high rates of return produced by ever increasing Spanish asset prices, and by the fact that in a monetary union, they can borrow funds at the same interest rate as banks in Germany, France etc. After the boom comes the bust. Asset prices collapse, creating a crisis in the Spanish banking system.

Too far-fetched to be realistic? The US monetary union provides many examples of such local booms and busts followed by financial crises that lead to large scale bail-out operations. Scenarios of local booms and bust, as the one just described, will almost certainly happen in the future euro-area. The essential ingredient triggering such crises is the existence of regional differences in rates of return on assets coupled with the fact that in a monetary union banks can borrow at the same interest rates’.

Well, it did happen in Spain, but it also happened in Ireland. Within eight years all that de Grauwe had foretold came to pass and as a result, the Irish people have been burdened with a bank debt of nearly €70bn (per Namawinelake blog July 8^th 2012: AIB/EBS €20.7bn; Bank of Ireland €4.7bn; Anglo/INBS €34.7bn; Irish Life & Permanent €4bn; NAMA contribution €5.6bn) - that’s over €15,000 per individual, a totally disproportionate burden loaded on the Irish people.

We have been failed by those who designed and launched the euro; we have been failed by those whose duty it was to oversee that currency, who allowed the hundreds of billions to flow unchecked from one area of Europe to another, who failed to monitor the impact this was having on those economies; we have been failed by those whose duty it was to find a fair and equitable Europe-wide solution to the problem.

FALLOUT:            Due to those institutional failures the Irish people are now faced with austerity measures which have led to emigration levels unseen since the Great Hunger of the 1840s, unemployment levels whose true rates are reduced by the level of emigration and deliberately disguised by the numbers on various government schemes, mortgage arrears which are now at crisis point, increased incidence of suicide, reductions in supports to the most disadvantaged in our society. All this is quantifiable; what can’t be measured is the impact all this is having on the human spirit, the loss of dignity – there is no misery index.

SUMMARY:        In  contravention of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, the imposition of this burden has seen a marked reduction in the levels of human dignity;

                                In contravention of Article 3.1 of the Treaty on European Union the imposition of this burden has promoted a marked reduction in the well-being of the Irish people;

                                In contravention of Article 3.3 of the Treaty on European Union the imposition of this burden has worked against the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth – the devastation caused by the euro has seen a marked imbalance developing (and still growing) in Europe;

Additionally, and again contrary to Article 3.3, there is increased unemployment and reduced social progress, a widening gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’; with the deliberate and repeated targeting of the most vulnerable in Irish society, there is a reduction in social justice and protection;

Far from there being ‘solidarity between generations and protection of the rights of the child’, the legacy of this crisis in Ireland is debt-slavery to Europe for generations as we are forced into paying a debt that was never ours;

In final contravention of Article 3.3, promoting ‘economic, social and territorial cohesion, and solidarity among Member States’, the selfishly ordained actions of the major European so-called ‘core’ countries are promoting a return to the kind of dangerous nationalism the original EU was established to combat, the demonization of Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, the characterisation of those peoples as being somehow lesser beings, feckless, lazy, corrupt, contrasted then against the glorification of those in that so-called ‘core’. As for solidarity, when this crisis struck it became every man for himself, the bigger and stronger countries dictating everything, Ireland bullied and coerced into accepting a Memorandum of Understanding that in truth amounted to a bailout only for the euro and for the major European banks at the expense of the Irish people, who in fact got a bail-in – not a cent of debt writeoff but actually the opposite, debt piled on debt;

                                In  contravention of Article 10 of the Treaty on European Union, from the outset of this crisis major decision after major decision has been taken without any consultation with the Irish people; we have been burdened with this bank debt without ever a vote, without ever a choice;

                                In contravention of its own rules which stipulate that Emergency Liquid Assistance (ELA) can only be used temporarily, be provided against adequate collateral, and be issued to illiquid but solvent institutions, on the back of PromissoryNotes which were never presented to the Irish Parliament for approval, the ECB allowed the Central Bank of Ireland to issue €30.7bn to Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society at a time when both were zombie banks, were not systemic to the Irish banking system.

                                In light of all the above, and citing Article 41.3 of the European Charter as quoted on page 1, that ‘Every person has the right to have the Union make good any damage caused by its Institutions or by its servants in the performance of their duties,’  we now petition this body to have this burden lifted, then shared fairly across the entire Eurozone but also, shared fairly with those whose billions helped fuel the crisis.

PROPOSALS:      These are our three proposals:

1.       To the ECB: Write off the €28.1bn in sovereign bonds currently held by our Central Bank in lieu of the Promissory Notes (€25bn + €3.1bn for the 2012 note), Notes that were issued in 2010 to cover a flagrant abuse of the Emergency Liquidity Assistance fund when €31bn was pumped in to two already insolvent institutions, Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society, abuse the ECB itself approved;

2.       To the EU: Through the ESM, restore to the Irish Exchequer a) the €3.1bn already destroyed on the basis of those Promissory Notes, b) the €20.7bn taken from our National Pension Reserve Fund to bail out those banks and c) the remaining €12.2bn or so borrowed from the various emergency funds to bail out the Irish banks.

3.       To the EC: Propose a measure to impose a levy on the finance industry that will see the billions their recklessness has cost the peoples of Europe restored to those balance sheets, perhaps that levy going directly to the ESM for redistribution to those countries affected.

The first proposal will ease the long-term bank-debt burden and help end the debt-slavery of future generations to Europe;

 the second will ease the current situation, give us money to invest in job-creation and thus enable us grow our way out of this recession;

the third will force retribution from those whose recklessness caused the crisis.

We thank you in advance for your forbearance, this petition has been prepared without expert advice; we thank you in advance also for considering this petition and trust that it will get due consideration and receive a favourable verdict.

We have attached to this petition a series ofletters from a representative selection of those who march with us, letters that represent more eloquently than any set of statistics the effect the euro-launch and the subsequent consequent series of events has had on the people of this country.