EU to dictate our future budget cuts.

Irish democracy is on its last legs according to comments made in the Dail yesterday. It has become apparent that elements of the EU believe it is their right to police future Irish budgets. There was me thinking that it was the right of the Irsh people to elect representatives to devide the money they pay into the state coffers amoung our vital services.

Speaking after the European Commission proposed a peer review for national budgets, Sinn Féin Spokesperson on Finance Arthur Morgan has hit out at the prospect of an unelected “eurocracy” policing national Budgets.

Deputy Morgan said:

“Today we are being handed down proposals from the European Commission that draft national budgets should be submitted to Brussels for scrutiny and peer review by other member states. The future sovereignty of national budgetary and fiscal decisions hangs in the balance. The basis of democracy itself will be corrupted if the Government do not wholly and vehemently oppose the trajectory of the European Commission to reinforce budgetary surveillance.

“The interests of capital are smothering wider social concerns and these are the very interests who created the crisis. The Commission’s aspiration to monitor national budgets and veto against them if they do not conform to the view of the Commission flies in the face of democracy and further concentrates power within the European institutions; power that should be sovereign.

“The consequences of this proposal being adopted are such that the rigid adherence to the Stability and Growth Pact will outweigh the importance of rights such as health, education and decent employment. As the EU places more emphasis on unfettered allegiance to this Pact, people and public services will suffer, as we are seeing in Greece.

“We cannot let this proposal be adopted. An unelected “eurocracy” cannot make decisions in lieu of people who have at least been directly elected. We have not voted to let the European Commission police our budgets.”