Protest staged against troika

Some 20 members of the United Left Alliance staged a protest confronting officials from the European Union and International Monetary Fund “troika” as they entered the Department of Finance on Merrion Street this morning.

The officials, in Dublin to negotiate aspects of the €67 billion rescue package with the Government over the next eight days, walked past the demonstrators to shouts of “IMF get them out we don’t want your kind about” without acknowledging it.

Dún Laoghaire TD Richard Boyd Barrett said "it’s outrageous these people can walk across from a five-star hotel and inflict so much suffering on people and steal this country’s assets.”

“It makes a mockery of democracy that these high paid unelected bureaucrats…will write Budget 2012 which will inflict unbearable suffering on ordinary people.”

“It’s long passed the time that ordinary workers and citizens in this country followed the lead of people in Greece or now in the US and took to the streets,” he added.

Dublin West byelection candidate Councillor Ruth Coppinger said the austerity measures imposed by the Government and the troika are not working.

“Apart from the injustice of it, its failing to create jobs, austerity simply doesn’t work, it deflates the economy further so a new direction is needed,” she said.

“We’re here today to make it very clear to the officials from the troika that there is an anger out there, there’s a demoralisation in society as well…we need to see protesting getting out onto the streets against the injustice of what’s being done to us,” she added.