ABOUT 50,000 Irish people took to the streets at the weekend to oppose savage cutbacks needed to secure an international bailout.
The protests piled pressure on the debt-laden nation’s embattled government.
Waving placards reading “Eire not for sale, not to the IMF” and “There is a better, fairer way”, the crowd marched through Dublin in a mass protest against the austerity package announced on Wednesday by Prime Minister Brian Cowen.
The four-year package will cut the minimum wage and slash 25,000 public-sector jobs as the one-time “Celtic Tiger” economy deals with a huge budget deficit.
The government says the measures, along with a budget due on December 7, are a precondition to securing European Union and International Monetary Fund loans worth a reported €85 billion ($116.5bn).
EU finance ministers were meeting in Brussels last night to discuss the loans, which will be directed in part at Ireland’s struggling banks and are intended to try to stop the debt crisis spreading to other euro-zone nations.
But there is widespread anger in Ireland at the bailout and voters dealt Mr Cowen’s Fianna Fail party a humiliating by-election defeat in Donegal on Friday that cut the FF/Green Party coalition’s parliamentary majority to just two.
“Why should we pay for the banks? . . . The euro is on its way out,” said Esther Hoad, 48, a civil servant who drove 290km on frozen roads to join the Dublin protest.
About 700 police officers were deployed in Dublin for the march, which was largely peaceful.
“We are here to object to the arrogance of the government,” Irish Congress of Trade Unions president Jack O’Connor told the crowd.
“They want to sign a blank cheque for generations to come. We’re not here to pay for the speculators, but we’re here to insist on a fair plan.”
The march converged on the General Post Office, the scene of Ireland’s declaration of independence in 1916 and a symbolic site for critics of the bailout, who say it is eroding Irish sovereignty.
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