IRISH MEP JOE HIGGINS STRUCK a nerve with Jose Manuel Barroso today when questioning the president of the European Commission over Europe’s involvement in Ireland’s debt.

Socialist MEP Joe Higgins challenged Barroso over the Permanent Financial Stability Mechanism, claiming it was “nothing more than another tool to cushion major European banks from the consequences of their reckless speculation on the financial markets”.

He claimed the mechanism was forcing European workers to pay for the “crisis of a broken financial system and a crisis-ridden European capitalism”.

He also questioned “the morality of transferring tens of billions of euros of private, bad-debts of speculators and bankers gambled wildly on the Irish property market and placing those debts on the shoulders of the Irish people who carry no responsibility whatsoever for them.”

Far from a bailout,  your IMF/EU intervention in Ireland is a mechanism to make vassals of the Irish taxpayers to the European banks…

You claim to be democrats, but you enslave the working people of Europe to the markets – the financial markets – who lead you around by the nose.

Responding to the allegations, Barroso reacted angrily by stating emphatically:

The problems of Ireland were created by irresponsible financial behaviour of some Irish institutions and by the lack of supervision in the Irish market.

Europe is now part of the solution, is trying to support Ireland, but it was not Europe that created this fiscal irresponsible situation and this financial irresponsible behaviour.

Watch the heated exchange in this clip: