President Michael D. Higgins has questioned how financial decision-making at a global level has moved away from parliaments to unaccountable agencies.
He also said the scale of the unemployment crisis in Europe today reflected a dysfunction arising from the limited frame of economic theory.
Delivering the inaugural Donal Nevin lecture, named after one of Ireland’s most respected trade union leaders, in Dublin last night, the President said the public needed a pluralism of perspectives honestly stated.
“The large-scale unemployment problem in Europe today, with its large youth component, reveals a dysfunction and should surely engage us all in a discourse that seeks such an understanding, and a strategy in public economics as will meet this waste of human creativity and life, and by doing so can best engage our moral instincts.”
He said the global system at present was constituted of ever more anxious peoples who perceive themselves to be an increasingly declining, countervailing force at the mercy of market forces.
