Answer the question Minister

RTEs Richard Crowley had a very difficult time getting a simple answer from our lying Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, last Sunday (This Week, 21st).

The question was simple – How much are we going to borrow from the EU/IMF?

Crowley: How much are we looking for?

Lenihan: Blah, blah blah, blah…

Crowley: What’s the figure Minister, how much are we looking for?

Lenihan: Blah, blah, blah, blah…

Crowley: How much are we applying for on this loan?

Lenihan: Blah, blah, blah, blah…

Crowley: How much?

Lenihan: Blah, blah, blah, blah…

Crowley: Roughly

Lenihan: Blah, blah, blah, blah…

Crowley: Are we talking tens of billions?

Lenihan: Yes, we are talking tens of billions.

Crowley: So it could be 70, 80, 90 billion?

Lenihan: No, nowhere near that.

We’re borrowing €85 billion.

Ireland as a warning to others?

On the reasonable assumption that the EU/IMF are fully aware that an interest rate of 6.7% will destroy what’s left of our economy there can only be two reasons for such an imposition.

It’s the first shot in a negotiating process.

Or

The EU/IMF have decided that Ireland is expendable, that it’s economic and social destruction could serve as a useful warning to countries like Portugal and Spain to get their act together.

Ireland's nod and wink culture and pension losses

Recent comments by David McWilliams on pension losses.

This has all to do with, I wouldn’t say corruption, it’s to do with the extraordinary nod and wink culture in Ireland.

So much of Irish pensions were put into Irish banks by people who were paid by the Irish banks to put the pensions into the Irish banks.

Clients were told the pensions were safe by people who were being paid by the banks to say they were safe.

Yes, it’s called nod and wink in Ireland. Other jurisdictions call it by its name.

Eating the Irish

The attached article by Paul Krugman of the New York Times is well worth reading.

Krugman compares Ireland with Iceland and comes to some damning conclusions.

He does, however, leave out one important difference between the two countries.

When disaster struck, the people of Iceland took strong and immediate action.

They threw out the government and the corrupt bankers, put the former Prime Minister on trial and told the bond holders to take a hike.

In other words, they retained their self respect as a nation and took control of their own destiny.

New York Times
November 25, 2010

By Paul Krugman

Eating the Irish

What we need now is another Jonathan Swift. Most people know Swift as the author of “Gulliver’s Travels.” But recent events have me thinking of his 1729 essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which he observed the dire poverty of the Irish, and offered a solution: sell the children as food.

“I grant this food will be somewhat dear,” he admitted, but this would make it “very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.”

O.K., these days it’s not the landlords, it’s the bankers — and they’re just impoverishing the populace, not eating it. But only a satirist — and one with a very savage pen — could do justice to what’s happening to Ireland now.

The Irish story began with a genuine economic miracle. But eventually this gave way to a speculative frenzy driven by runaway banks and real estate developers, all in a cozy relationship with leading politicians.

The frenzy was financed with huge borrowing on the part of Irish banks, largely from banks in other European nations.

Then the bubble burst, and those banks faced huge losses. You might have expected those who lent money to the banks to share in the losses. After all, they were consenting adults, and if they failed to understand the risks they were taking that was nobody’s fault but their own.

But, no, the Irish government stepped in to guarantee the banks’ debt, turning private losses into public obligations.

Before the bank bust, Ireland had little public debt. But with taxpayers suddenly on the hook for gigantic bank losses, even as revenues plunged, the nation’s creditworthiness was put in doubt. So Ireland tried to reassure the markets with a harsh program of spending cuts.

Step back for a minute and think about that.

These debts were incurred, not to pay for public programs, but by private wheeler-dealers seeking nothing but their own profit. Yet ordinary Irish citizens are now bearing the burden of those debts.

Or to be more accurate, they’re bearing a burden much larger than the debt — because those spending cuts have caused a severe recession so that in addition to taking on the banks’ debts, the Irish are suffering from plunging incomes and high unemployment.

But there is no alternative, say the serious people: all of this is necessary to restore confidence.

Strange to say, however, confidence is not improving. On the contrary: investors have noticed that all those austerity measures are depressing the Irish economy — and are fleeing Irish debt because of that economic weakness.

Now what? Last weekend Ireland and its neighbors put together what has been widely described as a “bailout.” But what really happened was that the Irish government promised to impose even more pain, in return for a credit line — a credit line that would presumably give Ireland more time to, um, restore confidence. Markets, understandably, were not impressed: interest rates on Irish bonds have risen even further.

Does it really have to be this way?

In early 2009, a joke was making the rounds: “What’s the difference between Iceland and Ireland? Answer: One letter and about six months.” This was supposed to be gallows humor. No matter how bad the Irish situation, it couldn’t be compared with the utter disaster that was Iceland.

But at this point Iceland seems, if anything, to be doing better than its near-namesake. Its economic slump was no deeper than Ireland’s, its job losses were less severe and it seems better positioned for recovery.

In fact, investors now appear to consider Iceland’s debt safer than Ireland’s. How is that possible?

Part of the answer is that Iceland let foreign lenders to its runaway banks pay the price of their poor judgment, rather than putting its own taxpayers on the line to guarantee bad private debts. As the International Monetary Fund notes — approvingly! — “private sector bankruptcies have led to a marked decline in external debt.”

Meanwhile, Iceland helped avoid a financial panic in part by imposing temporary capital controls — that is, by limiting the ability of residents to pull funds out of the country.

And Iceland has also benefited from the fact that, unlike Ireland, it still has its own currency; devaluation of the krona, which has made Iceland’s exports more competitive, has been an important factor in limiting the depth of Iceland’s slump.

None of these heterodox options are available to Ireland, say the wise heads. Ireland, they say, must continue to inflict pain on its citizens — because to do anything else would fatally undermine confidence.

But Ireland is now in its third year of austerity, and confidence just keeps draining away.

And you have to wonder what it will take for serious people to realize that punishing the populace for the bankers’ sins is worse than a crime; it’s a mistake.

Here we go again

Letter in yesterday’s Irish Examiner.

Here we ago again: ‘Look as foolish as you can and call every man sir’

THE then German ambassador to Ireland, Christian Pauls, made the mistake of laughing at our folly when addressing a group of German businessmen in Clontarf Castle more than three years ago, almost exactly a year before the banking crisis in the US became world news.

Ambassador Pauls depicted Ireland as a “coarse” country dominated by avarice. He pulled no punches, providing examples of a small country with a population of four million top-heavy with overpaid ministers, junior ministers and a retinue of others in political life living high on the hog.

The ambassador also spoke of medical professionals who dismissed the €200,000 offered to them to tend patients in public hospitals, as “Mickey Mouse money”.

He raised a laugh among the Germans in the audience when he spoke of the vehicular vanity of the Irish, recalling an occasion when he attended a concert performance. A public announcement was made to the effect that a 1993 car was causing an obstruction outside the hall.

Nobody left the hall to move it and Herr Pauls’ conclusion was, right or wrong, that we had reached such a level of snobbery that to be associated with a 1993 clunker would mean social death.

Our self-identification with expensive cars and sumptuous mansions bought on tick from the German taxpayer provided the Deutschlanders with an insight into the grotesque comedy of the feral and predatory Celtic Tiger.

The German ambassador was rebuked by the Irish government in all its preening glory and was subsequently recalled to his own country.

The truth often hurts in a country where then Taoiseach Bertie Ahern once told us we’d be the laughing-stock of the world if we continued to use pencils to cast our votes. So that we wouldn’t become laughing stocks, Martin Cullen ordered some shiny new toys in the form of evoting machines.

Unfortunately, although they’ve been charged to the Irish taxpayer, they are now in some junkyard or museum as icons of extravagance and utter ineptitude. Did the ministers and Taoisigh not have grannies who warned them that ‘wilful waste makes woeful want’?

John B Keane bequeathed to us the expression “cute hoor” and, although WB Yeats was invoked throughout the past week or so, John B understood what deprivation and emigration really meant to our ancestors.

In his play Many Young Men of Twenty, the Listowel writer has a woman bidding farewell to her sons about to emigrate to England to find work. Her advice to them is to “look as foolish as you can and call every man sir”.

The innate wisdom of her advice is the recognition that it is much better to be underestimated while quietly achieving than to flaunt so brazenly that others are waiting for you to get your comeuppance.

John B Keane wrote about rural Ireland in the 1950s and he saw the foibles of a people still sure of their birthright.

Sean O’Casey wrote about the Dublin slum-dwellers in The Plough and the Stars who veered from sentimental patriotism to an acceptance of harsh reality.

The 1916 Rising involved just the courageous few who were prepared to die for their beliefs while in Dublin city centre there were others who were busy looting shops.

Today’s white-collar looters have cannibalised our country, facilitated by those entrusted with its governance, the very same people now bragging about their remarkable cleverness in having the IMF arrive here to delve into the jiggery-pokery of our banking system.

We should almost be proud that Ireland is now the focus of world attention and that our “colleagues” and “partners”, even “friends”, are so concerned for our welfare.

Christian Pauls, must be laughing heartily at the bluffing of our Taoiseach and Minister of Finance.

The ambassador’s comments in Clontarf Castle in September 2007 were published as far afield as the southern hemisphere and were printed in The Australian newspaper at that time.

Maureen O’Donnell
Boreenmanna Road
Cork

Irish taxpayers will not pay

Ok, here’s the reality. The massive cuts and tax increases in recent budgets, the massive cuts and tax increases in the four year plan are all just nibbling around the edge of the infinite billions we owe, estimated by some at €250 billion.

The EU, IMF and the Markets, in cooperation with our gombeen government have decided that Irish taxpayers will take on the full cost of saving the Euro and repaying the bond holders.

Germany, the richest and most powerful country in Europe with a population of 80 million just recently paid the last installment of the €28 billion bill for WW1, nearly a century after the event.

There are only four million citizens in Ireland, two million of which are working. Most of these workers are in dire straits with massive loans, mortgages and the day to day cost of living in a very expensive, inefficient and corrupt banana republic.

The expectation is that Irish citizens will voluntary live in a wilderness of poverty and hopelessness for the rest of their lives in order to make the plan work.

They will then happily pass on the massive burden to their children without comment or complaint and on to future generations ad infinitum.

The gombeen government is doing what all Irish gombeen government do when the make a mess of things – screwing the taxpayer.

The EU and IMF are ignorant of the true state of affairs in Ireland and have been convinced by our gombeen government that Irish taxpayers are only too happy to help out, no matter what the cost.

The international financial community is very impressed with the honesty and apparent unity of the Irish people.

But there’s a problem. Nobody has bothered to consult the two million or so taxpayers about the plan.

It has been innocently assumed by all parties that they will shut up and pay up.

I don’t think they can, or will pay.

It is on this technicality that the great plan will fall.

Noel Dempsey: I feel your pain

Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey, spoke to George Hook (24th Nov.) about the pain he feels for himself, his family and the great unwashed after the publication of the four year plan.

I’m a citizen of this state the same as the people that are texting into you, anything that affects them affects me.

I can understand that an awful lot of people were very angry when this thing hit…That anger is affecting everybody, it affects me the same as it affects everybody else.

I have children too, I have family members and everything else so I understand that. It’s very popular to kick politicians around, we do our best.

As a government minister Dempsey is on a salary of about €250,000. He pays for nothing, not for phone, not for transport, not for food, not for accommodation and a large percentage of his expenses are tax free.

But the peasants can take solace from this ‘leader’ that he feels their pain, he understands their anger, he’s at one with their suffering.

Irish corruption threatens EU and European project

Slowly but surely EU officials are beginning to realise how virulent the Irish corruption disease really is as it begins to not only infect the Euro but threatens to bring down the entire EU project.

But EU officials are only fooling themselves if they think the €85 billion offered tonight to recapitalise the banks and fund the public finances will be enough.

According to Prof. Brian Lucy of Trinity College the total bill, which I believe is down to our corrupt political system, will be about €250 billion, I’ll just repeat that – €250 billion.

I think Brussels is making a serious mistake by under funding the Irish bailout because if it fails the domino effect will accelerate and threaten Portugal and perhaps even Spain.

If that happens, it’s goodbye Euro.

In a corrupt state reality must be avoided at all costs.

Last weekend the Minister for Justice, Dermot Ahern and the Minister for Transport, Noel Dempsey lied to the nation regarding negotiations on the IMF bailout.

In a functional democracy these liars would be swiftly dealt with and the nation would move on.

In Ireland this cannot happen because we are an intrinsically corrupt state. In such a country the truth must never even be acknowledged because to do so would mean having to actually act and to act would mean accepting that we are an intrinsically corrupt state.

To avoid facing reality we regularly engage in bizarre analysis of events.

The following discussion is taken from the Sunday Supplement in which presenter Sam Smyth, Fianna Fail’s Mary O’Rourke, and other panelists engage in an Alice in Wonderland analysis of what exactly a lie is as opposed to the truth.

As a member of the most corrupt political party in the country and therefore the party with the greatest number of liars Mary O’Rourke’s responses are particularly interesting and bizarre.

Panelist: We had this comical situation with Dempsey and Ahern standing at a platform and saying it was completely ludicrous the notion that we were dealing with the IMF.

Smyth: Do you think they were deliberately lying or did they not know…a lie is worse than being mislead. There’s no question about that, it’s a deliberate untruth.

Panelist: It’s morally worse but is it worse in the sense that the insight into how this government works or rather doesn’t work.

Smyth: I take that point but somebody maliciously lying or telling an untruth is a serious…

Panelist: well if you take it that they were lying then that will stand on its own. If they weren’t lying and they didn’t know what was going on that’s even worse if they’re two members of the Cabinet.

Smyth: Mary (O’Rourke) do you think those Ministers were lying or do you think they didn’t know what was going on?

O’Rourke: I believe that they didn’t realise the extent of what they knew if you follow me.

That if they sat at the Cabinet table they had to know what was happening therefore if they inquired and didn’t seem to realise of what was going to happen well then that’s what led them…

I do think that genuinely they didn’t realise the extent of the vastness of what was about to happen.

Smyth: Would that (their ignorance) not frighten you Mary?

O’Rourke: I would feel they knew but did not realise the awfulness of the extent of what they knew, that’s what I feel.

Now, nobody has told me, I just figured that.

Dermot Ahern wouldn’t be known for his nuancing, shall we say. He said it was a book of fiction.

Panelist: If he used the expression ‘a book of fiction’ then either he’s outside the loop or he absolutely and utterly lied.

Dermot Ahern is very emphatic in the language he uses and to say something was a work of fiction…

Smyth: Yes, when you’re going to be found out so quickly it’s hard to believe that someone would deliberately say that.

Panelist: It makes a mockery of the whole thing. It was laughable for ordinary decent citizens who were listening to the shenanigans that were going on.

Incredibly, the whole matter came up again later in the programme and again the panel engaged in a bizarre discussion on when is a lie not a lie while completely ignoring the fact that we live in a country where the Minister for Justice can casually lie to the nation regarding a very serious matter that will impact on every citizen for generations to come.

The disturbing aspect of such off the wall analysis is that these are well educated, intelligent people who wield a good degree of influence on ordinary citizens.