Letter in today’s Irish Independent.
Let me get this right. Brian Lenihan says we can’t continue to borrow €400m per week or we will go bankrupt. Yet our politicians are on holiday for 12 weeks by which time they’ll have borrowed an extra €4.8bn.
When Mr Lenihan works out which vested interest pays the most money to Fianna Fail, and therefore needs to be kept on side the most, it will be the end of January 2010 and we’ll have borrowed a further €6.8bn. All this money has to be repaid, with interest, plus an extra premium given our lower credit rating.
Every voter in Ireland has a duty of care to their children, grandchildren and parents to make their anger known to TDs, and in particular those in the Green Party who keep this Government in power, so that no TD gets a moment’s respite from that anger until they abandon their holidays, recall the Dail and take the steps required to start fixing this mess now.
The required cutbacks need to start from the top because the well-off, despite their moaning, haven’t paid their fair share yet. The Government is relying on the Irish public remaining as weak and ineffectually docile as usual, but there’s only so much hypocrisy people will take before the worm turns.
In 2009, every pillar of Irish society failed. We now know how the corruption we allowed flourish in politics, by re-electing TDs we knew were not fit for the job has seeped into every sector of society so that the financial, legal, professional and religious systems are as rotten as the political one. So who’s left holding the sky up in Ireland, and how long before the whole thing falls in?
Rather than recalling the centenary of the 1916 Rising; in 2016, we might be dealing with the fallout from the long overdue revolution that sweeps away the Irish political system.
Desmond FitzGerald
Canary Wharf, London