“What if the IMF comes in?” You’ll hear that spoken with trepidation everywhere you go. The fact is the IMF is in – with the EU – and is producing next month’s budget that will make you and me pay for the crisis.
And just to make sure, Ireland's new Lord Lieutenant, Olli Rehn, visited Dublin last week. If this was Greece or France the people would have taken to the barricades.
Alas, this is Ireland, a country where Labour leaders are too comfortable to be climbing up on dirty barricades. As Insider predicted a year ago, Irish resistance – that brought 100,000 people onto our streets - was deliberately aborted by trade union leaders. Let’s face it, being on €140,000 a year makes David Begg & Co somewhat detached from the real world.
A troubling feature is that most of these boyos are leading figures in the Labour Party. Equally worrying is party leader Eamon Gilmore committing a future Labour-led government to achieve the EU’s (and IMF’s ) impossible demand of a three per cent Irish deficit by 2014.
This didn’t stop Labour’s Galway West TD Michael D Higgins writing an article a few weeks ago in the Irish language weekly Gaelscéal, attacking EU banker Jean-Claude Trichet’s insistence that austerity measures are the only way out of this capitalist crisis.
Dep Higgins outlines an open letter by 28 leading economists calling for serious State investment to boost the economy and jobs. Interestingly, he made no mention of the 2014 EU deadline.
Insider wonders if, as he penned this piece, did Dep Higgins recall all the untruths his party propagated about “Lisbon Treaty jobs” during the referendum?
That said, Michael D’s article is certainly a progressive approach to the crisis. Whether this would be acceptable to FG in a coalition government is unlikely. In Galway Labour it will probably go unnoticed.
The recent developer-driven re-zoning frenzy in the Galway City Council, in which two and sometimes three Labour councillors participated, illustrates the lack of political understanding.
Labour’s convention last Friday chose a political novice - Cllr Derek Nolan - as general election candidate. Higgins’ natural successor to the Dáil seat is - former Labour Party and now - Independent councillor Catherine Connolly.
Intellectually she is his equal. She is articulate, precise and very, very passionate. She is no ‘cute hoor’. What you see is what you get. If FG’s recent poll giving Connolly the fourth seat is to be believed then Michael D committed a terrible blunder.
Why Labour shafted such a capable and principled party comrade from being Dep Higgins’ running mate in the last general election remains a matter of conjecture.
At Friday’s convention a motion calling for two candidates, which would have seen the experienced Cllr Colette Connolly on the Labour ticket, was defeated.
However, on Monday, Michael D told Raidió na Gaeltachta that maybe there would be another candidate chosen by the “ard comhraile”, ie, himself. Is fear glic é! But so much for democracy and Higgins’ claim on his website to be a “feminist”.
Having taken the independent route Catherine Connolly could not return to a party that will follow Brussels/IMF’s diktat and butcher our already ailing health services. Ironically, she would concur with the economic policies Higgins sets out in his Gaelscéal article. But she would object – unlike Higgins – to the loss of Irish sovereignty to Brussels.
Insider understands the logic of this humane approach to this capitalist crisis. It was tried after the 1929 global crash. Worryingly, it took World War II to lift that depression and today’s crisis is being compared to it.
Perhaps, rather than sticking plaster solutions to capitalism, we should change systems. Create a society that works in the interests of the majority of the people, not in the interests of an elite and the supposedly omnipotent markets.
But let’s return to some of the burning issues Michael D preferred not to touch on in his gripe against the EU bankers.
David McWilliams has linked the Irish crisis to our membership of the euro. The lack of Irish influence over the euro and interest rates led to a flood of cheap money from German, French, and other foreign banks/speculators that fatally fuelled the Irish property boom.
Sure, Fianna Fáil and the golden circle played their delinquent part in this economic disaster, but it is not only in Ireland that ‘golden circles’ exist. The EU has its own golden circle, its own “crony capitalism”.
When Ireland needed a high interest rate to stem the spiralling house prices, the French and German economies needed a low interest rate and the latter’s ‘golden circle’ got what it wanted.
When it appeared that German and French bondholders were going to be burnt by the collapse of our banks, the EU, ie, Merkel and Sarkozy, approved NAMA, so that we have to pay back these reckless speculators.
They call it socialism for the rich, capitalist crisis for everyone else.
True, Merkel is whistling a different tune since the horse has bolted – but her only concern now is her taxpayers, not us!
Let Insider play devil’s advocate and suggest that our membership of the euro has been a disaster and perhaps the only answer is to leave it.
Our membership of the EEC/EU hasn’t been all that successful either. Apart from the 10 year boom that has brought us to the edge of the abyss, our economy has remained in the doldrums.
The Europhiles counter that Ireland without the EU would be a small country on the periphery of Europe. What, like Norway? A country that boasts one of the highest living standards in the world? And just like Norway, we have gas, oil, and fish off our shores.
It is time we started thinking the unthinkable to get ourselves out of this mess. Who’ll give Insider a hand with this barricade?
