The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week – Special IMF Commemorative Edition November 21, 2010

It seems that the commentariat of the Sindo is experiencing a form of collective shell-shock. I was expecting this week’s paper to be on the war path, filled with unabashed neo-liberal bile and venom, all of it stupid and all of it eminently quotable. But apparently not. For example, it was left to Celia Larkin to red-scare against the Provos, while poor Gerry Adams merited only a light slap in passing for coming to Louth. Instead, although the government gets abuse, the paper was downbeat and restrained. So it’s hysterical at the best of times, and when things appear to be at their worst, it becomes taciturn. Perhaps a collective deep breath before unleashing a barrage next week telling us how this is the greatest thing ever. Certainly though, the lack of self-awareness we all know and love has not been dented. This from Declan Lynch, in a piece where he rightly accuses Fianna Fáil of being so intoxicated by its own bullshit it has started to believe it

It is an addiction too, the old bullshit, and it has played a remarkable role in the destruction of Ireland.

This is true. And a fair proportion of it has emanated from the Sindo (see this reaction from a prominent Sindo columnist to being called on his bullshit for example. Thanks to regular commenter Shane for that link).

The paper is though still capable of throwing out some supremely silly statements. Just ask Julia Molony, who unfortunately is probably not being sarcastic.

IT might seem a little joyless to bring up divorce while the whole world is celebrating a royal engagement

We also get the amusing sight of a somewhat penitent Willie O’Dea, before moving on to the really silly stuff.

Brendan O’Connor has jumped the gun on the turn to praise the IMF, by informing us that we shouldn’t be too worried.

All the IMF will do is make us do what we keep saying we’re going to do, the things that our local yokels’ need for popularity prevents them from doing — the right things.

Aengus Fanning is pleased to see economic policy being removed from the hands of the locally-elected politicians, and placed elsewhere. He condemns these same politicians in what can only be described an act of amnesia or total hypocrisy. I wonder which it might be.

The Government has rightly pursued the Holy Grail of export-led growth but, in doing so, it has allowed a brutally deflationary policy to be imposed on our people. By depressing consumer demand, allowing businesses to close, jobs to be lost, and property prices to collapse, it has sought to make us more internationally competitive, causing great collateral damage through the blighting of human lives.

Who cheered on that policy Aengus?

There is one Sindo columnist, however, who has not forgotten. First prize to Jody Corcoran, who, providing some passion, once again spectacularly succeeds in following an agenda that places the blame for the crisis squarely at the wrong door, and that can lead only to further chaos, crisis and economic disaster.

The Government likes to claim there have been four austere Budgets in its lifetime, when, in truth, there has only been one, and even that — the last — was almost fudged when the Taoiseach sought to cave in to his most basic instinct, which is to protect Fianna Fail by protecting a public sector so big, so bloated, so fattened on the suckling tit of benchmarking, itself bankrolled by the excess of the property bubble; his instinct to step slowly, carefully, embracing the social partners who were, by the by, exposed for having routinely partaken in the Fas-like sense of entitlement so engendered by the Celtic Tiger.

A report was commissioned from Colm McCarthy’s group, but left to gather dust; quangos, stuffed to the gills with the cronies of Fianna Fail, 14 years in power, remain largely untouched; the semi-States, gilded and carpeted, many of them pointless, standing as monuments to the excesses of the age, their CEO’s earning a multiple of the salary of the president of the United States; the banks, unreconstructed, the bastards therein who
did this to us, in the main, still there, still drawing down their bonuses, still quaffing on a bogus prestige; property developers, unrepentant, as vacuously empty as the white elephants they have left behind, who wrested the State from the body politic to abuse as they wish, their own plaything with which to enrich themselves; and the political system itself, of course, seemingly powerless in this dance to the death with the elite, which has brought the country to ruin after just 80 years in existence, just that, unreformed and increasingly unaccountable, hiding behind the shambles that is Harney’s HSE, for but one example, and now turning in on itself, its only refuge, unable to understand the anger of the people which is welling up that it might burst any day now into a pyre of burning flames.

For Christ’s sake, would they not just go, and go now, this very day, that we may salvage something from the ashes with which to start again.

You live and learn. Or not.