Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week

First up, the Labour Party would be better worrying about people who dodge taxes rather than setting up what the Sindo describes as a Sweeny-style squad to look for benefit fraud. In fact, added to Rabbitte’s recent rant about natural resources, a large part of Labour should just get it over with and join Fine Gael. We can only dream about seeing the fringe benefits beyond the obvious that raising income tax would have.

Louise McBride, in the business pages, has decided that it’s time to deal with the debt holding back economic growth. How can we do this? Why, of course. Attack public sector pensions. If private sector works are getting screwed over their pensions, the public sector should too.

This is not simply an argument about private versus public sector. Despite the recent pensions levy, the State is still drowning in a public sector pensions bill that could be as high as €8bn a year.

This bankrupt country simply cannot afford that bill — particularly if it comes at the expense of hard-pressed taxpayers who are already sick to the teeth of cutbacks.

A bill like that will make it harder for us to shift the mountain of debt that will hold back economic growth for years. And it can’t be justified when three-quarters of the workforce are left high and dry with their pensions.

Notice the word “could” there. Notice the absence, too, of reference to small matters like the bank bailout that may just have added to the debt. Notice, in short, stupidity. Having said that, at least she is good enough to offer us advice on what to invest in next – fine wine, classic cars, the movie industry, and paintings. Obviously, she’s aiming helpful, realistic and practical advice at the public sector workers, as clearly no-one in the private sector has the money to do anything like this.

Eamon Delaney has a go at the left for not protesting against what the government is doing in Syria (he then proceeds to throw Libya and Iran into the mix too, somewhat less plausibly). He contrasts this with what he sees as the constant complaining about the US and Israel, grounded in an irrational hatred. Except he can’t make up his mind who it is that the people he is criticising actually hate.

The discrepancy is presumably because these conflicts don’t involve the US, or Israel, or the West in that one-sided, self-hating fashion of the liberal left.

I’m not really sure how Irish leftists protesting against Israel and the US is self-hating. And unfortunately, he doesn’t explain it to us either.

This week’s winner, Declan Ganley, has declared that Europe needs a hero to save itself. I wonder who he has in mind for the job? Before getting to the most quotable inanity, perhaps it would be worth reminding Ganley where Europe actually is. He starts his article with a description of what he claims was the first action by British troops in WWI, the first British Army action on the continent, he says, since Waterloo. Either his history or his geography needs some work, given the Crimean War. Anyway, he offers us this.

Across Europe, the charade of feigned government competence continues. It would seem that every one of them, to some degree or another, thinks that they can defy the laws of common sense and private responsibility, in denial of the fact that their beloved European ‘social model’ is insolvent and collapsing into financial and moral bankruptcy. It had been kept alive, artificially, by transfusions of private capital, in the form of pensions and savings entrusted to politically compromised banks, who then passed on the cash to insatiable government borrowers, eager to promise more of anyone else’s money, in return for the sinecures that are so part and parcel of Europe’s current political class.

I think what he meant to say was that the institutions of private capital has been artificially kept alive by a massive infusion of public capital. You can see how he made that mistake. Like many others, he suffers from a disease called neo-liberalism, so perhaps we shouldn’t mock the afflicted.