for lefties too stubborn to quit
Hard not to agree with Irish Eagle who tweeted last night…
Eagle @irish_eagle
Look, we’re transitioning from terminal illness to chronic. We will live, but never be well. #IBRC #PromNight
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worldbystorm2014ATgmailDOTcom
The Cedar Lounge Revolution
The Quiet Road
It strikes me that portraying a repayment extension as a victory is about as insidious as it gets. Ireland is like a man being forced to pay off someone else’s mortgage. “Look”, say the ECB, “we realise you’re having some problems paying this debt as fast as we’d like you to. So we’ve decided to let your kids help you pay it off once they’re old enough to work. Can’t say fairer than that!”
Except you can. Pretty much anything else you say would be fairer than that.
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+1
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Have to agree witg ejh above, however already i’ve heard some ‘non politically minded’ people describe the deal as a good thing. The arguement being that we pay less now and with inflation in 40 years time a billion wont be that much at all. Which of course takes away from the fact that we shouldnt be paying it in the first place , be it over 10 years or 100 years.
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Very true. There’s also the problem, and I thought this was true of Kenny’s thoughts today about the ‘other problems’ with our economy and state expenditure etcetera, that this may seem to ‘park’ as it were the European element and then allow for a focus on those supposed ‘other problems’ with solutions that would be very very detrimental to any progress at all.
Difficult not to feel this is a bait and switch.
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I see it as good deal for anyone reliant on short term success. Not so much for anyone else who has to live here. We can say and no doubt will be told this is the best we can get and that might be true given the approach and who we were dealing with but none of it takes away from the choices the Government themselves have made and decisions unquestionably in their own hands.
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Kenny made much in his speech about the embarassment caused to Ireland by our banking collapse, and how this deal somehow relieves this embarassment. He made no reference that I heard to the historic injustice done to the Irish people by the world banking system.
it seems clear where his loyalties lie.
This is so depressing.
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+1
embarrassment is a very telling word to use.
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What does this deal do to our debt/GDP ratio? Does it push it off the scale?
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The view from Poolbeg Street:
“Austerity has definitely pinched our trade year on year as more and more taxes come in, so hopefully getting this deal will be good all around,” he said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/07/ireland-ecb-reaction-idUSL5N0B7H7P20130207
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http://joan-collins.org/2013/02/07/promissory-note-deal-is-a-three-card-trick/
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Had a brief look at this mornings papers and The Examiner was the only one not gushing about the deal on its front page.
Both the Times and the Indo had headlines about 20 billion being wiped from our debt burden.
The next polls will be very interesting.
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Sorry folks for going AWOL. Have sore throat and strange aches. Hope it isn’t flu before protest. I shall snarl at any SP who snarls at me this time. The whole potitical scene around this has been bizarrely volatile. I have found some of the media bordering on the thought police. If not for twitter etc and sites like this…
I still don’t know what to think. There is a necessity to wait sometimes. It is hard to say it is not a positive to have the next budgets easier. But will they? One thing is sure. The coalition will go up in the polls. For a while. SF didn’t do themselves any favors for. A purely political point of view compared with the awful FF.
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“It is hard to say it is not a positive to have the next budgets easier.”
Easier for whom GG? Will Labour be insisting that the €1bn be ring-fenced to reverse cutbacks in the social welfare and healthcare budgets. Will it make any difference to those hardest hit by 5 years of austerity? Will it make any difference to public sector workers who have had pay cuts? Will it make any difference to domestic demand and struggling small businesses? Don’t think so somehow.
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Look – this was the marriage of two political opportunists – Merkel in Germany making nice during her re-election campaign and the FG/Lab shambles in Ireland desperate for any positive story. After the Bundeselection expect ‘Bad-Merkel’ to appear again.
The makes very little differrence to the overall debt level which is only slightly less unsustainable than it was. I think 0.6 percent of GDP I read somewhere.
Of course the idiots in the meeja lapped it up.
So we have to keep repeating for the slow learners:
1) It was never our debt to take on and we had no obligations on those promisory notes. They should be torn up.
2) The surrender of political sovereignty will mean that every part of the social state that isn’t up for cutting will be up for privatising.
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