I’m sick of this shite being trotted out that Fianna Fáil are willing to take the hard decisions.
They had 3 big ones to make - and everything that’s now considered a “big decision” 1) pales in comparison next to them and 2) is as a direct result of them not taking the hard decisions IN THE FIRST PLACE!
The Bank Guarantee scheme
Save the people or save the banks?
Decision - Save the banks.
Nationalising Anglo
Kill the toxic bank or save the builders’ bank?
Decision - Save the builders’ bank.
NAMA
Let the market find it’s floor or prop up the zombie banks?
Decision - Prop up the zombie banks.
By putting the unique bank guarantee scheme in place, it forced the Anglo and NAMA decisions to be made.
Everything flows from that night in September 2008.
Why do the media now accept it as a given that only Fianna Fáil will take the hard decisions when the one time they really had to make one they crumbled?
The next person to tell me Fianna Fáil take the hard decisions and that Brian Lenihan is some sort of genius gets a boot up the hole!
I heard that the other day from someone, shortly followed by well sure aren’t the others all as bad? Then I was told that giving everyone a medical card would cost the tax payer loads of money.
Yes I’d much rather my tax was spent on Richie Boucher’s pension and NAMA.
Does it though? What about the €20b+ annual deficit? I still can’t quite work out why our €20b loss on Anglo (and even if you add another €10b for other banking losses) is so much more important than us losing that amount every year in current spending. That seems a far bigger problem to me.
You are right that ‘take the hard decisions’ is a ludicrously optimistic way of putting it.
What I think is a truer description is that we unfortunately find ourselves as part of this society. And a random collection of folk who post on an internet board, united by nothing other than a desire to avoid paying someone else’s debt, just isn’t a politically cohesive force. Folk exposed to property is a much more cohesive and visible force. If you were appointed finance minister in the morning, that’s what you’d have to face. That’s the situation he’s handling well.
Sure we saw it in Quinn Insurance. The minute the Regulator acts, despite all we’ve been through, you get the ‘jobs jobs jobs’ mantra that’s meant to make all other concerns unimportant. Despite all we’ve been through. Its unbelievable. But that’s the kind of people we share this country with. Those are the people we have to deal with to formulate solutions in this society.
I’ve suggested elsewhere our new national anthem should be ‘Stuck In Middle With You’
I think its a very fair point. Whenever I hear one of those 'sure you’d never know there was a recession comments, I remind whoever says it that we’re collectively borrowing an Anglo Bailout a year just for current public expenditure.
2007 was the year of fear.
By March 2008 Anglo was a dead duck. Cue golden circles, illegal share support and fear turning to panic.
By September 2008 the game was up. It was just a question of who picked up the bill.
Without a guarantee the banks would have collapsed.
We would have been better off with a total banking collapse.
Interestingly, I think the whole thing would have come apart much sooner after 2001 had the government not caved in to the demands of the building industry and “specuvestors” to extend the tax relief schemes. Had they done so, it is likely that we would have had a major banking crisis around 2002/03 that would have collapsed Anglo Irish Bank and possibly created problems for AIB and maybe BoI, instead by not taking the hard decisions then, most of the Irish banking system collapsed in September 2008. Of course you can argue that had there not been a building boom, that Irish banks would then have gotten involved in derivative instruments based on the UK and US and Spanish property boom like the German banks and Swiss banks (UBS, Credit Suisse) did and the major banks such as AIB,BoI would still have collapsed in September 2008 with the locus of the fallout being in the IFSC.
But the point is clear, FF will never take hard decisions unless their backs are to the wall, even back in the 70’s the whole idea of breaking with sterling and linking to the Deutchmark was largely driven by FF’s desire to access cheap credit in order to buy votes. Martin O’Donoghue (Minister for Economic Planning and Development 1977–1979 )the architect of this policy retired as a director of the central bank in April 2008 having been appointed in 1998.
The hard decision they have to take is to call an election
harder still would be to come forward and admit to all their corruption down the years
but they control large sections of the media
if people are still thick enough to reelect them Irekland is super fucked the people are fucked and everything is fucked. u dont need to even call in the IMF demolition team the 2 brians without a brain are doing that brilliantly. that gives u an idea just how bad things are in ireland
Thats about spot on, the effects were’nt really seen until Feb 07, but from Oct 06 to Dec 06, there was a huge tightening from this qtr on, by April 07 it was in full flow.
It also has a volcano… You can’t correlate everything…
Ireland’s finances both personal and public were sheer lunacy, whereas Iceland’s domestic economy was relatively sound and they were only exposed by the actions of a couple of crazy banks abroad with UK cash when the music stopped.
Totally different situations not that I disagree with your substantive point.
