A dangerous report card from Europe

The International Monetary Fund recently issued its opinion of how the Irish Government is doing in getting the economy back in shape after its burial under an avalanche of debt in recent years.

There has been a certain admiration expressed with regard to dedication of the Government in implementing the kind of swingeing cuts, with their concomitant hardships, demanded by the bailout.
The international news service Reuters reported, “While again praising Dublin for the ‘vigorous’ policy implementation that has made it the toast of Europe’s bailed-out countries, the IMF noted a deterioration in economic conditions outside of Ireland would hamper its growth prospects for this year and next.”

 

That paragraph can truthfully be rewritten as follows. The Irish Government has greatly pleased us by slashing public spending, making life very much more difficult for the people who live there.

They have been far more efficient in following our orders with regard to degrading the living standards of those in the country with economic difficulties and by drawing many more people into that net, than other financial train wrecks around Europe who are ungrateful upstarts in our eyes. They will be rewarded with growth if the rest of Europe will pay to help the euro survive the crisis or at least subjugate the pride of more countries like Ireland; who found themselves with their pants down at the end of the party.

In addressing Irish civil servants’ concerns about the Croke Park Agreement, Minister Pat Rabbitte stated that since the agreement was signed, there are 18,000 less civil servants. I’m not sure this is something to be proud of. In the book Poisoned Wells: The Dirty Politics of African Oil, the author Nicholas Shaxson quotes a former Nigerian official about the destabilising effects of civil service reduction in the aftermath of a coup. “Over six weeks, without due process, without controls, more than 10,000 civil servants were retired or dismissed. The justification was to shake up the civil service, which was too powerful.”

The “shake-up” has had lasting effects on Nigerian society, according to the official. “Our pride as custodians of the public good was destroyed.

“The Nigerian psyche has been assaulted and insulted. With civil servants respected, we would have been an African lion today beside Asian tigers. But now, we are 45 years behind.”

I concede that we are not comparing like with like in this example but I feel there are enough similarities between the two cases to justify their comparison. Both Ireland and Nigeria in these instances were in the aftermath of a great shock. As Naomi Klein described in her book The Shock Doctrine, people and nations are weak and vulnerable to the movement of massive changes and “remaking” in the aftermath of such shocks. What is patently different is that the leaders of the coup just followed what they believed to be the way forward for the nation.

The cuts being imposed in Ireland have been decreed from outside and implemented with obsequiousness by the Irish Government in a way, which is stomach turning.

They will claim they have been dragooned into the actions in order to save the nation but the fact remains their actions will have massive and lasting effects for Ireland in the future.

It is demoralising to see the Government implementing these ideological changes with such phlegmatic efficiency. While their actions, in successfully implementing these cuts and attacks, may win them praise in the pages of IMF reports, it will constitute a pyrrhic victory when contextualised within the cost to people’s lives and the lives of future generations.

Once again it is education, social welfare and the health service, which have been identified by the IMF for more cuts. These social protections have been branded “unrealistic,” in the current climate, by the IMF. Further reductions have been called for.

Despite all these actions and proposed actions on the part of the Government, Reuters was able to report the following. “Were GDP to expand by only 0.5% per year over the medium term, the country’s gross debt would rise to 129% of GDP by 2017, instead of peaking at 119% of GDP next year.” Essentially, no matter what Ireland continues to do, if the wider situation in Europe is not addressed and dealt with, Ireland’s debt will have risen rather than fallen in the long term. In the best-case scenario, it will peak next year.

Perhaps there is at least one positive in the Government’s approach and that is the absence of sophistry in their delivery of the news of cuts. There is no attempt to paint this in anything like a positive light, they are holding up their hands and showing the world that they are tied. There is no pretence that any of this is beneficial to Ireland or the people who live there.

This is loss of sovereignty writ large and they are to be lauded for not denying it. I am starting to wonder, however, if maybe elected representatives should not be doing a little more to prevent the wholesale destruction of people’s lives. This has particular implications for the Labour Party, whose morals and principles seem particularly friable. Come the next election, many of their core supporters will feel completely disinclined to vote for them.

With them added to the list of Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, the number of parties in the country with any semblance of principles for which a person can vote is becoming very restricted indeed.

The hardcore Fine Gael supporters will cling to the ragged claim they have been forced into their actions because of the actions of former coalition governments but their part in implementing Troika policy and decrees cannot realistically be ignored.

So, as well as the civil service, the health service, education and social welfare, we can now safely add the reputations and principles of Irish political parties to the list of things decimated by Troika. Although it is more accurate to say in the final case that the ideologically defunct nature of Irish political parties has been exposed by recent events, rather than caused by them.