The more things change the more they stay the same

Fianna Fáil is dead! Long live Fianna Fáil! Who needs the Soldiers of Destiny when you have Fine Gael and Labour adopting Fianna Fáil policies? Now doing the very things they condemned the then Government for doing before the election last month.

So they were going to “burn the bondholders”. God bless your innocence if you believed that one. It’s as if there was no election. The names of the people in power have changed but everything else remains the same.
Last week in the Dáil the new Minister for Justice Michael Noonan said that Tuesday, September 30, 2008, would go down in history as the blackest day in Ireland since the Civil War broke out. That date, as you may remember, was the date on which the then Government issued the bank guarantee which gave a blank cheque to holders of senior bonds in Irish banks.
Now this is an issue that I have carefully tried to avoid since it first arose in September 2008. I neither condemned nor praised the then Government for their action. Because I just didn’t know. Some economic experts said the Government had no choice, while others said it was a dreadful mistake that future generations of Irish people would be paying for.
I think everyone would agree now that the latter opinion was the right one. Events since September 2008 seem to bear that out.
I suppose the best that can be said of the Government decision then was that they were not told all the facts about the threatened collapse of the banking system here. They had to make an instant decision in the small hours of the morning.
If they waited for further advice or information it would be too late and there would be no money to pay the wages of teachers, nurses, gardaí and other public servants. There would be nothing to pay the social welfare bill that week. Buses and trains would remain in their stations. Electricity generating stations would shut down. The whole economy would grind to a halt. Or so we were told.
But isn’t hindsight a fantastic gift? A pity that we couldn’t have it in advance. The then Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his Finance Minister Brian Lenihan were faced with a terrible choice. Should they or should they not bail out the banks?
The consequences for this little country were going to be extremely serious no matter what they did. Those were two men who were only a few months in the job and they, and nobody else, were going to have to carry the can if things went wrong.
Now we have the spectacle of former senior ministers like Willie O’Dea washing his hands of the whole affair. O’Dea says he and his fellow ministers were “bounced” into making a snap decision. They were presented with no option but to agree to the decision that had to be made before markets opened the following morning.
But that was the same dilemma that was faced by Cowen and Lenihan. Now O’Dea, in his selfish bid to get back to the top of the poll in Limerick, is trying to give the impression that the decision had nothing to do with him.
Like the little boy caught with his hand in the box of chocolates, he will blame everybody but himself. “They made me do it,” he says.
There might be far more regard for O’Dea if he had put his money where his mouth now seems to be. He should have walked the walk then, rather than talking the talk now. He should have resigned from the cabinet then if he was so concerned about the issue rather than resign on a local issue a few years later.
It is now the popular thing to condemn Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan for that blanket guarantee to the banks. But it is a bit late in the day for Willie O’Dea to be jumping on that popular bandwagon. He and every single member of the cabinet is just as much to blame as the two Brians.
As I stated earlier, I have avoided discussing the bank bail-outs up to now because this is a subject I know nothing about.
However, like everybody else, I now accept that the original bail-out decision in September 2008 was a dreadful mistake. But I am still very much in the dark about a lot of related issues and I’ll give one example. If it was so wrong then to bail the banks out why is it so right now? Michael Noonan says that day in September 2008 was “the blackest day” in modern Irish history. But the same Michael Noonan now thinks it’s ok to give the same banks a further €24bn.
I am following politics long enough to know that you will say one thing in Opposition but will do the opposite in Government. But how can he still say, now that he is in Government, that Fianna Fáil were wrong then, but that he is right today? That’s what I don’t get.
Surely we are not bound to that original guarantee given by the Fianna Fáil/Green Coalition in 2008. That, as far as we are aware, was a decision made under extreme duress.
It was also a guarantee given to the banks arising out of false information given to the Government by the banks themselves.
I cannot understand why the present Coalition cannot declare that original guarantee to be null and void in the circumstances. Surely the Fine Gael/Labour Government cannot be bound by a guarantee given by the previous Government when a loaded gun was pointed at their heads. Surely our children and grandchildren should not have to pay for a guarantee that was based on bare-faced lies told by the banks to the previous Government.
If someone can answer that question satisfactorily I promise to stay away from bank bail-outs in the future and stick to simple and pure politics.