The people’s anger

I HAVE been writing this column for almost a week. I usually try to narrow this time scale and can usually manage it just fine but generally, I am writing on something fixed, definite and, as a result, something that is easy to condense and analyse.

This has not been the case with the Irish financial crisis which has been a nebulous fog of rumour; intrigue and some would say lies over Europe for the past few days. Even now, as I try to finish the thing and file it, I feel it will be almost stale by the time The Clare Champion is published on Thursday.
In certain ways, this has been the best news story in many, many months and has been infinitely more interesting to follow than the recent British election. Unfortunately, the thrill of the constant breaking news and extraordinary potential consequences involved has been sapped by the fact that this is Ireland as a nation and the future of its people on the line.
In the beginning the tone of some reports on the various BBC outlets here was more than a little condescending. Pantomime Irish stereotypes were trotted out on a fairly regular basis. This peaked with a report on the usually high-brow Newsnight programme which was so over the top in its use of stereotypes that it prompted a huge backlash on the internet and is now being investigated by the BBC. I was quite aghast when I watched it and was reminded of nothing more than Punch.      
This kind of treatment did not last long, however, as the true scale of the threat to Britain and the rest of Europe began to trickle down from politicians to journalists. A new, poe-faced type of coverage soon replaced it, as it became clear that not only was silly old Ireland at risk, the rest of us are too. It was an interesting transition to watch but also chilling. 
The Irish people have come out of those reports looking angry, ripped off and betrayed. Their political representatives have emerged from the mess (at the time of writing) looking like incompetent, naïve buffoons, themselves used by the bankers and other two-bit financial conmen. Ireland’s political system of local representatives taking care of their own constituents needs at the cost of everyone else looks embarrassingly parochial and simple when viewed in the harsh light of foreign journalistic scrutiny. While the Green Party’s announcement regarding a general election might have played well at home, it was viewed with great suspicion on the BBC, which seemed to take the editorial decision that such local political posturing would send a bad message of instability to Ireland’s new bosses in the bond markets, the ECB and the IMF.  
For the most part, these are the only views that have been available to the British people and those in Europe regarding the fiasco. I have been watching various reports on RTÉ, speaking with friends and family and so I am glad that the Greens took the decision they did. The true human cost of Fianna Fáil’s reign in Ireland will not be fully known to us for a long time and they deserve to be voted back to the Stone Age for what they have done. It may not play well in Europe but the people of Ireland, who in the most part have not taken to the streets, need an opportunity to scream their outrage at what has been done to them. The best available way to do this now is through the ballot box. In voting booths all over the country at the beginning of next year, a message can be sent by the real victims of this crash to those who facilitated it and it needs to be sent loudly, clearly and unequivocally. The voting alternatives that will be on offer in the main offer me little hope but either way the message that should be sent to Fianna Fáil must stand in history as a judgment by the people of Ireland on that party’s devotion to capitalism, greed and its total disregard for the future generations of the country’s population.
Now that the IMF have come, scavenging around the political and economic corpse of Ireland, there is little chance that anyone will see a reversal of the policy of unfettered capitalism any time soon no matter who is in power after the next election. As they have done to poverty-stricken nations in Africa and all over the world for many decades, the International Monetary Fund will deliver a list of demands with their “bailout”, “loan” or whatever you may wish to call it. Their physical equivalents are stalking poor areas all over Ireland and Britain at the moment offering “loans” to help pay for Christmas. There will be many interesting phrases used when the final details of the deal are announced but what they will describe is higher taxes, less public services, increased privitisation and all the other practices so dear to the moneymen of the IMF. Of course, thanks to the economic policies and ideology followed by successive Irish governments the IMF will find a nation which has already shed much of its public service remit and sacrificed the wellbeing of its people to the private sector.     
The irony of how those who caused the financial crisis have been treated in comparison to those who must now pay for it is cruel in the extreme. In a piece he recently wrote for The Guardian, Joseph O’Connor described the situation succinctly and poignantly. “About 300 people in Ireland continue to live like rock stars, while four million of us foot the bill. We have socialism for bankers, the ferocities of the market for everyone else,” he said.
There is no doubt that the markets will be ferocious to Ireland in the coming years and it is the ordinary voters who will bear the brunt of it. The forthcoming General Election will allow for a change of personnel at least but the storm is only just beginning to gather.