"nothing quite symbolised this State’s loss of sovereignty than the press conference at which the ECB man spoke along with two IMF men and a European Commission official. It was held in the Government press centre beneath the Taoiseach’s office. I am a xenophile and cosmopolitan by nature, but to see foreign technocrats take over the very heart of the apparatus of this State to tell the media how the State will be run into the foreseeable future caused a sickening feeling in the pit of my stomach.
This is not to say that we would be happy to have our country’s affairs managed by the current, disgraced, government. I yield to no-one in my loathing of the men and women who have done this to my country. What has been the intellectual low-point of the last couple of years? Was it the cash-for-clunkers stimulus package (Ireland does not produce any cars)? Or the statement by our Finance Minister that Ireland need not fear a bank run, since Ireland is an island? Or the biggest Irish joke of them all, which underpinned the bank guarantee in the first place: that if we wanted investors to retain confidence in the creditworthiness of the Irish State, we needed to make sure that nobody who invested in our (private sector) banks ever lost a penny?"
Dan O’Brien, the economics editor of the Irish Times, quoted by Kevin O'Rourke. He describes more of the Irish pain brought about by the irresponsible banking sector, who will get a substantial portion of the bailout funds. O’Rourke calls it “black hole that is the Irish banking system”. The Irish citizens are suffering because of its banking system. It got too drunk with lending-Guinness!! Now, the Irish State is having a terrible hangover while the debt-ridden drunkards are preparing to run scot-free again to cause another accident. Rein in them and force them to be sober before it is too late, again!
The latter decision is the one that sank the country. It was the last great act of hubris of the Celtic Bubble, and was immediately denounced by one of the heroes of the crisis, my old UCD colleague Morgan Kelly. On the night the guarantee was announced, Kelly pointed out that while it was the right policy if the Irish banks were facing a liquidity crisis, it was a terrible policy if they were insolvent, which was in fact the case. As they always do when confronted with someone smarter than them, the Dublin establishment circled the wagons, and Kelly was dismissed as an irresponsible young troublemaker of no consequence. He has been proved right, of course, but the establishment is still at it, making the
same fundamental mistake of thinking that a solvency crisis is just a liquidity crisis. Now, however, the establishment is European as well as Irish, and it is the State rather than the banking sector which is insolvent.
More on Iceland versus Ireland here.
