DEPENDING on which wise economic voice you listen to we have either turned the corner or we are about to go bust.
Amongst it all I can’t help asking, when exactly did we hand the country over to some unseen cabal of economists, either homegrown or abroad, who now dictate our every action?
And if all we do is done to ensure the confidence of outside investors why don’t we just be done with it and hand the running of the country over to them lock, stock and barrel?
Strange though, dependant on what they are saying, economists are either the gurus who will guide us out of all of this or are academic innocents who know nothing of the real world.
One respected economist, credited by many with predicting Ireland’s economic collapse, was recently castigated by the Government for arguing that Ireland was inevitably about to go bust, that there was no way it could not.
They lacerated him for suggesting this and the inference was not only did they believe he was wrong, but that even if he wasn’t, the outrage was that he went and said it at all.
This brought us back to the early days of the recession when Government ministers queued up to accuse people of ‘talking the country down’, as if financial collapse could be kept at bay if we followed the old Irish tradition of making sure that whatever we said we said nothing.
TD Mary O’Rourke, the old Fianna Fáil grandee and scion of the Lenihan political aristocracy, was to the fore with this and with typical grandiosity claimed internal critics were treasonous.
It reminded me of the time before Bertie Ahern was forced to resign and another Fianna Fáil blusterer, the English public school educated TD Martin Mansergh, accused one Fine Gael TD, who was criticising Bertie, of having a lack of respect for his betters.
Honest to God, I have spoken, and probably written too, some rubbish in my time, but if I was on record as having said half of the guff these representatives of our Republic come out with, I’d hang my head with shame.
Shame though, is not a quality these people possess.
None of the corrupt politicians, disgraced clergy or discredited bankers who have disfigured this country over the last 20 years have ever shown any sense of shame.
Charlie Haughey and Bertie Ahern? Brazen to the last. The Catholic Church? Confessing up their sins? Not likely. The bankers?
Coming out hands up?
No, walking away with their hands still in the nearest till. No, the establishment knows no shame.
That is why this ‘do your bit’ mentality,’ ‘we are all in this together’ rhetoric, is so very difficult for people to take. There was no ‘we’, no social solidarity for the duration of the Celtic Tiger.
There was a togetherness, for sure, in the moral bankruptcy of the political elite, the business elite and the Church but it did not extend downwards to the rest of society.
There was no national consensus or national conscience when an Ireland of unseen levels of inequality was being constructed.
There was plenty of abuses of power and it is worth pointing out, if Britain is about to undergo the same demonisation of public servants that we had here, that the only public servants proven to have obscenely dipped into and taken from the public purse on both of these islands have been those from the political elites.
There was injustice and social neglect. And now, now that they are skint and have made the rest of us skint too, we are all in this together?
Now,my maths isn’t the best admittedly, but just how on earth does that add up?
We have been told for a long, long time that real politics is about consensus and about agreement.
We have been told that class politics should be left to a few student hotheads.
We have been told that all of that stuff is to be left behind when you grow up.
Is it not the case, though, in both Britain and Ireland that a certain elite have run both countries into the ground, that in response to that they have not gone away but have in effect intensified their hold on both countries, and that the rest of us are expected to pay for it all.
Now what kind of grown-up puts up with that?