Posts Tagged ‘ Irish Crisis ’

Notes on the ‘Loss of Sovereignty’

By
1
20 April 2012
Keating economic pressure

A stand­ard jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the cuts to pub­lic ser­vices, the policy of pri­or­it­ising the repay­ment of private spec­u­lator debts over fund­ing for hos­pit­als and schools, the policy of con­vert­ing private spec­u­lator debt into sov­er­eign debt, is that ‘we’ have lost our sov­er­eignty, or, in a more refined ver­sion, ‘we’ have lost our ‘eco­nomic sov­er­eignty’, as though the sov­er­eignty of a state also oper­ated in ways inde­pend­ent of the eco­nomic sphere. Let me exam­ine what this means in a little detail. I don’t plan to go into an abstract dis­cus­sion of dif­fer­ent con­cep­tions of sov­er­eignty here. Instead, I want to focus on the effects achieved by this claim, which is made repeatedly by politi­cians of the rul­ing parties and the media out­lets that seek to ...
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The New Irish Constitution

By
2
19 April 2012
638px-Flag_President_of_Ireland

Fol­low­ing the Irish Government’s decision to modify the con­sti­tu­tion of 1937 fol­low­ing a new con­sti­tu­tional con­ven­tion, the Ice Moon Blog — which has con­tacts in the highest places in the Irish State — has been able to obtain a secret gov­ern­ment memo with a full mock-​up of the new con­sti­tu­tion to be amended after the Fiscal Com­pact Ref­er­en­dum. The fol­low­ing are the rel­ev­ant new articles: Art­icle 1 The Irish nation hereby abrog­ates its inali­en­able, inde­feas­ible, and sov­er­eign right to choose its own form of Gov­ern­ment, to determ­ine its rela­tions with other nations, and to develop its life, polit­ical, economic
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The Irish Crisis: We do have choices

By
0
8 December 2011
99percent

In the wake of yet another aus­ter­ity addled budget, a strident chorus of our polit­ical lead­ers and self-​proclaimed media states­per­sons, backed by a broad range of pub­lic comprador/​organic intel­lec­tu­als are echo­ing the sen­ti­ments if not the exact words of that great ‘reformer’ Mar­garet Thatcher — that ‘There is no altern­at­ive’ (TINA) to the policies of aus­ter­ity that have and are con­tinu­ing to prove so ruin­ous to our coun­try. Much as these great and wise talk­ing heads wish there was another way of res­cuing our ail­ing coun­try from the rack and ruin vis­ited upon us by that other shower of feck­less rogues in the past, they inform us sadly — feigned grief drip­ping from their lugubri­ous coun­ten­ances — that they have been left with no option but to ...
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The Irish Crisis: We, the People, are too big to fail

By
0
8 December 2011
NO

The Bal­ly­hea Bond­holder Bail­out Protest, now in its 40th week and joined with Charleville (their 25th week) is about one issue, and one issue only – the trans­fer­ence of private debt to the pub­lic purse. In one word, and very pure, very simple, it’s wrong. His­tory On a fate­ful week­end in Septem­ber 2008 Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Fin­ance Min­is­ter Brian Leni­han were called to a crisis meet­ing with Ireland’s bank­ing elite and fed with false/​incomplete inform­a­tion (take your pick); they declared a blanket Bank Guar­an­tee, three words that will haunt us for gen­er­a­tions, three words that will define the his­tory of this whole debacle. The fear they were force-​fed was that if drastic meas­ures weren’t taken that week­end there would be a run on depos­its in ...
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The Irish Crisis: Europe Colonises Itself

By
1
7 December 2011

In a recent brief exchange between Oscar Guar­diola Rivera and Wal­ter Mignolo, respond­ing to an impossibly broad ques­tion about Europe’s cur­rent crisis, Guar­diola Rivera quipped that Europe was col­on­ising itself. Just think, he said, of the racial­isa­tion of Greek, Span­ish and Italian people: lazy and cor­rupt. And with that the debate moved on. But his thought of Europe col­on­ising itself has haunted me: as a dia­gnosis it is chillingly brilliant. We have known for many years that the major neo­lib­eral inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions – the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, etc – were developed to impose massive eco­nomic reforms on ‘fail­ing’ states. It has also long been noted that the impos­i­tion of neo­lib­eral reforms in Latin Amer­ica and South East Asia was a form of eco­nomic ...
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The Irish Crisis: The Dynamics of Complicity

By
0
7 December 2011
BLAME

A year after all of the head-​shaking and nay-​saying assur­ances that ‘nego­ti­ations’ with the IMF and EU were mere ‘fic­tion’, the sense of betrayal that Irish people exper­i­enced about the then Government’s denial that the Irish nation was about to lose its eco­nomic sov­er­eignty is still palp­able. This psy­cho­lo­gical pro­cess of denial – the refusal to acknow­ledge a real­ity that is obvi­ous to oth­ers – is char­ac­ter­istic of con­tem­por­ary Irish soci­ety and can be linked, in part at least, to its his­tory of colo­ni­al­ism (for more on this see Ger­aldine Moane’s Gender and Colo­ni­al­ism). Another psy­cho­lo­gical pro­cess char­ac­ter­istic of post-​colonial soci­et­ies is that of double-​think – a capa­city to enter­tain two con­flict­ing thoughts simultaneously. Enda Kenny’s state of the nation address was the epi­tome of double-​think. Per­haps ...
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The Irish Crisis: Global Crisis, Local Effects

By
0
7 December 2011
Local Heroes Quinn

A few years back, we had a Taoiseach who blamed US banks for the onset of Ireland’s reces­sion. Ber­tie Ahern claimed again recently in an inter­view that it was Leh­man Broth­ers wot dun it, his imputa­tion being that loc­ally elec­ted politi­cians could not be blamed for this eco­nomic crisis. We now know dif­fer­ently. This crisis is global, but, as Enda keeps remind­ing us, we are in this together. As European politi­cians try hard not to look like bag men for global banks, here in Ire­land we are being force fed rumours about a budget that will, in all like­li­hood, cut the heart out of a strug­gling domestic eco­nomy. The clusters of half-​completed houses around the towns of this State are suf­fi­cient reminder of ...
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The Irish Crisis: Discipline and Punish

By
1
7 December 2011
Unfuck The World

Enda Kenny’s ‘state of the nation’ speech last night was little more than a foot­note to the more reveal­ing and fun­da­mental address that he delivered last month to an audi­ence of EU offi­cials, bankers and rep­res­ent­at­ives of the ‘troika’. That speech was, tellingly, addressed not to the Irish people but to the Ger­man fin­ance min­is­ter, Wolfgang Schauble, and delivered not in Dub­lin, but in Berlin. Kenny, Europe’s cur­rent poster boy for aus­ter­ity, prom­ised to do bet­ter — that is, to cut more, spend less and con­tinue to use tax­pay­ers’ money to pro­tect and insu­late European bankers and bond­hold­ers. ‘The Irish people are a proud people,’ Kenny gingerly told his audi­ence. And lest any­one would con­fuse Ire­land with Greece, pro­claimed: ‘We work hard. We ...
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The Irish Crisis: The Screwed up state we’re in

By
0
7 December 2011
Down the Drain

The State of the Nation, I’m afraid, can be summed up in one word — screwed. We can flesh things out a bit, but that’s the nub of it. Every stra­tegic step taken over the past dec­ade has ensured that the screw­ing would be comprehensive. The crisis isn’t about fiscal prob­lems, the pub­lic ser­vice or Ger­man ambi­tions — it’s about the moun­tain of debt cre­ated over the past couple of dec­ades in a series of Ponzi schemes run by a com­pletely insane fin­an­cial sec­tor, applauded by the politi­cians and the media. Since 2008, the Great War Against Ourselves — in which the politi­cians have sav­agely cut income and ser­vices — has drained an already weak economy. Why did they do that? Because that’s always been the solu­tion to minor reces­sions — shift the bur­den ...
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The Irish Crisis: Don’t mourn, organise

By
0
7 December 2011
Operation Move In

My dad died 31 years ago this week. My mom, who has taken up web-​development in her mid-​70s, went look­ing for an obscure pic­ture of him to scan into an anniversary email to her chil­dren and grand­chil­dren, but instead turned up this beau­ti­ful piece of organ­ising eph­em­era from the Upper West Side of Man­hat­tan, c 1968. Sit­ting in the cold and wind for an ‘Occupy Uni­ver­sity’ ses­sion in Dame Street the fol­low­ing day, I thought ‘Oper­a­tion Move In’ seemed like an espe­cially good idea. But what really struck me, with more than a little grief, was how the very same act­iv­ism and action are needed today as nearly my whole life­time ago — how far we haven’t come. On a shorter time-​scale and closer to home, ...
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The Irish Crisis

By
0
7 December 2011
IRELAND BANK BAILOUT SHARES

In recent months the Irish crisis has dis­ap­peared from the inter­na­tional news. But that has not stopped the crush­ing cuts. Last sunday night the Taoiseach (the leader of the exec­ut­ive) addressed the nation. On monday and tuesday, an excep­tional two-​day budget was announced — the first of the new centre-​left coali­tion. Ire­land is the trust­worthy PIG (Por­tugal, Ire­land and Greece). It has buckled down to some good aus­ter­ity. But this sounds so bland abroad. Even the word ‘aus­ter­ity’ sounds like some sort of banal vic­torian head­mis­tress, likely to give you a stern dis­ap­prov­ing eye. But the Irish aus­ter­ity is eye-​watering: unem­ploy­ment, emig­ra­tion and emiseration. One of the most inter­est­ing responses to the Irish crisis has been organ­ised over on CrisisJam, on Politico​.ie. We ...
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