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…
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…
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…
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…
What the middle-classes of Europe are waking up to is something that colonial peoples have known for a long time 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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…