HEARTBEAT:Those who brought us here do not have the capacity to save us, writes MAURICE NELIGAN
THERE OUGHT to be a health warning printed on each newspaper. It goes without saying that times are bad, but does it do the communal blood pressure any good for us to read that the State spent €150,000 deporting a Ghanaian drug smuggler. I suppose easy come, easy go and, as usual, nobody is responsible.
There was worse and this leads me to my Monster New Year’s quiz. First prize is an all unvouched expenses paid trip to Fantasyland in the Government jet. All you have to do is answer the simple question; is it a)a class act; b)a brass act; or c) a crass act or any combination or permutation of the above?
Answers should be sent including the €1 entrance fee to the Society of St Vincent de Paul. The good volunteers of the society, earthbound in the real world, see at first hand where profligacy and stupidity have brought us.
On this day with its beautiful, hopefully non-allegorical, sunset, Dell, Waterford Wedgwood, Tara mines are all in trouble. Everybody has reflections, analyses and an endless capacity to blame everyone else. Profound solutions are in short supply, particularly from those whose responsibility it is to formulate them.
Belatedly and long after the rest of us, they acknowledge that we collectively and, more importantly, our children are on the path to ruin. They do not seem to have the faintest idea as to how to get off it.
There are woolly allusions as to how “social partnership” has served us well before and that the powers are waiting to lay their proposals before the partners and seek agreement for whatever size of hair shirt is deemed necessary.
This is an abdication of responsibility and it simply won’t do. Right now we have no time for dancing or posturing from diametrically opposed factions. Besides there are thousands of angry people excluded from this cosy cabal that has allegedly served them so well. Has it really; could it in fact be part of the problem?
Wake up and look around you. Where are the fruits of our pampering? Where are the schools, hospitals and basic infrastructure that should be the legacy of the halcyon days of such service? Ask yourselves, where did the money go? Ponder as to whether those elected to govern wisely should not have spent judiciously on the basics of our economy and heeded the right of our people to decent health and educational services and all that is ancillary to the care and succour of the most disadvantaged of our society. They demonstrably did not.
It seems to this superficial non-economist and non-banker that there are certain fundamentals that we must try to do. We must safeguard as many productive jobs as possible. This may involve substantial pay cuts for many in order to keep their fellows at work and to make us more competitive. We must invest wisely in infrastructure and necessary social projects such as schools and hospitals.
Those investing our money must be accountable; no more PPARS, stadium Ireland and hosts of other white elephants. We must ruthlessly eliminate all unnecessary frills and unjustified expenses. There must be an end to all political jobbery. This has to apply across the political system.
In my humble opinion, increasing taxes, income taxes or levies will not lead us forward. Such course would stifle initiative and deter genuine entrepreneurial skills so necessary to us now. It would have a deleterious effect on foreign investment here.
There’s a strong case for bringing VAT levels to at least UK rates to encourage people to spend at home. How much would that have saved us over the past few months thus benefiting the shoppers, the merchants and the State?
It’s going to take a long time for recovery to take place. It may never reach levels attained in the past for the simple reason that such levels were attained by the delusion that building houses, hotels and office developments that were way surplus to requirements and service industries that sometimes amounted to taking in each other’s washing, constituted a thriving economy. It didn’t.
We need our best people now. We need our pride and sense of community. We need luck and we need friends. In saying that, I feel that to reject Lisbon 2 would be catastrophic. Europe won’t be reduced to an a la carte menu just to suit us. As yet our European colleagues have tolerated our delusion that we eat only caviar. It is time to shape up and belong.
These are grim times and the pity is that they need not have been so bad. We were very poorly led and we were shamefully complacent. It stretches credulity to assume that those who brought us here have the capacity to retrieve the situation. Daily it becomes more obvious that they do not and public anger is growing. Time is not on our side.
- Maurice Neligan is a cardiac surgeon