Sir, – What occurred in the Oireachtas on Wednesday night and Thursday morning was outrageous (Home News, February 7th). The Government has loaded generations yet unborn with the recklessness of private bankers, foreign as well as national, and it has obliged us to pay interest on the debts concerned in the meantime.
It has done so in a manner which makes democratic consideration of the implications of this change effectively impossible. It is claimed, by the Government that its hand was forced by the leak to the media about IBRC. But from where did that leak come, and why? The public does not know, but someone does.
Does the Minister for Finance know, and so, why doesn’t he tell us? The logic of this is that every time there is a leak about a matter of urgent public interest, emergency legislation has to be rushed through parliament: a state of affairs which makes a nonsense of parliamentary democracy.
This appears to be a classic case of what the American sociologist Naomi Klein has called “shock doctrine”, in her book of that name, ie the use of crisis to transfer huge sums of public money to the private economy. This is not democracy, it’s a coup d’état. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Why must we continue making important banking decisions in the early hours of the morning? What’s wrong with ordinary office hours? – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Waiting for the Dáil to resume at midnight I picked up a copy of Dick Walsh Remembered, the fine anthology from Dick’s columns in The Irish Times.
The book fell open at his final offering.
Your former political editor signed off: “And, to one and all, this question: do we have to wait until our backs are to the wall again and Irish society is about to fall apart before challenging the latest orthodoxy – that market forces will solve everything? They won’t, you know. ” It was published on October 26th, 2002. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Former Anglo-Irish Bank to Nama (Níl Aon Money Ann!). – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore’s “Game changer” turned out to be a “Name changer”: IBRC to Nama. Shifting deck chairs, iceberg ahead. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – As a young person who has only recently returned to Ireland from what seemed like economic exile abroad, it was with a great fear and foreboding that I watched the events of Wednesday night unfold. Observing the anxiety and chagrin that seemed to be manifest within the Government front benches during their supposed moment of triumph transfixed me with a sense of the deepest trepidation.
Was this what our supposed moment of victory from the negotiations with the ECB was to look like?
Depressed, deflated and de facto defeated? With the Opposition afforded the minimal time to analyse the content of the Bill and simply rubberstamp a foregone conclusion the last semblance of democracy was evacuated from Dáil Éireann. September 30th, 2008 will go down in history as the day Fianna Fáil killed this country! February 6th, 2013 will mark the day that Fine Gael – that other monstrous relic of the Civil War – carried it off to the morgue. Pity the people, mourn the nation! – Yours, etc,
Sir, – It would appear that the “Irish operation”, as European Central Bank president Mario Draghi put it, is still very much in the hands of the Irish Government.
Even allowing for coded, diplomatic language, the news on Ireland was not good.
In non-diplomatic language, our private gripe has been duly “noted by “all”.
I get the distinct feeling that something very important has been lost in translation. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – For the debate regarding the liquidation of IBRC, Dáil Éireann was forced to work an unusually long day. The quality of the debate has been variably reported as disappointing, inefficient or embarrassing.
At the point at which the debate was in full flow, an on-call non-consultant hospital doctor would have been only halfway through a shift which started at 8 that morning. For any remaining people who believed it acceptable for anyone to work under such conditions while shouldering a heavy burden (let alone do so safely, effectively and compassionately), the events in Leinster House may serve as an elegant illustration of their error.
One wonders how deputies might respond to an expectation from their employer that they work such long days regularly in addition to their regular weekly daytime schedule. I suspect it would not be allowed to continue; why are Irish patients entitled to less protection? – Yours, etc,