Madam, – John O’Hagan’s article (Opinion, May 30th) was excellent except for his statement that “public pay, pensions and social welfare should be cut by up to 10 per cent”.
The sad fact is that a 10 per cent cut doesn’t even begin to address the scale of the problem.
Public pay costs €20 billion and welfare costs €20 billion. With our income a bit over over €30 billion it’s clear that the very most you can spend on these two big ticket items is €10 billion each, a 50 per cent cut, leaving a paltry €10 billion for all other public expenditure, including huge debt service costs.
Our rates of public pay and social welfare are massively out of line with our European counterparts and yet we continue to borrow like crazy people to fund this public pay and welfare bubble.
Hello, have we learned nothing from the property bubble? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The article by John O’Hagan condemns “celebrity economists” such as Morgan Kelly for their octopus-like forecasting abilities and lack of calm, rational, factual, analysis, while making no verifiable statements of fact, or falsifiable predictions for the future. His thinking seems to be reducible to your headline that “Confidence and hope can trump counsel of despair”, while ignoring the fact that the positive spin about “soft landings” and “the cheapest bank guarantee in the world” got us into this mess in the first place.
As the numerous comments on the online version of your paper can testify, his pious hope that we can muddle through ignores the fact that the economic meltdown he thinks can be avoided by thinking positive is already a reality for those outside the comfortable academic groves and intellectual bubble world he seems to inhabit.
“Please don’t rock the boat because I’m all right Jack” seems to be the mantra being repeated by the Irish elite at the present time. Bad things happen if you allow reality to intrude.
Unfortunately, the consequences of such complacency are all too real for most people and moralising econobabble from highly paid academics can no longer cover the cracks their lack of leadership has exposed and created in Irish life. – Yours, etc,