Ballyhea Bondholder Bailout Protest
The basic problem for the Irish economy is the coupling of the private bank/bondholder debt to our sovereign national debt and the resultant 100% payoff of that debt to those bondholders.
Where I live - and doubtless the same applies in your area - most of us didn't go off and buy second homes, nor did we buy the big 4x4 60-grand gas-guzzlers; we lived life as always, within our means. However, the property crash and the bank crash have impacted severely on us, cuts in salaries made worse by the haircut budgets introduced in the last few years, and many more to come.
Where is the suffering for the bondholders? Where is their haircut? Why is it that they have to be paid in full and why is it that we should have to be the ones to pay? Those bondholders negotiated those loans with probably 100 people - at most - at the top of the Irish banking sector; they didn't negotiate them with us, those are not our loans, those are not our debts.
That deal last November was a bailout for the bondholders, NOT a bailout for Ireland. The ECB's insistance that, as a condition of giving us a loan to take care of our sovereign debt we would have to assume - in full - the private bank/bondholder debt, was an act of enslavement.
Ultimately, remember, most wars are about coinage, about land, about hard cash; for many years, and on the back of that diabolical deal we will be paying 'tribute' for decades to Berlin, to Brussels, to Frankfurt.
It's wrong, period. Whether you know it or not, if you're now living in Ireland or if you're one of the Irish forced abroad because of these changed circumstances, you are in a war. Fight; walk with us, this Sunday and every Sunday, 11.45am in Ballyhea, or in your own local community; fight, or again become a nation trampled underfoot.
Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.
