TWITTER: @ballyhea14
May 25th 2011
BALLYHEA BONDHOLDER BAILOUT PROTEST - is feidir linn
It’s half-time, you're in the dressing-room with the rest of your battered and bruised teammates, your little parish team is ten goals behind and fighting for its championship life against a team of All-Stars, when one of the highest-profile managers in the game sticks his head in the door – ‘IS FEIDIR LINN!’, he shouts, ‘Yes we can!’
Yes we can alight, I'm thinking, yes we can – in my arris we can. Perhaps if one of your own star players, Timmy Geithner, ‘guesting’ for them, hadn't slam-dunked us very early on in the game (he’s the US Treasury Secretary, and according to Professor Morgan Kelly’s recent well-publicised Irish Times article, Timmy was the man who vetoed an IMF plan at a G7 summit to force the bondholders into a two-thirds haircut on €30bn – would have saved us €20bn), perhaps if you could use some of your muscle to persuade the ECB referee and his officials to at least give us a fair break, then yes, we can still turn this mess around.
A catchy slogan, a pat on the back, a bit of roaring and shouting at half-time – those days are gone. Leinster turned their fortunes around in the Heineken Cup final with a lot of cold analysis of what was going wrong, of what had got them into the situation where they were 22-6 behind at the break; the coaching staff came to their conclusions, made the decisions on what needed to be done, explained it to the players; only then was the catch-cry introduced, the Jonny Sexton speech – yes we can, is feidir linn.
Any independent cold-blooded analysis of our situation will state that the only way we can turn this situation around is for the existing bondholders to take a serious haircut, and for the previous ECB-decreed payouts to be assumed by them, and that should happen NOW. The private debt is what’s killing us; we should not pay another cent to the bondholders, not another cent taken from our Pension Fund - our last few bob - and we should be working like hell to cut ourselves loose from the billions already paid out, on the insistence of the ECB. Then, yes yes yes, we damned well can. Otherwise, we’re just damned.
Regards,
Diarmuid O'Flynn.
