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July 31st 2011
BREAD N’ WATER 7-DAY FAST
This is to announce that in an escalation of the Ballyhea Bondholder Bailout Protest, from midnight tonight, Sunday July 31st, I will be going on a bread-and-water fast, initially for seven days, to be reviewed next Sunday. The choice of bread and water is symbolic, the penal condition to which the ECB will have us reduced should we continue on the present penal course of redeeming in full all the current failed bank bonds, as directed by them.
I would like to stress, our protest is not against the government, neither this version nor the one preceding; our protest is aimed at Frankfurt and the ECB. Their hammer, we’re warned, is poised over our heads, ready to apply the fatal blow to our fragile economy if we dare attempt to do to the bank bondholders what should have been done right from the start – give them the haircut that is their due.
Our own leadership is non-existent. Just eight months ago Fine Gael and Labour deputies, led by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore, were heaping derision on Fianna Fáil and the Greens, castigating the deal done with the troika (IMF/EU/ECB), with not a single government deputy voting against the deal – there was even talk of treason, of traitorous behaviour; now we have the spectacle of Fine Gael and Labour - still led by Kenny and Gilmore - implementing the most heinous aspect of that ‘agreement’, the payment of those failed private bank bonds. The boot is now very much on the other foot but the same situation pertains – not a single deputy from either government party standing against this sell-out of the Irish people. Looking after number one, not a conscience, not a principle, between the lot of them. And they wonder why people are so cynical about our politicians? No point in protesting to them, when they have already so obviously submitted to the jack-booted will of the ECB.
This is a solo decision, not even my family consulted; it is also a one-man protest. Because of the demands of my job it can’t be held I public – Irish Open today, Croke Park next Sunday for the All-Ireland semi-final, prep-work between now and then for the Examiner. I will, however, try to have as much of it as I can in Ballyhea, if I can arrange for temporary shelter!
If past efforts to throw the spotlight on what’s happening to us are any indication - the hundreds of millions being paid out month after month on these failed bonds even as Hospital services are cut, Special Needs Education reduced, fuel/phone/electricity subsidies for the elderly and the poor diminished – this escalation will register not a whisper, alter matters not a whit. But I’ve tried everything else I can think of, am now at my wit’s end.
Yours sincerely,
Diarmuid O'Flynn.
