GHOSTS

The men who have led Ireland for twenty-five years have done evil, and they are bankrupt. They are bankrupt in policy, bankrupt in credit, bankrupt now even in words. They have nothing to propose to Ireland, no way of wisdom, no counsel of courage. When they speak they speak only untruth and blasphemy. Their utterances are no longer the utterances of men. They are the mumblings and the gibberings of lost souls. A quote from the writings of P.H. Pearse that has resonance still.

With one greedy grasping fist this government  - as did the last - takes from the young, the old, the needy, the most vulnerable, from those of us huddled in the middle; with the other feeble hand it feeds the greed of our new banking masters, the ECB. The men who have led Ireland have done evil, and they are bankrupt.

Then, with their mumblings and their gibberish, its ministers, party members and media apologists try to justify the utterly unjustifiable, impoverishing their own people while enriching foreign financial investors and institutions through the payment of failed private bank bonds. They are bankrupt in policy, bankrupt in credit, bankrupt now even in words. 

Terrorised and intimidated by the threats – spoken and unspoken – of those cold new masters, our leaders have poured tens of billions of our money into the banks to pay failed bonds. They have nothing to propose to Ireland, no way of wisdom, no counsel of courage.

They then negotiate ‘deals’ which will see our children and our children’s children pay reparations for decades for that bank debt, reparations for a war we never fought, and they will present this as triumph. When they speak they speak only untruth and blasphemy, their utterances are no longer the utterances of men.

Our leaders have been cowed, they have been bullied, they have been beaten, they have been subjugated, supplicants reduced to pleading and begging. They have accepted on our behalf a debt that isn’t ours, was never ours, will never BE ours. 

We must now again arise, we the people. Not in arms, not in blood, but in anger nevertheless. We’re told that the ECB won’t even talk to us, never mind consider restoring the tens of billions forced from us. The reason? The same reason they considered themselves able to inflict this burden on us in the first place – we’re a small nation. Well yes, we are, but when it comes to toppling empires, we have a bit of history.

To finish, another quote from the same work of Pearse: Ghosts are troublesome things in a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost.

This Sunday the Ballyhea protest will take place in Charleville, meeting as per usual at the Library Plaza at 11.30am, week 86. The following Saturday, however, October 27^th, we’re again taking our protest on the road, heading up west on this occasion. The itinerary outline is as follows:

Charleville:  7.45am, meet at the Library Plaza;

Ennis:        9.15am, meet O’Connell Monument, march O’Connell St;

Galway:      10.45am, meet Bus Station cnr of Eyre Sq, march around the square;

Castlebar:   12.45pm, meet Military barracks just off main roundabout, march Main St;

Sligo:        2.30pm, meet at the end of O'Connell St, march to GPO for 3pm protest;

Donegal town: 4.45pm, meet at the Lidl supermarket carpark, march to The Diamond.

We would appreciate local organisers/support in each of those locations. Contact us on

Twitter - @ballyhea14;

Facebook – Ballyhea bondholder bailout protest;

Blogs – http://bondwatchireland.blogspot.com; http://thechatteringmagpie14.blogspot.com

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.

YOUR €15,000 GIFT

Many times through the last 83 weeks of our protest in Ballyhea and Charleville we've had people tell us that they don’t see what we’re protesting about, that unless the government is actually taking money directly from their pockets, as in the controversial Household Charge, they won’t protest. But the government IS taking money from their pockets.

Here’s how it works. If you went through your bank accounts to discover that money is being taken from your various accounts every week without your permission and with no indication as to where it was going, how would you react? If you went to your bank manager to investigate and discovered that without ever being either asked or told, the bank had slapped an extra loan of €15,000 not just on you but on every single member of your household, and that you were now paying back this extra ‘loan’ with interest through your various different accounts – a few bob taken here, another few bob taken there, all under different headings – how would you react? Last Monday, for example, AIB paid an unsecured unguaranteed bond of €1bn - that's our money, money we sank into AIB over the last couple of years, over €200 for every man, woman and child in the country for one bond in one day.

Denise O'Toole's courageous one-woman stand on Monday last in Sligo

If you delved further to discover that it wasn’t just in your case this subterfuge was happening, that your local bank manager was settling further disputed debt by taking out interest-only loans at inflated rates in the names of your children, and of your children’s children, the principal to be paid a decade hence, another decade hence, yet another decade hence, spread over the next 40 years, debt that is NOT yours but debt that has now been passed on to future generations of your family, how would you react? Because again, this is EXACTLY what was done with the 2012 Promissory Note and what’s being planned for all the future Notes.

We are being robbed blind by the ECB, and I mean blind – we’re not being told. They have intimidated our own government – this one and the last – into acceding to their policy of placing banks and other financial institutions above people, they have fooled our major mainstream media into cheerleading that same plan. 

Fear and fog have been their major propaganda weapons. Fear, in moving the question on a level from where it should be. Instead of questioning the morality, the ethics, the legitimacy, even the practicality, of what they’re doing, they have succeeded with both the media and with our government in moving the question on a level – what will happen to us if we DON’T do as they demand? Fog, the truth lost in the mist of lies, half-lies and semi-truths we’re being fed to disguise what’s happening. 

Recent examples? The so-called 2012 Promissory Note deal that transformed a very arguable €3.06bn loan ‘guarantee’, for which we could have borrowed that same €3.06bn from one of the ECB emergency funds at about 3% while we continued to argue over it, into a very solid Sovereign debt for which we had to actually borrow €3.46bn on the markets – that’s an extra €400,000,000 my friends – and on which we’re paying over 5% per annum until our kids have to pay the full amount of that bond when it ‘matures’ in 2025.

You want another example? How about the ‘seismic shift’ announced after the EuroZone leaders’ summit last June, Enda’s and Eamon’s blather, all the money the various national newspapers then trumpeted we were going to get as a result; where is that seismic shift now? As Constantin Gurdgiev put it so succinctly on the Vincent Browne Tonight show on TV3 during the week, it’s merely a ripple in a bath-tub.

We’re told to gird ourselves for the cuts and taxes coming up in Budget 2013, that all the low-lying fruit has been picked. What fruit is more low-lying than the salaries, expenses and pensions of our politicians themselves? What fruit is more low-lying than their own numbers and the numbers of similarly overpaid representatives on our 34 local authorities (29 county councils – Dublin with three, Tipperary with two – and five city councils)? 34 local authorities to deal with a population of 4.58m? What fruit is more low-lying than the number of salaries of the various advisers in the various government departments? God above, what fruit is more low-lying than the pensions we pay to our ex-politicians? 

Has the Troika touched any of that? No. Why not? Because these people are now the reincarnation of the old British Empire Agents, they are our new overseers delivering to us the list of demands from our new Masters, the ECB/EU.

For those who would succumb to the propaganda of fear, I have one word – Iceland. The people of Iceland, due to the courage and integrity of their President who – for the first time in Iceland’s history – refused to sign the legislation that would have enslaved them for generations to bail out their banks as we’re being enslaved now, were given a choice, a referendum. Just as we’re being now threatened they  were threatened by their own media with the prospect of Armageddon if they rejected the ‘agreement’. They did reject it, and only a couple of years later they are thriving.

Protest. March with us. This is now week 84, we’re In Ballyhea this Sunday October 7^th 2012 at 11.30am, meeting at the church carpark. Join us.

Regards, Diarmuid O’Flynn.