It started in Ballyhea on March 6th 2011, was taken up by Charleville and Fermoy some weeks later; now, two years on, it is becoming a national movement – Ireland says NO! to BANK DEBT.
In the last couple of weeks we
know of protests that have started up in Tralee, Killarney, Ratoath, Clonmel,
Ennis and Tulla; we know also that people in Skibereen, Cobh, Midleton,
Tipperary, Nenagh, Cahir, Galway, Wicklow, Dublin are in the process of
starting their own weekly protests, joining the growing swell of people who
refuse to be saddled with this odious debt.
Know the magnitude and yet the
simplicity of what has been done to us over the last five years; €69.7bn of
what was private bank debt has been foisted on us, the people. Those were
bonds, interbank gambles between consenting adults who (we presume) had read
the fine print which normally applies to any such financial speculation – warning, your investment may fall as well as
rise. While they proved profitable the investing banks and financial
institutions were more than happy to take those profits back to the various countries
in which they were based; when the bubble inflated by their tens of billions burst (as was
inevitable) they should then have taken their losses.
They didn’t. Thanks to the abuse
of its financial muscle by the ECB, thanks to the ineptitude of successive Irish
governments, we have now been forced into paying loans we never took out, loans
from which this country never benefited, and we’ll be paying for at least 40
years, for even longer when those loans are then ‘rolled over’ again. Debt
slavery for generations, for debt that was never ours.
There is no moral justification
for this – none. The reasons advanced are spurious – no, we did NOT all party;
no, making it legal doesn’t make it legitimate, no more than making apartheid legal
makes it legitimate – remember, most of what the Third Reich did was ‘legal’.
This is odious, illegitimate
debt. By any objective definition it is an obscenity, the people bailing out
not just private industry but the most wealthy, the most greedy, the most
voracious, the most murky private industry of all, the new and unregulated
banking and finance industry.
Extending the terms of payment is
merely extending the wrong. If you're not saying NO! to this then by your silence
you acquiesce, by your silence you are saying YES, yes to all the cuts, yes to
all the new taxes (including the Home Tax), yes to the continuing austerity,
yes to debt slavery for you and for your kids.
Join the movement, Ireland says
NO! Come to us in Ballyhea and Charleville this weekend, to the Charleville Park
Hotel on Saturday evening, 8pm (free admission); learn from economists
Constantin Gurdgiev and Michael Taft, hear independent TD Luke Ming Flanagan explain
how we can get involved politically; come to us in Ballyhea on Sunday morning,
11.30am at the church car-park, and learn how to set up and maintain a regular
weekly protest in your own parish/village/town/city. Say NO! to bank debt, say
NO! to debt slavery for debt that isn’t ours.
Regards,
Diarmuid O'Flynn.
