LETTER TO OUR EDITORS
Ballyhea
Co Cork
June 25th 2014
Dear Sir/Madam;
'Lions led by donkeys'; nearly a
century on, that's how the British infantry (including tens of thousands of
Irish) and its officer corps are remembered from the First World War.
I wonder, a century from now how
will we and the current Irish political leadership be remembered?
Cast your mind back two years
ago, to June 28th 2012 and yet another Eurozone summit meeting, the short
statement issued at its conclusion on the separation of bank debt from sovereign
debt, which included the following: 'The
Eurogroup will examine the situation of the Irish financial sector with the
view of further improving the sustainability of the well-performing adjustment
programme.'
Remember Enda Kenny's 'seismic
shift' boast – ‘I’m a hard grafter and,
as some of them found out, they shouldn’t tangle with me too often’? Remember
Eamon Gilmore's 'game-changer' bombast?
Two years on, what has shifted,
what has changed?
For starters, we've had Michael
Noonan's acclaimed Promissory Notes deal, Notes Michael himself described in an RTE
interview as ‘illegal, totally' but which now sees that €25bn of disputed debt
transformed to sovereign bonds.
The first of those bonds are sold
this year, €500,000,000, that money then destroyed by the Irish Central Bank;
€500,000,000 a year in fact for the next five years, borrowed and burned, then
€1,000,000,000 a year for the following five years, €2,000,000,000 a year for
eight years and finally, in 2032, the last bond, €1,500,000,000.
A total of €25,000,000,000 that
had been used at the behest of the EC/ECB to bail out two bust banks, now
borrowed by this broke and broken country and burned at the behest of that same
EC/ECB, all set up by a compliant, obeisant Kenny/Gilmore government without
even a murmur of protest. They didn't even ask, never mind confront.
Then there's the vaunted ESM from
which we were to receive the billions refund of the 'legacy' bank-debt arising
from the June 2012 statement - what has actually happened there? Well the fund
has been established and Ireland has already contributed a €1bn share to that,
which of course we also had to borrow and on which we are now paying interest.
What have we received? How much 'legacy' debt relief? Not a single cent.
The actual legacy of this
government, the legacy this generation leaves to those who will follow us, is
debt piled on debt, 40 years of debt-slavery to our new European masters, all
uncontested.
In Ballyhea and Charleville we
have been campaigning since March 6th 2011 against this debt imposition, this
sovereign surrender. This Sunday in Charleville at 10.30am, week 174, we're
joined by three of our recently elected MEPs, Luke Ming Flanagan, Nessa
Childers and Marian Harkin. New leaders, same cause; lions needed.
Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.
