BALLYHEA SAYS NO – WEEK 250

Since Sunday March 6th 2011, over four years ago, a small group of determined people have marched every week in protest at the imposition of private bank-debt on the Irish people.

IN EUROPE
During that period, recognising that this was an issue on which our government was not going to be of any assistance, the protest morphed into a self-funded self-propelled campaign.

We have been to the ECB headquarters in Frankfurt (old and new), we’ve been to Brussels and met and argued with senior officials from:

1 The European Commission (senior economist Istvan Szekely, with responsibility for Ireland);
2 The European Council (Shahin Vallée, economic adviser to then President Herman Van Rompuy);
3 The European Parliament (Sharon Bowles MEP, then head of the ECON committee);
4 Submitted a Petition to the Petitions Committee;
5 Formally presented Ireland’s case to the GUE/NGL parliamentary group (has 52 MEPs).

IN IRELAND
1 We have twice met and argued our case with Patrick Honahan, then head of the Central Bank, on the second occasion accompanied by two MEPs (Luke Ming Flanagan and Nessa Childers) and two TDs(Peter Mathews and Stephen Donnelly);
2 Met and argued Ireland’s cause for nearly two hours with senior ECB Troika representatives, the first and so far only group to ask directly for debt write-down;
3 Had a Private Member’s Bill brought before the Dáil (house of parliament);
4 Hosted several major public information/conference events;
5 Been featured on several international newspaper/radio/TV and documentary programmes.

MONEY TO BURN
Already this year the Central Bank of Ireland has destroyed €1.5bn, part of the legacy of the infamous Promissory Note debt, which itself is only part of the €69.7bn total bank-debt imposed on the Irish people.

The Promissory Note debt is the €31bn created in 2009/10 to bail out the creditors of two failed zombie Irish banks, Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide Building Society, €31bn that the ECB now insists Ireland take back out of circulation, thus the ongoing destruction.

To date €5.5bn has been destroyed (€3bn 2011; €1bn 2014; €1.5bn 2015); the Central Bank is still holding €25.5bn worth of Promissory Note bonds, all awaiting sale, all those billions then destroyed but all the resulting interest to be paid by the next several generations of Irish people, the principal repaid through the 2040s and into the 2050s. This MUST be stopped.

AN INQUIRY SET UP TO FAIL
This week the watered-down result of the watered-down Banking Inquiry is emerging, one of the proposals from which is that the Irish government should bring the ECB to court on the strong-arm tactics (we say blackmail tactics) that were used to force Ireland to accept the entirety of the bank-debt, no burden-sharing allowed.

We agree with this proposal but we go further. The government should immediately challenge the ECB on the continued sale of the Promissory Note bonds, should press for their destruction and additionally, should demand the recreation of the €5.5bn already destroyed.

SOVEREIGN SURRENDER
It should be understood, however, Ireland is not unique. This government-sponsored transfer of debt from the few to the many and the reciprocal transfer of wealth from the many to the few is happening globally, to the extent that 80 people – about enough to fill a double-decker bus – now has more wealth than half the world’s population combined.

That concentration of wealth, and the power that goes with it, is accelerating in recent years, and it’s not accidental – it’s orchestrated.

The proliferation of tax havens (of which we are one) facilitating tax avoidance by the wealthiest individuals and the major global corporations; the growing number of massive international ‘trade’ agreements that facilitate the erosion of labour rights, the reduction of protections to environment, food production and quality, the privatisation of what were public services – water, health, education, energy etc; ALL of this is facilitated by captured, compliant legislators in thrall to the powerful and their disproven philosophy of ‘trickle-down’ economics. The only thing trickling down is pain; meanwhile, the wealth is flooding up.

It’s all part of the race to the bottom and with their ‘inducements’ (bribes) to the multinationals, to the sharks and vultures of the finance world, successive Irish governments have been leading that charge.

CHANGE STARTS WITH YOUR VOTE
We need to change this, we need national politicians who look beyond themselves or their party and see the bigger picture.
In the upcoming general election I will be standing as an Independent Alliance candidate in Cork North-West and if elected, one of the first priorities will be to form an all-party (or failing that, a cross-party) committee to negotiate with the European Commission/ECB/Eurogroup on Ireland’s bank debt.

Meanwhile, through all the above we’ve been marching every week and on occasion, several times a week.

WEEK 250
This coming Sunday, December 13th, is week 250. As usual we will be meeting at 10.30am, this week in Ballyhea; as usual, hail rain or shine, we will march.

Afterwards we'll meet in the nearby Charleville Park Hotel to discuss how far we’ve come, where we’re going to go from here. This is a call to all those who have occasionally marched with us, who have wanted to march with us but couldn’t, to join us for this one significant day.

Our marches are quiet, dignified, without chants or fanfare, non-threatening, non-violent, minimal disruption to traffic. They should NOT, however, be underestimated. We have an iron determination, an unbreakable will, and the weekly march – small as it may be – underpins everything we do. We will win this battle.

Regards and thanks,
Diarmuid O'Flynn
Ballyhea
Co Cork

COVENEY’S CALL TO ARMS

EUROPAWNS

Ireland is a pawn in the stuttering euro experiment, a minor piece that can be sacrificed at any time in the greater game that has been played out for many decades between Germany and France in their drive for a federal ‘United States of Europe’-style EU.

Full European Monetary Union (EMU) is an integral part of that drive, all new entrants to the EU mandated to join the euro, all current members (with the exception of the UK and Denmark) mandated to join eventually. With EMU comes full European Fiscal Union, European Banking Union and every other economic union you care to mention, all national monetary, fiscal and banking policy surrendered.

Within that union Ireland is insignificant, dispensable – witness the threats before the Troika came to town, witness further what happened to Greece, with a similar-sized economy to our own but twice our population.

Despite the fact that already we have grievously suffered as a direct consequence of joining the new currency (and we aren’t alone, with five Eurozone going bankrupt, all the rest bar Germany with massively increased debt/GDP ratio), our current government sees no problem with this drive to ever-closer union, more than willing to see us subsumed into this new EU.

For those of us who would prefer to see Ireland as an independent republic among equals in a scaled-back EU, that’s a serious concern.

EU-PAWNS

Of even more concern, however, is what emerged last week, the invocation by the France of the EU Treaty clause 42.7, the mutual defence clause, and our government’s response to it.

Because of our long-held and widely respected policy of neutrality, we have an exemption under that clause, yet this government has opted to send Irish troops to the al Qaeda hotspot of Mali, to enable France to free up its troops there. This is a dangerous development, really dangerous.

What happened in Paris last Friday week is deplorable.

What happened in Beirut a few days before that is deplorable.

What happened in Kenya this year, in Nigeria, is deplorable.

What’s happening right now in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Palestine is deplorable.

Indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel, attacks on individuals, is deplorable.

None of those statements in any way takes from the others – there are so many atrocities happening right now across the globe, carried out in the name of one god or another, fiscal or physical or theological, all deplorable.

Ireland, however, does NOT need to be sucked into this.

A KALEIDOSCOPE IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

What’s happening in the Middle East right now is being presented to us in very simple and stark terms – it’s good versus evil, a clash of civilisations, them against us.

It is not.

The Middle East may not be the kaleidoscope of people and religions and attitudes that we enjoy in Europe but neither is it a monolith, one people with one idea and Israel apart (as it is), one religion. There is, and always was, diversity, colour, tolerance, friendship, hospitality, music, laughter, song.

What’s happening now though, the destruction of the Middle East, is all about the oil, about control of the fields, the production, the pumping, the pipelines. 

Since the early 1900s, Britain and/or the US has been toppling regimes in this region, replacing them with those whom they deemed supportive of UK and US needs. How those puppet regimes treated their own people? Irrelevant. Does anyone seriously believe that the western ‘allies’ gave a damn about the everyday fate of ordinary Libyans under Ghaddafi, or ordinary Syrians under Assad, any more than they gave a curse about Iraqis under Saddam Hussein or Iranians under the Ayatollahs?

This isn’t conjecture, this isn’t conspiracy, this is recorded fact. Almost a century before the recent ill-fated western-backed ‘Arab Spring’, in 1916 we had the western-backed ‘Arab Uprising’ against the Ottoman Empire, but when it was all over, Britain and France carved up what was left between them. Ever since then, the US a late but most enthusiastic arrival to the party, they have all played their own games in that unfortunate area.

BUSH FIRE RAGES ACROSS THE MIDDLE EAST

The current turmoil was started by George Bush Snr in 1992 with the first invasion of Iraq, continued by his son and his allies in 2003, subsequently added to with orchestrated chaos right across the region. 

Many of those on the ground – probably most of those on the ground – are fighting what they see as a religious war. That’s what those who are pulling the strings want them to think, that’s what they want all of us to think, that’s what our own government now seems to think. But, just as with Ireland and the euro, they are pawns in a much bigger and much dirtier game, WE are pawns in a much bigger and much dirtier game.

We need to step back from this and have a good, hard look. By all means offer all the non-military help we can to the people of Paris and of France, to any other of the innocents in all this. But Mali, al Qaeda, troops? An increase in our defence budget to include fighter jets? 

Where are Enda Kenny and this government leading us, exactly???

A cartoon from 1916, a few decades before the US became involved

For further reading:

The Guardian, Iraq was really about the oil;

The Spectator: The wars that are really about the oil;

Or if you want to off mainstream and for a really big read, Blowback Paris: Exxonomics 102.

BURYING THE TRUTH IN THE NEWS

A headline in today’s Irish Times (Aug 19^th 2015):

Central Bank accelerates sell-off of bonds issued after IBRC liquidation

The first two paragraphs of the article (which is anonymous but probably printed verbatim from a Finance Department press release) are as follows:

The first clear sign has emerged that the Central Bank is to sell down the bonds issued as part of the IBRC liquidation at a pace faster than the minimum commitment given to the ECB. The National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA) announced yesterday that it had cancelled €500 million of one of the bonds which it had bought from the Central Bank.

The Central Bank had already sold another €500 million of this 2038 floating rate bond to the NTMA at the end of June. At the time of the IBRC liquidation in early 2013 it had indicated that it would sell a minimum of €500 million a year of these bonds between 2014 and 2018. So the sale of €1 billion this year – following a €500 million sale at the end of last year of the same 2038 bond which met the 2014 commitment– suggests that the Central Bank is moving to sell down the bonds more quickly than the minimum commitment. 

Further down the article, we have the following:

The Central Bank pointed out in an information note issued with its 2014 results that at a time when the NTMA could refinance the bonds at such low interest rates, selling down the bonds led to increased profits to the Central Bank. The bulk of these profits are then returned to the exchequer via an annual dividend. The December 2014 sale led to a €180 million gain to the Central Bank and each of the two recent transactions will have yielded similar or greater profits.

The writer goes on to note that there is a minor downside to all this: 

However there is also a cost to the State of early disposal, as the interest paid on the bonds by the NTMA is now paid to a third party, and not the Central Bank, as was the case with the special floating rate bonds. The Central Bank argued in its note that this interest rate gain of holding on to the notes and refinancing them at a slow rate could be offset in future if interest rates rise and it cost the NTMA more to raise replacement debt.

So there we have it, another €500m bond ‘cancelled’, resultant ‘profit’ of another €180m (if not more!) for the exchequer, albeit we are now paying interest to a third party for the lifetime of the bond.

MISSING from this report however is the most crucial point of all, the whole raison d'être for this entire exercise – what happened to the €500m that the Central Bank received to enable the ‘cancelation’ of that bond? What happened to the €500m – real money, even if it is all borrowed – that it received in June?

That money was destroyed, every last cent. A broke and broken heavily indebted country borrowing billions, to destroy. An ECB Quantitative Squeezing programme imposed on Ireland, even as that same ECB is engaged on a trillion-euro Quantitative Easing programme for the rest of the Eurozone.

MISSING also from the Irish Times report, the fact that beginning in 2038 and in chunks of billions, future generations of Irish citizens will begin paying off the €28.3bn worth of bonds now being sold and ‘cancelled’ by the Central Bank/NTMA. And for what? To bail out the failed creditors of the failed Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide, at the behest of the ECB/European Commission, to prevent a contagion of bank collapse throughout the EU.

The ultimate cost of all this to generations of Irish citizens will run into many tens of billions. When this is presented as a good-news story, what does that say about the ‘Paper of Record’? But sure look, what's a little omission between friends...

For 233 weeks – four and a half years – we in the Ballyhea Says No campaign have been battling to shed a light on the gross injustice that has been done to Ireland vis-à-vis the bank-debt in the name of the EU. This Irish Times article is a perfect example of what we’re up against. 

The best chance we have is that over and over again, people share blogs such as this, where the half-truths are filled out, the full truth is told.