IRELAND 2012 AND ITS VALUES

Last week, making headlines in all our media outlets, it was announced that the HSE was making a cut of around 600,000 hours to home help for the remaining months of 2012,  part of the HSE’s efforts to effect savings of €130m. There was outrage, and rightly so, and a few days later the government was forced to change its plans. Now, rather than just cutting the most needy to the bone the HSE will also have to look to shedding some fat. Not a full victory but still, people power prevailing.

On Monday of this week Anglo Irish Bank (as it was, is and ever will be to those of us who refuse to acknowledge it as anything else) paid a bond of €600m – that’s €1,000 for every hour the HSE was so blithely going to cut from home help; on October 1^st AIB – another bank we own – will pay a bond of €1bn. That’s €1,600,000,000 in bonds we didn’t issue being paid in just four weeks by two banks we now own, 12 times what the HSE is attempting to save, yet in our national media not a word. Why not? Since March 2011, when we began our protest march in Ballyhea, I’ve been grabbling with that question; €24bn in bank bonds later and I’m grappling no more – I just don’t have an answer.

Turning the corner?

The bank debt burden is a far bigger issue than anything else we face at the moment but where is the outrage, where is the people power? At what stage will we all make the connection between all those cuts and all those bank bond payments? At what stage will people revolt against the €69.6bn additional debt that has been forced on us by the ECB in cooperation with this government, our national media (with just a few brave and honourable exceptions) colluding through its silence? That’s a debt of over €15,000 for every single person in this state – is that not worth protesting, is that not worth highlighting?

‘These are tough times,’ they repeatedly tell us, as if we don’t know, ‘We are taking the tough decisions.’ Lies. How tough is it to take from the weakest and most vulnerable? Because that is exactly what this coward and craven government is doing. But take on the ECB? Take on Angela Merkel? Take on their own, the overpaid overpensioned political class; take on our own vested interests in this country; take on the high-earners; take on the ludicrous Croke Park Agreement and the fat and overpaid upper Civil Service area; take on those like the multinationals who are paying less than their fair share into the public coffers; take on any or all of those, even if only for the few years we would then need to clean up this mess? No my friends, this government is NOT taking the tough decisions.

What we have in Ireland of 2012 is a government whose priorities are perverse. The good of the people, the will of the people? It’s good to pay out tens of billions in failed bonds to failed large-scale financial gamblers while cutting from the old (home help), the young (education), the most vulnerable (the likes of St Joseph's)? This is the will of the people?

Is this where we want to be? Are these the values you want for Ireland 2012? Is this the way you want your country governed? I don’t. 

For 79 weeks now in Ballyhea a group of us have been protesting all this injustice, joined after a few months by a group from nearby Charleville. Every Sunday morning we meet, 11.30am, alternating between the two parishes, and take to the street. No slogans, no chants, just a short, dignified march by a small but fiercely determined group of very ordinary people.

We are non-party-political, we don’t espouse any –ism, we simply object to this enslavement of people to bail out failed banks and their failed bondholders. Our original intention was that every parish, village, town and city in Ireland could duplicate what we’re doing and hold their own march every Sunday, at around the same time. That can still be done. A few phone-calls among like-minded people, a banner proclaiming who ye are and what ye’re doing (BALLYHEA SAYS NO TO BONDHOLDER BAILOUT is ours), take your courage in your hands, and off you go.

Direct action, as taken against the home-help cuts, that is what is needed now. If you object to what’s happening, then protest with us, march with us. If you can’t make it on your own then join us in Ballyhea this Sunday, or at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin where we’ll be holding a march to Croke Park, meeting at 11.30am at both venues. You've been silent long enough.

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.

TAKING ON THE ECB

On Sunday last the noted economist Colm McCarthy had an article in the Sunday Independent in which he suggested the Irish government should sue the ECB for the money we have been forced into sinking into our banks.

On Sunday last also, week 77 of our on-going protest against those actions by the ECB, the Ballyhea/Charleville regular Sunday morning march took place but with a twist – a few of us who couldn't be in Charleville instead held a simultaneous march in Dublin.

                The Charleville Brigade                                      The Dublin Branch

With due respect to the man, Colm was merely stating the obvious. In fact, not alone did the ECB exceed its remit in what was done to Ireland, it went beyond the bounds of the law – blackmail and extortion, which is what has been happening on an on-going basis to us since the ECB became involved in our finances, is illegal in any civilised jurisdiction, and has been for millennia.

Of course, then, we should sue the ECB, that’s without question; there IS a question, however – for how much? ‘Somewhere north of €20bn’ is the estimate Colm put on it on the excellent Tonight With Vincent Browne TV3 show this week – with due respect again Colm, not nearly enough.

Blackmailed by the ECB, we have thus far sunk €69.6bn into our banks, an additional debt burden which in the first instance prompted ‘the markets’ to force us out of the club but an additional debt burden which is now crushing us – the vicious circle between banks and sovereign mentioned in the opening line of the recent hugely significant EZ Leaders’ statement.

Our government must now demand, on our behalf, the return of ALL that money. It can be done as follows: a) Burn all remaining Promissory Notes; b) in a local Quantitative Easing measure, allow our Central Bank to reprint the €6bn already destroyed to satisfy the Promissory Notes of 2011 and 2012; c) through a similar Quantitative Easing measure, allow our Central Bank to print the €21bn plundered from the National Pension Reserve Fund and handed over to the banks and thence to the bank bondholders; d) all bank-related debt to the various ECB funds to be written off; e) all bank-debt-related sums so far paid to the various ECB funds (including interest) to be repaid.

That’s our first fight, that’s Ireland’s fight, but it’s not the end of this war. Even as we’re battling to get back the money that was forced from us we must join forces with all the nations of the EC and do what the EZ Leaders themselves – again going back to that statement – have already agreed, break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns. That, they said, was imperative.

Right across Europe we must work together to break the power of the ECB, to put an end to its odious and failed policy of using public money to bail out failed private banks and their failed private bondholders. This isn’t even a question of forcing those bondholders to suffer their own losses, it’s a question of allowing them suffer those losses. That’s how their own system works, that’s capitalism, that’s commerce. Warning: your investment may fall as well as rise – we’re all familiar with that line, no? What the ECB did in Ireland, what it continues to do, is an attempt to dam the flow of that river. We need to now slowly dismantle that dam, before the whole damned thing bursts and swamps us all.

This Sunday, week 78, march with us, Ballyhea Says No To Bank Bondholder Bailout; meet at Ballyhea church car-park 11.30am, short and dignified protest with neither chant nor slogan.

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.

WEEK 76 - TAKING THE BALLYHEA PROTEST TO DUBLIN

August 14th 2012

Emerging from cavernous Croke Park at around nine o’clock last Sunday evening, all the All-Ireland hurling semi-final work for the Irish Examiner tucked up and put to bed (that’s ‘tucked’ up!), I was heading to my car when hailed by a guy along the way. He had been there for a while he told me, waiting for me to emerge, knowing I would have to pass where he was parked because he had noted my car further on with all the ‘Ballyhea Says No To Bondholder Bailout’ stickers.

He was waiting so he could apologise, apologise for a remark he had made several hours earlier when passing our little group as we were getting our picture taken in front of Croke Park, having marched from the Garden of Remembrance.

It wasn’t his true form, he explained, wasn’t his true feeling either; far from disparaging what we were doing he respected us, even supported us in principle. I accepted the apology of course, fully and without reservation.

Truth be told, though I had heard the comments and noted the speaker it hadn’t bothered me, not in the slightest. Over the last 76 weeks those of us who have been marching every week in protest at the extortion of tens of billions of euro from us by EU/ECB have become used to every kind of criticism, have become inured to every kind of disparaging remark.

This isn’t to say we’ve become pros at this protesting lark – far from it. We’re all so far out of our comfort-zones now that we’re going to need assimilation courses to get back to normality when all this is finally over. Many times over the past 16 months my guts have been in knots as I waited for our next move to unfold – sit-down protests on the main Cork/Limerick road, Run To The Dáil, a week-long bread-and-water fast, the ECB HQ protest in Frankfurt. Last Sunday in Dublin was no exception. 

Unable to make the Ballyhea protest because of the All-Ireland hurling semi-final in Croke Park (for those who don’t know, I work for the sport section of the Irish Examiner), I had decided at the last minute to bring a branch of the protest to Dublin, meet at the Garden of Remembrance at 11.30am, the same time they were meeting in Ballyhea, then set off at noon for Croke Park. At that appointed hour, I can tell ye, 11.30am, the Garden of Remembrance was a hell of a lonely place!

A few people did turn up, and I'm so grateful to them – so should be the whole country. We marched, got a lot of bemused looks, a few shouts of support, and yes, some disparaging words. But in spite of it all we march, because we know, now more than ever, that our cause is just.

At the end of June and to much fanfare, our media proclaimed a great deal for Ireland – the Eurozone leaders had met and from that summit was issued a statement which began with these immortal words: ‘We affirm that it is imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns.’ This is an admission that the policy which had been forced on Ireland hadn’t worked, had in fact seen us caught in this ‘vicious circle between banks and sovereigns’.

In the next few weeks, to absolutely no fanfare, that vicious circle continues, a €600,000,000 bond from Anglo on September 3rd, then a billion-euro bond – yes, that’s €1,000,000,000, would fund a lot of gold medals – on October 1^st, this one from AIB. We own both those banks, that’s our money, and this scandal is still going on.

That’s why we march, that’s why we risk derision, even from our own friends and neighbours. We don’t ‘cod’ ourselves about either our size or our impact but neither do we care; some day everyone else will awaken to what the EU/ECB is doing to us, the people of this little nation. It's not just wrong, it's not just bullying, it's criminal; it is extortion, it is larceny, it is blackmail, tens of billions of public funds (€69.6bn so far) being diverted to bail out failed private banks and their failed private bondholders. It’s a crime being perpetrated by the EU/ECB against one of its smallest member states at a time when that state is at its most vulnerable.

This Sunday, Aug 19th 2012, we’ll meet again at the Garden of Remembrance, 11.30am, in solidarity with the march back home in Ballyhea and Charleville, and we’ll march again, at noon, to Croke Park. We wouldn't mind a few extra with us, however, wouldn't mind at all!

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.

WEEK 75 - The flyer; feel free to print and post!

Ballyhea/Charleville Bondholder Bailout Protest

Upcoming Event

This Sunday 5^th August at 11:30am

Town Plaza, Charleville

              

              Mr Stephen Donnelly TD                         Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev

To mark the 75^th Week of Protest Marches against the ongoing payments to bondholders we are delighted to announce we will be joined by Dr. Constantin Gurdgiev (Economist) and Mr. Stephen Donnelly (Ind. TD Wicklow) amongst others, who will discuss the inequity of the payment of those bonds. We will commence proceedings with our usual short march and then move to The Charleville Park Hotel for speeches and discussion.

PLEASE SHOW YOUR SUPPORT FOR IRELAND 

HELP SHAPE IRELAND'S FUTURE 

JOIN US

WEEK 75 MEDIA NOTIFICATION

Ballyhea

Charleville

Co. Cork

Aug 2nd 2012

Ref: WEEK 75 BALLYHEA/CHARLEVILLE BANK BONDHOLDER BAILOUT PROTEST MARCH

Dear Sir/Madam;

It began on March 6^th 2011, the weekend after the General Election when Fine Gael leader and prospective Taoiseach Enda Kenny indicated, even before he had formed a government, that he would be going back on his pre-election promise of burden-sharing with the bondholders; 75 weeks later it’s still going strong.

Ballyhea is a rural parish in north Cork on the main Cork/Limerick road, has a population of around 1,000 souls, Charleville the nearest town, has a population of around 3,500. Sixteen weeks into our protest a group from Charleville followed our example and began marching in the town; several weeks after that we joined forces and since then we’ve alternated the march between the two centres, every second Sunday in each place. This week it’s the turn of Charleville, gathering at the Library Plaza at 11.30am.

We will be joined this week by well-known economist Dr Constantin Gurdgiev (his third march) and by highly respected Independent Wicklow TD Stephen Donnelly (his first outing), along with several other high-profile individuals. After the march, which lasts for only about 15 minutes, Constantin and Stephen will host a discussion at the Park Hotel, on the outskirts of the town.

With the recent statement from the Leaders’ Summit, ‘We affirm that it is imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns’, the EU has admitted that its policy of the past few years as forced on Ireland, the conversion of private bank debt to sovereign debt, was wrong, has to be changed.  In Ballyhea/Charleville, we’ve been protesting that wrong for 75 weeks. 

This admission by the EU is welcome, very welcome. However – and this point is critical – it doesn’t right the wrong, it merely acknowledges it. We can’t undo the massive damage done to the Irish economy and to Ireland’s reputation as a result of the EU/ECB policy over the past few years; we must do our damnedest, however, to get back the billions we were blackmailed into  pumping into our failed banks to enable them to pay the failed bonds (a practice, by the way, that continues unabated - €19bn in bonds from Irish banks this year alone).

So we march, 75 weeks now. It’s not Olympic-standard endurance but we are in search of gold, our gold, and until we see this wrong righted, until we see action as opposed to rhetoric, we’ll continue to march. We invite anyone in the area to please join with us this Sunday. This is not just Ballyhea’s fight, nor just Charleville’s fight – it’s YOUR fight, it’s everyone’s fight, right across Europe.

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.

THE EURO AREA SUMMIT STATEMENT INTERPRETED

WHAT HAS NOT CHANGED

Per this document, the EU/ECB policy whereby every bondholder in every bank in every country will be paid in full still stands but now (at their discretion), directly through the ESM mechanism. Who funds the ESM? Why we do, all those nations that have signed up to it, so the bank debt is still being transferred to public shoulders. That is STILL wrong, the bondholders SHOULD still be made to take their own pain, but let’s leave that aside for another day.

THE CHANGE

We affirm that it is imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns. With that one short sentence the EU has finally acknowledged that the policy it has adopted for the past four years, the policy whereby Ireland has been blackmailed into pumping €67.8bn of public money into failed private banks (mostly to enable them to pay failed bondholders in European, British and American banks), has failed, is wrong.

HOW IT HAPPENED

Mario Monti (Italy) and Mariano Rajoy (Spain) did what our Taoisigh Brian Cowen and Enda Kenny didn’t have the guts to do, they stood up to Angela Merkel and to the ECB and said ‘NO!’ to bank debt being made sovereign debt. If the ECB wants those bonds paid and those banks bailed out, said Mario and Mariano, then they will have do so themselves through the various mechanisms (EFSF, ESM) set up to deal with such emergencies. The subsequent debt will be bank debt, owed by those individual banks; critically, it will NOT be sovereign debt, it will not be owed by either Spain or Italy.

WHAT OUR GOVERNMENT MUST NOW DO

Monti and Rajoy have opened a door for us, we must storm through. No more pussy-footing – we’ve seen where that has left us. Even the 'Ireland' clause Enda is so excited about that was inserted – 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. Will someone please explain to me what the blazes that actually means? As someone whose stock-in-trade these days is the written word I see only vague gobbledegook. If it had been along the lines of ‘The Eurogroup accepts that what was done in Ireland is wrong and will now right that wrong’ then yes, that’s clear, concise language. But the statement above?

WHAT WE MUST DO

We must march, we must protest what was done to us, we must demand our money back. How much money?

• c.€21bn taken from our National Pension Reserve Fund;
• €31bn in Promissory Notes, two of which have already been paid, €6.2bn of our money destroyed by our own Central Bank;
• c.€12bn borrowed from the ECB itself to fund the banks;
• €5bn "state aid so far" from Nama to the banks; 
• All interest paid so far on the money we borrowed; 
• All interest lost on the money taken from the Pension Fund.

SUMMARY

There’s an expression in sport, in life – ‘you make your own luck’. What we’ve been given is a Lotto ticket but unlike the real Lotto we can work to ensure a win here, we can make our own luck. 

Firstly, we must know that those who are negotiating on our behalf are demanding all the above, and it is NOT acceptable to be told – as we were again my Junior Minister Brian Hayes this week – that this will be kept secret. ‘Paddy likes to know’ – remember that remark by Enda Kenny? Well, tell us, because based on what you've done so far we just don’t trust ye anymore. 

After the Greek bailout deal Ireland got a subsequent cut in interest rates, a cut we had repeatedly failed to negotiate for ourselves but which fell into our laps as a result of the deal done for Greece – this government claimed it as a triumph of their negotiating strategy. After this Euro Summit Statement Enda Kenny claimed a similar great negotiating victory for Ireland – neither was any such thing. We’re in the bind we’re in vis-à-vis the additional bank debt burden because of our passivity, we have this opportunity now because of the courage of others.

Now more than ever we ourselves, the people, need to make our voices heard. An opportunity has been presented to us, we must grasp it, we must become active. In Ballyhea and Charleville we’ll continue to march, we’ll continue to keep up the pressure. This Sunday, week 71, we’re in Charleville, meeting at the Library Plaza at 11.30am. Join us.

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.

RAISING GENERATIONS OF DEBT-SLAVES AND EMIGRANTS

On Sunday last we in the Ballyhea/Charleville Says No group marched for the 69^th week in protest at the continuing bank bondholder bailout. In the march with us was 6-month-old Patrick O’Brien, brought along by his parents John and Clara, who in turn had been alerted to our protest by John’s parents Pat and Frances.

Patrick O'Brien, b. Jan 2nd 2012

  

On Monday Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS) paid out two bonds which between them came to over €600,000,000; on Tuesday and Wednesday, Anglo pay out two bonds which between them come to over €500,000,000. Both those banks are zombie banks, now owned entirely by us, kept open for the single purpose of paying off bonds; all four of those bonds are unsecured, unguaranteed.

Here's what Michael Noonan said about the bank bailout in the Dáil just two months before becoming Minister for Finance: "The Minister for Finance (Brian Lenihan) reduced social welfare payments, punished the blind, disabled, widows, carers and the unemployed and he taxed the poorest at work, and for what? It was so that the taxpayer can take on liability for debts the country never incurred and arose from private arrangements between private institutions. What a disaster and an obscenity."

Here’s what the same Michael Noonan said a couple of months into his tenure as Minister for Finance, in an RTE interview in the US with Richard Downes: “I put my cards face up on the table, saying, ‘Look, it’s no longer a bank. Anglo is now merged with Irish Nationwide. It’s a warehouse for impaired assets. Its deposit base has been moved out into the pillar banks. And it doesn’t work as a bank anymore. You can’t put your money on deposit in Anglo Irish. You can’t get a loan from Anglo Irish. So the only thing that gives it the name of a bank is because it has a banking license. It needs the banking license to access the monies from the Central Bank. So I said that as far as I am concerned, this is not a real bank. This is a warehouse, and we need your assistance in dealing with the senior bond holders because we don’t think the Irish taxpayer should have to redeem what has become speculative investment.”

On Monday I was 59 which puts me in the same generation as Michael Noonan, Enda Kenny, Eamon Gilmore and Pat Rabbitte, the same generation as Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan of the previous government. I look at the legacy my generation is passing on to the generation of John and Clara O’Brien, to the generation of young Patrick O’Brien. And I am ashamed, ashamed and angered. Instead of confronting a problem that is of this generation – even if not fully created by ourselves – we have allowed ourselves to be blackmailed and bullied into a situation where we are now raising generations of debt-slaves and/or emigrants. 

My own kids are aged 23 and 21 and the liklihood as of now is that for most of their working lives they will be paying off this massive bank debt, with interest. As things stand, and if you too are of this generation, this is our legacy to them, the result of the inept, incompetent and - worst of all - spineless governance by our own.

You CAN do something about it. With €30bn of Promissory Notes to be fought for, with €50bn in bank bonds yet to be paid, this war is far from over. Join us. March with us in Ballyhea and Charleville or start your own march. But protest, take a stand. Before it IS too late.

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.