Diarmuid O'Flynn for MEP - Campaign launch speech April 23rd 2014

INTRODUCTION

I'm Diarmuid O'Flynn from Ballyhea

Entering the race for MEP

For over three years we have marched without pause

Peeling the onion in Ireland's cause

Peeling the onion? Yes, the EU skin

Seven layers of institutional admin

THE COMMISSION, initiators of legislation

28-member Cabinet with the power to crush nations

And they've used it. Unelected though they may be

Theirs is the power to force austerity

On Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain

While they, in their towers, are immune from the pain.

THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL, a gathering of Heads of State

The guiding lights, the good and the great

Who have steered this ship onto the reef

Ran us aground, marooned, no relief

A SECOND COUNCIL, as though one isn't enough

Councils of Ministers, each with their own brief

THE COURT OF AUDITORS checks the EU's budget amounts

Not since 1993 have they signed off the accounts

THE COURT OF JUSTICE has three layers of its own

Layer inside layer, how this monster has grown

Then there's the EUROPEAN CENTRAL BANK

Bean-counting number-crunchers of the highest rank.

Finally, the PARLIAMENT, that for which I now stand

Sits in Brussels and Strasbourg, the people's brass band.

And here's the rub

Only one of those layers is directly elected

All of those others are largely selected

Yet the Parliament, that democratic institution

Cannot initiate legislation

It needs to change

We need to rearrange

The entire edifice

And get back to the coal-face

Too many layers

Too many players

Too much bureaucracy

Too little democracy

Banks, bailouts, bonds, budgets, unelected bureaucrats

Bullying and blackmailing us into assuming a debt

That is not ours

Was never ours

Will never justly BE ours

Is this the Europe we want?

Is this the Europe we joined?

Is this the Europe we want to take into the future?

No, no and no again.

ASLEEP AT THE WHEEL

Seven layers of administration

Three layers of legislation

Three European Presidents

Three layers of justice

Two centres of Parliament

Two European Councils

All with

One thing in common

All are asleep at the wheel.

AND WHILE THEY WERE SLEEPING...

85 people

Have the same aggregate wealth

As half the world's population

That's 3.5 billion people

How did that happen?

The world's wealthiest individuals

And the world's wealthiest global corporations

Pay little or no tax.

How did that happen?

Banks are bailed out

Private investor losses paid out

Those costs and losses

Of our new copper-bosses

All covered by us, the people.

How did THAT happen?

The most vulnerable people

In the most vulnerable nations

Are subsidising the healthiest

And wealthiest

How the hell did all this happen?

It happened while they in the various EU layers were sleeping

It happened while WE who helped put them there were sleeping

Deregulation

Privatisation

Globalisation

Our legislators

Facilitated all this

Our legislators

Legislated all this

Some with eyes wide shut

Some with eyes wide open

A WORDY TALE

Pythagoras' theorem: 24 words

Lord's Prayer: 66 words

Archimedes' Principle: 67 words

10 Commandments: 179 words

Gettysburg address: 286 words

Proclamation of the Irish Republic: 475 words US Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words

EU regulation No. 1591/87 laying down quality standards for cabbages, Brussels sprouts, ribbed celery, spinach and plums: 5,091

While the seven layers of the EU onion

Distracted themselves

And asphyxiated business

With layer after layer

Of petty regulations

Others were using their

Power and money

To affect and effect

Major legislation

And thus

Were the floodgates opened

Thus did a tsunami of greed

Engulf the world

Surfing that wave

Are the 85

Swamped by that wave

The 3.5 billion

And more

CLOSING THE GATES

It's not too late

To slam shut that gate

We've still got time

To set the world back in rhyme

All those attacks on us?

Well let's lay a tax on them

The Financial Transaction Tax - the FTT

A small fee

On the most toxic transactions

Taking back a slice from the greedy faction

The tax-avoiding global corporations?

Close those loopholes with global taxation

Close cooperation

Among the world's super/supra-nations

For the benefit of all

That's all

That's needed

The selfish interests of the powerful few

Now supersedes

The needs

Of the people.

Thus the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership - you've not heard of this?

The TTIP, twixt the EU/USA

Partnership yes, of power and money

The greedy grabbing ever more of the honey

A corporate charter, with a court of their own

Where profit is law

And people are fodder

Fed to the gods

The euro and dollar

And all of this has happened

Under the blind watch

Of a succession of EU administrations

The elected, the selected

They have led us to this

Sleep-walked and sleep-talked us

To the edge of the abyss

DESPAIR, SUICIDE - by-products of Austerity

A black cloud

Hovers over our nation

The black dog

Takes up his station

On the shoulders of so many

And they die

By their own hand,

They die.

Sorrow and despair

Utter despair

Ideas and impressions

Clouded depressions

Inane position

Devoid of ambition

Emergency Exit

So many taking that emergency exit

Not because they want to die

But because they can no longer live

Long before that final fateful act

Life has been sucked from them

EMIGRATION

We thought it was history

Consigned to the past

But it's back

With a bang

Not felt since the Great Hunger

Younger and younger

Degrees in their fists

Despair in their hearts

They leave

Families fractured

Communities sundered

A nation fragmented

Again

And why?

This despair

This destruction

This death

At our doors

This mass departure

From our shores

Why?

The mistakes of others

The greed of others

Private losses

Imposed by unelected corporate bosses

On sovereign peoples

Right across Europe

With the collusion of our politicians

The WRONG people blamed

The WRONG cause diagnosed

The WRONG cure prescribed

Leading to one conclusion

We have been electing the WRONG people

The Irish people

Didn't collapse Lehman's

Didn't design the euro

Didn't pour hundreds of billions into Greece/Italy/Spain/Portugal/Ireland

'It's a fiscal problem!' cried the Commission and ECB chorus;

'Austerity the cure!'

It was a financial problem of course

Banks at the core

BAILOUT FOR WHO?

Ireland did NOT get any bailout

Shout that out from the roof-tops

With your voice-tops

IRELAND DID NOT GET A BAILOUT!

The IMF moves into a country in trouble

Lays down its conditions

Asset fire-sales

Privatisation

Deprivation

With cuts in services

But always, always

Bondholders burned

Creditors taking a share of the burden

Until Ireland

The IMF were joined by

The Commission

The ECB

The unholy trinity

THE TROIKA

One aim they had

One aim alone

Bail out the banks

No bond left behind

No loss imposed on those who

Blindly

Greedily

Voraciously

Had fed the Irish property boom

Had fed ON the Irish property boom

But now

As the whole thing went BOOM and burst

They would still profit

Down to the last cent on the last ‘coupon’

Why?

Because the ECB decided so

Because the Commission decided so

Because Merkel and Sarkozy decided so

And because our own government

Cowed and coward

Paralysed by fear

Bowed to the pressure

The abuse of political muscle by the Commission

The abuse of financial muscle by the ECB

And who would cover all those losses?

Why, the people, the already-suffering Irish people

Bailout? Oh bailout alright

But not of the people

And you can sing this in verse

From the highest steeple

Europe didn’t bail out Ireland

It was the exact reverse.

STANDING FOR ELECTION

And so I am here

Standing and running

Simultaneously

(Which is kind of a contradiction!)

The parties of record are on the trail

Fleets of jeeps

Custom-painted

Bottomless budgets

Subsidised by us all

Ads, posters, billboards galore

Strategies, vote management

They know the score.

And the promises, the promises, the promises

In Cork and Kerry, in Carlow and Kilkenny

They’ll promise the earth but ‘twill be no surprise

If all you get is mud in your eyes

As so often before

“Isn't that what you tend to do during an election?”

Pat Rabbitte telling it like it is

Shameless admission

But after the fact

After the false promises of the last election

Landed him with a fat Ministry

Landed us with all this misery

If you're happy

With the status quo

If you're happy

With how Europe has brought us this low

If you're happy

With our current MEPs

If you're happy

With how they’ve watched us brought to our knees

No fiery speech in the Parliament

No public challenge

Save from two – Joe Higgins and Paul Murphy

Joe’s replacement

No defying the native whip

Loyalty to party

Above all else

While paying lip

Service to the people

Again, bar one – Nessa Childers

She paid for her conviction, didn’t she?

I want this job

I want to do full-time

For the next five years

What I've been doing part-time

For the last three years

But this time

With a mandate

A mandate from you, the people.

My first, my last, my only loyalty

Is to you, the people.

ALL the people

Left, right, centre

Party, non-party

Regardless of race, religion, colour or creed

We are all people

We are all in this together

We must all work together.

I make three promises

I will work

I will work

I will work

And so

Come May 23rd

I ask for your vote.

 Campaign Website click here

DAN O'BRIEN'S FLAWED ANALYSIS

In last Sunday’s Independent there were two articles, one by Gene Kerrigan titled ‘Achtung Bono! Try studying works of Professor Frankfurt’, the other by Dan O’Brien titled ‘Demonstrators' analysis of the bank bailout is deeply flawed’. 

The first, which spoke to us about a book by Professor Frankfurt called ‘On Bullshit’, could have been written about the second.

Dan’s article was on his interpretation of our campaign here in Ballyhea and Charleville and to be honest, two days and several examinations of that piece later I'm still scratching my head. 

That Dan never bothered himself with actually researching our position on what has happened and how we believe it should be rectified (the link is here Dan if you'd like to do so now, late as it is) is bad enough. But his logic, well, simply defies logic. First though, his inaccuracies.

‘The Ballyhea protesters argue that the underlying cause of the crash was a badly designed euro and a central bank in Frankfurt that did not do its job.’ This was his first error but Dan was only warming up. ‘They believe that when the consequences of these failures manifested in a banking collapse, the powers that be in the EuroZone forced weak Irish governments to socialise the costs. On the basis of this analysis, they argue that justice demands other European countries repay the Irish state the approximately €65bn spent on the bank bailout. But agreeing with that analysis, however popular it might be, would be dishonest because the protesters' analysis it is almost completely flawed from start to finish.’

Oh Dan. Even we don’t agree with that analysis; it’s your analysis of our analysis that’s completely flawed, not at the start but certainly to the finish.

Yes, we believe the badly-designed euro was the underlying cause of our crisis. And that’s it, that was the sole underlying cause – the ECB and its role came later. The euro wasn’t just badly-designed however, it was structurally flawed, its own failure in-built, a premise Dan seems to accept. In fact he goes further than we have ever gone, predicts it could even end up destroying the EU.

‘The starting point is the euro and its design’, he says; ‘At this juncture, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the creation of the single currency was a mistake. It has proved to be the perfect transmission mechanism for financial crisis and caused profoundly deep divisions among the states and peoples of Europe. It may yet prove that a project designed primarily to bring Europeans together ends up doing precisely the opposite.’

Ok, we’re with Dan to this point. On the ECB, however, we have never said that it was ‘the underlying cause of the crash’ – the ECB was designed with the euro, only came into existence six months before the euro was launched.

However, as the outflow of hundreds of billions from the core European countries (France and Germany especially) to the periphery was happening, in Ireland especially the ECB failed utterly in its primary role of ‘maintaining price stability’, as house prices shot up. Bad as was that failure, what they subsequently did to Ireland was worse – they abused their power, blackmailed Ireland into accepting the losses of the various institutional investors/gamblers.

No evidence of this, says Dan; let him take that up with Michael Noonan, with Leo Varadkar, with these guys: In his book 'The Price of Power' Pat Leahy states: ‘a series of increasingly fraught phone calls on March 31, 2011  between the ECB boss and Finance Minister Michael Noonan in which Jean-Claude Trichet spelled out the consequences of burning the bondholders; "No, no, no," said Trichet. If you do it the bomb will go off. It will not go off in Frankfurt, it will go off in Dublin". The 'bomb' would be the sudden withdrawal of all the ECB funding that was keeping the Irish banks going. "Rattled by such high-powered pressure, Noonan backed off at the last minute’.

On 28th January 2014 Citigroup economist Willem Buiter was reported in the Irish Times to have stated; ‘strong pressure from Germany, the US and then ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet blocked that move. Mr Buiter said Ireland had been “cajoled, coerced, you might even say, extorted” into a deal that saw €30 billion to €60 billion of bondholder debt lumped on to the taxpayer.’

We object to that extortion, to the overall immorality, and again Dan would seem to be with us. ‘The socialising of massive private losses is a huge injustice’ he says, later in his piece.

It seems though that he agrees only to disagree. Ascribing to us again and again positions we’ve never held, he then points out to us – again and again – the error of our ways.

‘It is wrong to blame it (ECB)  for failing to regulate the EuroZone financial system before the crash. That is because the countries which signed up to the euro and designed its institutions wanted to keep regulatory powers in national capitals rather than transferring them to Frankfurt. It is not credible to blame an institution for not exercising powers it never had in the first place.’

Wrong again Dan, gross misreprentation of our position. Contrary to blaming the ECB for not regulating, we have accepted over and over the failure of our own Regulator, of our own banks and bankers, of our own politicians, in office and out. What you're referring to above however is one of the critical design failures of the euro, the results of which were both foreseen and foretold by many, in this article by Belgian economist Paul de Grauwe.  And yet, knowing the potential for disaster, the EU went ahead and launched. If an engineer designed a building, offered it to a client who removed several critical structural columns and beams, then went ahead anyway with the construction – when that building collapses, who takes the rap? That design engineer will end up in jail but in our case, even as the building comes crashing down around us not alone do we not get our money refunded, we have to compensate the owners.

‘The Ballyhea protesters say that foreigners forced Irish governments to ensure that Irish taxpayers repaid all investors in the domestic banks’, says Dan.

First, we don’t speak in terms of ‘foreigners’, which makes us appear as myopic nationalists – we’re not; second, we don’t speak of ‘Irish taxpayers’, we speak of the people, most of whom bear the brunt of this burden; finally, we have never said/inferred/suggested that any external institution forced all this debt on us. On the contrary, we have repeatedly pointed to the blanket bank guarantee of 2008 as our own doing, Irish people in Irish banks misleading Irish politicians who were being advised by individuals of proven ineptness. That wasn’t the source of our problem, however; at that stage it was already too late, damage already done. We go back to the launch of the euro, the known in-built flaws and we ask – where was the planning for the inevitable disaster? Why was there no system in place, why was it left to Ireland to try to defend itself in this situation?

‘Their analysis is flawed,’ concludes the bould Dan, ‘and the prospect of other taxpayers in Europe (many of whom have paid for bailing out their own banks) gifting Ireland €65bn is next to zero.’

We have never asked for a ‘gift’ from anyone, we demand only that this odious burden be lifted from us. We have never said we have no blame in this, in fact again it’s the contrary – we have always said that as part of the EU, as part especially of the Eurozone, we carry our share of the blame for this debacle. We should carry only our own share of the cost. So though should those whose greed and corruption also led to all this, which is why we are fully behind the Financial Transcation Tax currently supported by 11 European countries, including Germany and France but not Ireland.

I could go on. His utter misrepresentation of our campaign apart, there are other areas of this piece where Dan first seems to establish one argument, then totally undermine it with another. ‘Far too much money flowed into Ireland in the 2002-07 period, and this cash was central to the inflating of a massive property bubble’, he proclaims (correctly); a few paragraphs later, as though absolving those who poured those billions into Ireland of any blame, he says  ‘If the sudden availability of cheap money was the cause of the Irish bubble, why did Italy and Portugal not also overheat when their interest rates fell by as much or more than Irish rates?’ I give up Dan – are you saying Ireland would have had that massive property bubble anyway, euro or no euro? 

Then he says – ‘Another variant of the argument that attributes the Irish bubble to the euro relates to interest rates. They did decline a lot in the run-up to the launch of the single currency in 1999 and interest rates do, of course, influence economic activity. But they do not determine everything.’ Dan, if you ever discover what determines ‘everything’, man, you're in business! In the meantime though, I hope you're not trying to tell us that the universally low interest rates in the Eurozone weren't a major factor in the crisis?

That was Dan O’Brien and his article. In fact there is one paragraph in it that for the life of me I can't sense of high up or low down – perhaps someone can enlighten me: ‘Until the megabubble exploded in 2008, financiers ramped up the channelling of huge amounts of money to the most unlikely places with little or no consideration for the risks involved. The countries into which the international financial system poured most money (measured by balance of payments deficits expressed as a percentage of GDP) were non-euro countries. Iceland, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Albania and Georgia all recorded bigger balance-of-payments deficits than any of the euro-area countries.’ And? Relevant to our situation, the point of that paragraph is what, exactly?

Going back to the top, a couple of paragraphs taken from Gene Kerrigan’s article: ‘The bullshitter, Professor Frankfurt says, "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose . . . He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."

In short, it's about saying whatever works. The bullshitter merely has to create a plausible story, unhindered by any obligation to reality. It merely has to look like it might be true. And, when the alternative is a more complex, more difficult narrative, the bullshitter wins hands down. Faced with two apparently plausible stories, people will always – always – choose the simpler, less demanding and more hopeful one.’

A few months ago we in the Says No campaign had our first up-close-and-personal experience of the Dáil. Through the Technical Group, backed by a few other independents and by Sinn Fein, we managed to get a Motion introduced via a Private Member’s Bill, a single paragraph that the government ask (simply ask) the ECB for permission to destroy the €25bn in Promissory Notes sovereign bonds now awaiting sale by the Central Bank. The €25bn thus raised will be destroyed, every cent, but we will be paying back both the principal and interest – an estimated €72bn in all – over the next 40 years, the bulk of those payments falling on future generations.

The government didn’t just vote against; a succession of back-benchers gleefully derided those of us who had brought forward the Motion and between them spoke for hours and hours. All of that time was spent on hyperbole; not a second of their speeches was spent on addressing the actual motion itself.

Just over a week ago I declared my candidacy in the Ireland South constituency for the upcoming European Parliament election. For the last three years Dan O’Brien has ignored us. Is this what we can now expect from him in the coming couple of months?

Regards,

Diarmuid O'Flynn.

MARY TOBIN ON BALLYHEA SAYS NO THIRD ANNIVERSARY

This was posted on Facebook on the morning of Sunday March 2nd 2014 by Mary Tobin of the 'TRALEE SAYS NO' group as she headed to Ballyhea to take part in our third anniversary march. It was raining heavily at the time. The eloquence of the lines exposes a bitter truth.

Hitting the road shortly to pick up Mike Enright and the bould Mike O'Gorman to walk with the Ballyhea/Charleville Say No Group who today, as they begin their 4th year, walk against this and the previous governments' decision to sacrifice Ireland's children to the Gods of Banking. 

Well, it's not the best of days but it never stopped them yet. 

If the weather is her voice, poor Mother Ireland is weeping for Paradise Lost, her land washed of her future and being sold to the highest bidder, flooded with greed and battered by indifference. 

She is on her knees, exhausted, but still they slice away at her resources. 

She crys out for it to stop but the waves of indifference keep washing over her. 

It's the wonderful spirit of Ballyhea Says No that is keeping her alive. Trying to shelter her, protect her and mind her decency. 

They keep her reminded of the Proud Woman she was and can be again. 

They are the ones that whisper in her ear - 'There are still those who love you, always have, always will'. 

There is a better way. So at 10.30am we will be proud to walk once more with them today in Ballyhea.

Mary Tobin, Tralee Say No.