The Irish Revolution of 2011

Denerick

So the new coalition government has effectively picked up the ball from Fianna Fáil and are running on the same track to nowhere.

Now why is this not a surprise? How many people were telling you this in the run up to the election? I, for one, was dizzy from all the partisan posturing and the other nonsense. I, like many others, knew our choices were limited and that government policy during 07-10 would have been the same regardless of who was in power.

Can anyone really say that ejecting FF from power made any difference whatsoever? Are we still going to delude ourselves that our economic crisis was the fault of a few Machiavellian schemers in Leinster House and not of the Irish nation, who consistently voted for an economic and political consensus that guaranteed economic doom down the road? We are a nation of tabloid readers and Joe Duffy listeners; such a sorry excuse for a citizenry surely got exactly what they deserved. Are we ever going to accept responsibility for our collective bad decisions?

Laminations

Denerick wrote: »

So the new coalition government has effectively picked up the ball from Fianna Fáil and are running on the same track to nowhere.

Now why is this not a surprise? How many people were telling you this in the run up to the election? I, for one, was dizzy from all the partisan posturing and the other nonsense. I, like many others, knew our choices were limited and that government policy during 07-10 would have been the same regardless of who was in power.

Can anyone really say that ejecting FF from power made any difference whatsoever? Are we still going to delude ourselves that our economic crisis was the fault of a few Machiavellian schemers in Leinster House and not of the Irish nation, who consistently voted for an economic and political consensus that guaranteed economic doom down the road? We are a nation of tabloid readers and Joe Duffy listeners; such a sorry excuse for a citizenry surely got exactly what they deserved. Are we ever going to accept responsibility for our collective bad decisions?

Yes, they have been held somewhat accountable for the mistakes they made prior to 07 and during the initial stages of this crisis that has now left little room for alternative solutions.

later12

Denerick wrote: »

Are we ever going to accept responsibility for our collective bad decisions?

In the long term, this is the most important question to emerge from the current private and sovereign debt crisis.

I don't believe for a second that Irish people have accepted anything about their actions. I think that if there were a turf boom to begin on Monday morning you would have the same old profusion of money, credit dependence, and the resulting wage and consumer inflation cycle with an inadequate consideration given to the necessarily finite nature of the boom.

Champagne, Champagne for everyone!

Denerick

Laminations wrote: »

Yes, they have been held somewhat accountable for the mistakes they made prior to 07 and during the initial stages of this crisis that has now left little room for alternative solutions.

Mistakes 'they' made? You mean the mistakes the Irish people made in continuously electing them, and the mistakes Fine Gael and Labour made by continuously guaranteeing increased spending and reduced taxation in their election manifestoes? We can delude ourselves all we want; we voted for a political consensus that essentially guaranteed a crash.

DonkyDonk

Denerick wrote: »

So the new coalition government has effectively picked up the ball from Fianna Fáil and are running on the same track to nowhere.

Now why is this not a surprise? How many people were telling you this in the run up to the election? I, for one, was dizzy from all the partisan posturing and the other nonsense. I, like many others, knew our choices were limited and that government policy during 07-10 would have been the same regardless of who was in power.

Can anyone really say that ejecting FF from power made any difference whatsoever? Are we still going to delude ourselves that our economic crisis was the fault of a few Machiavellian schemers in Leinster House and not of the Irish nation, who consistently voted for an economic and political consensus that guaranteed economic doom down the road? We are a nation of tabloid readers and Joe Duffy listeners; such a sorry excuse for a citizenry surely got exactly what they deserved. Are we ever going to accept responsibility for our collective bad decisions?

Good point. But what choice did we have?

Denerick

DonkyDonk wrote: »

Good point. But what choice did we have?

Ha. We were buggered if we did and buggered if we didn't.

I'm making the point that the absurd whining and whinging from the electorate is essentially a course of blame dislocation; continuously point the finger at a conspiring elite and you won't have to blame your fellow countrymen. This was a much broader problem, a problem of political economy that permeated every section of society.

JustinDee

What 'revolution'??
Sitting on one's hands, moaning and wailing is not a revolution.
Nor is people acting as if they knew all along that the economy would tailspin.

Utter drivel.

DonkyDonk

Denerick wrote: »

Ha. We were buggered if we did and buggered if we didn't.

I'm making the point that the absurd whining and whinging from the electorate is essentially a course of blame dislocation; continuously point the finger at a conspiring elite and you won't have to blame your fellow countrymen. This was a much broader problem, a problem of political economy that permeated every section of society.

That's pretty deep. True that it's all our faults

loldog

When Ireland's economy was overheated the ECB kept interest rates low. Now Ireland's economy needs some pep, the ECB raises interest rates.

We're not really fitted to the eurozone perhaps?

.

Denerick

JustinDee wrote: »

What 'revolution'??
Sitting on one's hands, moaning and wailing is not a revolution.
Nor is people acting as if they knew all along that the economy would tailspin.

Utter drivel.

You don't seem to possess an irony meter. The word 'revolution' in this context is deliberately ironic. That said I find the infantile professional protestors to be a waste of both actual and intellectual energies; I'd rather live in the real world thanks.

JustinDee

Denerick wrote: »

You don't seem to possess an irony meter. The word 'revolution' in this context is deliberately ironic. That said I find the infantile professional protestors to be a waste of both actual and intellectual energies; I'd rather live in the real world thanks.

I was in agreement with you.
I was more having a go at the people whose revolutionary activities amount to click 'Like' on a Facebook page or barracking with quotes on the internet.

Zubeneschamali

Denerick wrote: »

Now why is this not a surprise?

Because we read the parties manifestos before the election.

Rubik.

Denerick wrote: »

Can anyone really say that ejecting FF from power made any difference whatsoever? Are we still going to delude ourselves that our economic crisis was the fault of a few Machiavellian schemers in Leinster House and not of the Irish nation, who consistently voted for an economic and political consensus that guaranteed economic doom down the road? We are a nation of tabloid readers and Joe Duffy listeners; such a sorry excuse for a citizenry surely got exactly what they deserved. Are we ever going to accept responsibility for our collective bad decisions?

We didn't know that the Government was going against the advice of it's own finance department when it was increasing public spending by billions, we weren't in a position to know what was happening in our banks because even the financial regulator didn't have a clue and we weren't present when Lenihan and Cowen concocted the banking guarantee.

I never voted for FF, the PD's, the greens, Healy-Rae or Lowry - so I feel no need to take a share of the blame. I don't buy this "we are all to responsible" notion - the lion share of the blame lies with the Government of the day and the boards of our banks.

Denerick

Rubik. wrote: »

I never voted for FF, the PD's, the greens, Healy-Rae or Lowry - so I feel no need to take a share of the blame. I don't buy this "we are all to responsible" notion - the lion share of the blame lies with the Government of the day and the boards of our banks.

And the opposition parties and the citizens who elected them.

We mightn't have known everything that could have been known, but we had a fair idea that this was a property bubble. We just convinced ourselves that this time would be different.

dan_d

At the very least, the election got rid of the "THE GOVERNMENT HASN'T GOT A MANDATE FROM THE PEOPLE" argument that kept being trumpeted ad nauseaum by the press, the Opposition (now the current Gov) etc,etc, etc. We just couldn't get past the whole "it's all FF's fault thing". That's all we've talked about for the last 2 and a half years. It's filled newspaper columns, entire TV and radio shows, and countless threads on Boards and other sites. We rarely mentioned what we might do to solve our problems, but my God, we never shut up about what FF were doing wrong and how it was ALL their fault.

Ahem. Anyway, what I find difficult to believe (and very mildly amusing) is the number of people who got the idea that FG were going to something totally different to FF, and solve all our problems overnight. If they had been elected 2 years ago, there might have been some hope for well, something. But by the time the election did come around, we were (and are) so deep in the mire, there's no going back.

They have no option.Why can't people see that? We're broke.The only reason we're running as a country is because we are being bailed out. I don't honestly know if FG claimed they'd say no to the EU/IMF, or not give the banks any more money ever, during their campaign. Maybe they did.Or maybe a whole host of completely deluded voters just didn't listen properly and decided, based on some campaign rhetoric, that that's what was said. It's amazing what people can hear (or not hear) when they want to.

Anyway, no matter what they will or won't do, it's not going to happen straight away. I reckon it'll take at least a year before we can make any judgement on whether their actions are good, bad or indifferent. We won't see the results of their actions until at least then.

There's no point condemning them just because they haven't told the big, bad EU to go f*&k off. We actually need the EU right now.....

hoorsmelt

The Irish crash couldn't have happened without lending from German banks. There were problems in this country alright, but you can't blame people for voting for what they saw as an improvement on generations of poverty without looking too deeply into the causes of it. Hopefully if the crash achieves one thing this'll be it.

Permabear

This post has been deleted.

Rubik.

Denerick wrote: »

We mightn't have known everything that could have been known, but we had a fair idea that this was a property bubble. We just convinced ourselves that this time would be different.

By 2007 almost everyone had accepted the property boom was about to end. Only a handful of our economists predicted anything like the eventual outcome, yet you seem to be suggesting that we all should have know that outcome was inevitable.

Denerick

Rubik. wrote: »

By 2007 almost everyone had accepted the property boom was about to end. Only a handful of our economists predicted anything like the eventual outcome, yet you seem to be suggesting that we all should have know that outcome was inevitable.

Well not really.

If nobody else in Ireland predicted the bubble bursting, how come so much blame is placed on Fianna Fáil?

If you accept that the bubbles blew up out of nowhere, then you must also accept that FF essentially didn't do anything wrong. True, they may have lacked foresight and vision, but so did the rest of the country.

I'm war weary because over the last 4 years I've heard nothing but 'FF have ruined the country', when, as you say, nobody could have predicted what happened. Yet we conveniently absolve ourselves of blame and instead blame this group of villains in Leinster House. I want to see and hear people blaming their neighbours with their holiday homes in Bulgaria and their maxed out credit cards and their children with all the latest fashion accessories.

I feel like I'm the only person who can see the inherent lunacy of this national line of reasoning.

Rubik.

Denerick wrote: »

Well not really.

If nobody else in Ireland predicted the bubble bursting, how come so much blame is placed on Fianna Fáil?

If you accept that the bubbles blew up out of nowhere, then you must also accept that FF essentially didn't do anything wrong. True, they may have lacked foresight and vision, but so did the rest of the country.

I'm war weary because over the last 4 years I've heard nothing but 'FF have ruined the country', when, as you say, nobody could have predicted what happened. Yet we conveniently absolve ourselves of blame and instead blame this group of villains in Leinster House. I want to see and hear people blaming their neighbours with their holiday homes in Bulgaria and their maxed out credit cards and their children with all the latest fashion accessories.

I feel like I'm the only person who can see the inherent lunacy of this national line of reasoning.

I wasn't saying nobody could have of predicted it, clearly some did. My point was your average citizen is not an economist, even those citizens who are - most didn't see this coming. But I do expect the Finance Minister to be one of the most informed people in the country on these matters and he should have known.

If successive ff Finance Ministers had been more prudent with our public finances, if the finance regulator had done his job and if banking directors hadn't lost the run of themselves we would still have been faced with a difficult couple of years, but nothing like the catastrophe we are now facing.

sollar

This is exactly what people from outside the country were laughing at when we voted in this government. They were saying one centre right government for another. All we did was change the faces etc.

There was no revolution beyond hammering the once mighty sociopathic fianna fail. Hopefully people realise there is more to this country than fianna fail and never vote them in again.

beeftotheheels

Rubik. wrote: »

I wasn't saying nobody could have of predicted it, clearly some did. My point was your average citizen is not an economist, even those citizens who are - most didn't see this coming.

What is the deal with "your average citizen is not an economist"? You didn't need to be an economist to see that this was a bubble. A farmer could see that we were in a bubble, but the farmer with no mortgage and plenty of sites to sell didn't worry about the outcome of that bubble, there was upside for him and limited risk. That he's now seeing the pricing of risk trickle down to him through USC etc is by the by. He knew there was risk, he understood that there was a bubble and risk, he just didn't place that risk at his own door.

Economists don't have all the answers, and you certainly don't need to be an economist to understand the problem. All of this praise for economists just deludes them into exaggerating their own importance...

Economists are the middle ground, they don't understand the granularities of a risk like a lawyer (I'm talking good lawyers, not poor lawyers who double up as politicians), they don't understand the pricing of risk like a pure mathematician.

One or two of them got it right (monkeys on typewriters anyone?) and now they have been elevated into an omniscient class?

The current government cannot act in a vacuum when our biggest creditor is the ECB. We are a member of the EU, and a member of the Euro. By accepting both of these things we limited our sovereignty.

We are now borrowing from the EFSF, EFSM and IMF. This further curtails our sovereignty.

If people genuinely believed that FG/ L could make a seismic change in our economic policy then they made a mistake. But we, as the Irish people, got ourselves into this mess. We no just need to hope that we can make our way out of it. I don't think the swing was because people expected seismic change, I think it was aimed at punishing FF for their leadership up to 2008.

blinding

The Bankers are still pulling the strings of their puppet politicians.

Plus c'a change ! ! !

Inverse to the power of one!

Denerick wrote: »

I'm war weary because over the last 4 years I've heard nothing but 'FF have ruined the country', when, as you say, nobody could have predicted what happened. Yet we conveniently absolve ourselves of blame and instead blame this group of villains in Leinster House. I want to see and hear people blaming their neighbours with their holiday homes in Bulgaria and their maxed out credit cards and their children with all the latest fashion accessories.

I feel like I'm the only person who can see the inherent lunacy of this national line of reasoning.

You're not! And even more so, lets hope we have a generation rising who are cynical in the extreme about the nature of our actions and lifestyle of endless credit(moral and otherwise). No need to point out the corruption of the above to an unemployed 18 year old with no prospects for the future, their already experiencing the harsh realities that some people would love to absolve themselves of having created.......and I'm not so sure their outlook on the situation will be as rosy as: "Ah sure, it wasn't me....."