Category Archive: Social Comment

Oct
04

Scottish ‘Sunday Hearld’ – 03-Oct -2010

In the Celtic Tiger era, Eamonn Blaney would have been the embodiment of Cool Hibernia.
With his dark-rimmed designer specs and sharp pin-striped jackets, you might still mistake him for a successful entrepreneur or corporate executive if you were to see him sipping an espresso in one of the cafés near his home in Howth, a traditionally prosperous peninsula jutting out from Dublin. But the truth is this 46-year-old Dubliner is carefully counting the cost of every small indulgence these days.

Blaney is on the dole: one of the 455,000 citizens of the Irish Republic unemployed or under-employed. When he signs on, he is surrounded by traumatised Tiger Cubs, a hedonistic young generation foolishly reared to believe that their wise elders had somehow suddenly discovered a magical cure for the centuries-old scourges of economic misery and mass emigration. Blaney’s own grand misfortune was to graduate with an MBA from Ireland’s top-rated university, Trinity College Dublin, in 2008 just as the international banking crisis erupted and the southern Irish property bubble spectacularly burst. The two start-up businesses he has founded since have both failed to pay the bills as Dublin has become trapped in a particularly fearsome downward financial spiral.

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Sep
26

Public job cuts will be worth the pain – Sunday Indo 26/9/2010

No doubt you are sick of listening to the radio, watching the television or reading newspapers and getting nothing but bad economic news.

Unfortunately, this is happening because our Government — and many of us — closed our eyes and ears to the reality of what was unfolding before the meltdown. The priority now is to resolve it the best we can and as quickly and as equitably as possible. To do so is going to require some major decisions, all of which will have substantial and far-reaching consequences for every one of us.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan should immediately tell us what options he considered prior to the bank guarantee scheme and the implications of each. Not once, since this crisis began, have we been treated like adults and told exactly what options were considered. Instead, we were told the bank guarantee scheme is the only show in town, with no explanation whatsoever. Suspiciously, none of the other options (if any) have been discussed publicly by the Government.

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Sep
26

Neil Blaney’s son takes his turn at going to war with the leader of Fianna Fail

A MEMBER of one of the country’s best-known political dynasties told the Irish Mail on Sunday yesterday that Taoiseach Brian Cowen is a ‘disgrace’, ‘a failure as a leader’ and ‘pursuing a personal life that is causing him to fail in his obligations to the people.’ Eamonn Blaney, the son of Neil Blaney, a former Fianna Fail TD and a controversial cabinet minister who was sacked in the midst of the Arms Crisis of 1970, also revealed to MoS that he intends to run in the next General Election because he is ‘appalled and ashamed’ of the performance of national politicians.

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Sep
10

What Are The Alternatives To This Economic Disaster? (Sunday Indo 12 Sept 2010)

To be published in the Sunday Independent 12 Sept 2010

On numerous occasions in the last week we have heard our Minister for finance Mr. Lenihan remind us of the necessity to continue to guarantee the banks. Not to have done so initially would almost certainly have meant the instant financial collapse for our state. Of the two options open to him (letting the banks go, being the first), guaranteeing the Irish banks was the only practical option. Well, according to those who were advising himself and Mr. Cowen on that fateful night, when the crises meeting took place in Government Buildings.
Let’s face it, this is what he was told by the CEO’s and the Chairmen of Allied Irish Banks and Bank of Ireland. And these people should know shouldn’t they? These were the same people who, we had been led to believe, understood international finance, economics and the creation of wealth. After all, the bankers were finance professionals and Mr. Lenihan and Mr. Cowen, were legal professionals. You wouldn’t go to a solicitor for financial advice nor vice versa, would you? Our representatives at the meeting (Zig & Zag) were either lied to or they were incompetent, or both. Fortunately for everyone in the room that night, we’ll never know as there were no minutes taken at the meeting. Yeah, right.
We can only surmise that the bankers put up an extremely strong case for the guaranteeing of the banks and strangely Anglo Irish bank, which they knew was in serious trouble. The problem is, Mr. Lenihan has ever told us what, specifically, the alternatives were. Sure, we have heard the warnings of “economic meltdown” and “imminent collapse of the financial system” etc etc. But so far, nobody has actually told us what these mean. What advice specifically did Mr. Lenihan and Mr. Cowen receive from the bankers? What “appalling vista” lay before them that left them with no choice but to guarantee the Irish banks and therefore a generation to economic hardship? I, for one, would really like to know the answer. I mean, how bad would the alternative have been? ./…………

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Sep
05

Default and be damned – Sunday Indo, Sept 5th ’10

The banks effectively want it every way, full security against all monies that have been borrowed from them in the form of a personal guarantee from each mortgage holder and failing that, a state guarantee, notwithstanding the fact that they already hold the deeds of your property. But hold on, it gets worse. As a direct result of their utter incompetence, the banks lost all their capital reserves, then the equity (share value) thereby threatening all the depositors money which should then place all the bond holders at risk of loses as well. Yet they expect that these losses should be paid back in full by you the mortgage holder, tax payer or citizen or else we “risk damage to our international reputation”. The bondholders knew the risks (that’s their job) and individual investors and depositors should have too.

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