The bailout was very real so stop gaslighting us, Micheál
BY AUGUST 2013 the Financial Times was reporting that almost 400,000 people had emigrated from Ireland since the start of the financial crisis in 2008. Now, we all know that just didn’t happen – those people were merely taking extended holidays in faraway places like Australia and Canada. By 2014, as a result of the banking collapse, employment had dropped like a stone, down 15% from 2.1 million people taking home wages in 2007, according to experts from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, the ERSI and the Central Bank.
Total rubbish. What would they know anyway? Just people being lazy, to my way of thinking.
As late as 2016, the ESRI were still insisting that about 100,000 homes were in ‘negative equity’, down from a high of well over 300,000 at the end of 2012.
Balderdash, and that’s for certain. Mortgage holders just dreaming up ways to avoid repayments.
The Irish Times actually had the temerity, in September 2018, to report that half of all Irish people were psychologically affected by what they referred to as the economic crash and of those, one in seven said they considered suicide.
C’mon, who could possibly believe such nonsense? Snowflakes and millennials the lot of them.
AND then in the Dáil the other day Rich Boy Barrett had the audaciousness to state that the so-called bank bailout had cost us €64bn. Well, it’s a good job we have a fussy Taoiseach like Micheál Martin in charge – a man whose scrupulous attention to detail and truth would put Barrett back in his box.
‘Bailout, what bailout? There was no bank bailout,’ declared Micheál – drawing a shocked and quizzical look on Barrett’s face, as if what the Taoiseach had said came as news to him.
Enough.
Mr Martin’s bank bailout denial and distortion will haunt the remainder of his time in Government Buildings.
This unforced error and langer-clanger will go down as Martin’s FUBAR moment – the last three letters standing for Beyond All Recognition. It’s a pity Mr Martin didn’t read his own Comptroller and Auditor General’s annual report for 2018 which not only establishes the FACT of the bailout, but also puts the cost at a hefty €41.7bn.
In fairness to the Taoiseach, the C&AG doesn’t actually call it a bailout, instead choosing to describe it as ‘banking stabilisation measures’. The vast amount of money we were forced to hand over to European bond holders, who lost at the tables but still insisted we pick up their tabs, is referred to as ‘investments’.
Either way, there’s was nothing sugarcoated about the net costs arising from these ‘investments’ in busted banks, two of which were once run by the likes of Seánie FitzPatrick and Michael Fingleton.
Interestingly, Page 26 of the C&AG report shows that Richard Boyd Barrett was wrong – he said we put €64bn into the banks when, in fact, it was €66.8 billion.
If you take disposals and residual values (mainly in AIB) and all other bits and bobs into account and put them against €22bn in debt servicing, we’ll still be at a loss for nearly €42bn when all this disaster is eventually tidied up.
Micheál Martin as Taoiseach was supposed to come, by reputation, with sensible sure-footedness. We could be assured that, at least on this side of the pond, there was an adult in the room.
Early on he stumbled and staggered, with many giving him a pass and putting it down to a lack of match fitness. More recently he appeared to be stamping his own personality on the office of Taoiseach, to be finding his voice. And, quite correctly, he called out Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Féin for their outrageous attempts to create a false narrative about their historic association and apology for mass murder as carried out by the Provisional IRA.
Mr Martin is now attempting to excuse his extraordinary gaffe by saying he ‘misspoke’. More accurately, he was gaslighting. It was more than cack-handed. It was an out-and-out abuse of people who have suffered too much. It was clumsy and plain wrong.