We have every reason to doubt Croker claims

It is nothing less than amazing that Brendan Howlin should be surprised that people have difficulty in accepting the claims made by the Government and the unions regarding savings made on the Croke Park agreement. He is either extremely naive, thinks we are all idiots or that we have the memory span of a goldfish.

Broken pre-election promises, we’ve had many from this government. Assurances that this, that or the other will be dealt with have fallen by the wayside. Also let’s not forget the various favourable interpretations of EU commitments to help reduce our debt, only to vanish even before the ink was dry.

Hard talk about hard action is simply that — hard talk. Or is it a case of all talk and no action? That unfortunately sums up this Government’s performance so far. There are no reasons whatsoever why Mr Howlin should be surprised that we take his and the Government’s and indeed all other vested interests’ assurances and commitments with anything other than a large dollop of salt. We are all Doubting Thomases and we have good reasons to be.

Very few of us will have forgotten the various benchmarking exercises. It became very clear very quickly that the benchmarking body started with the answer and then made everything fit the required answer. How otherwise would it be necessary to destroy the working papers immediately the decision to give considerable pay increases right across the board was announced?

Certainly, the pay increases had strings attached and were mainly related to flexibility and changes in work practices. However, very few of those conditions were ever fully fulfilled or even saw the light of day.

Right from the start of the economic crisis, we’ve had the banks and the regulators assure us that all was well and that this was a minor flip. Despite repeated assurances, we finally saw that we had been taken for a fine gallop.

Every assurance was false. At this point, most of us do not believe that it was mere wishful thinking or even incompetence. We are more than convinced that we were lied to.

Unfortunately, the banks do not seem to learn. The address by Central Bank head of banking supervision Fiona Muldoon attested to that at the Irish Banking Federation National Conference 2012 on Tuesday. A couple of her comments make for fascinating reading. She said: “The failures of Irish banking were obvious from a distance, and they are even more so in hindsight.”

One of the primary focuses of her address was on the issue of mortgage arrears — another of the elephants in the room but affecting hundreds of thousands of people. She said: “The absence of any cultural skill set or knowledge base in Irish banking for the arrears problems presented has been evident in the dearth of sustainable solutions found to date. The result is a drag on the economy, new lending and the banks’ own future profitability.”

She criticised the lack of strategy and the “wait and see” approach adopted by the banks: “What is it that we are waiting for on mortgage arrears? Is it the hope for the economy to recover, hope that house prices will come back, and hope that the personal insolvency issue will solve the problem? This is the stuff of denial. Hope is not a strategy, any more than anger.”

Each time major institutions in the state mislead us, lie to us, or otherwise try to pull the wool over our eyes; we become more cynical and hold them in greater contempt. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Now that is not really the way to lead a country out of an economic mess.