Ireland’s crash-time leaders on other planet

Anybody with children will be well aware of the existence of Mr Nobody.

Something gets broken, something goes missing but not one person in the house knows anything about it. The culprit just had to be the one and only Mr Nobody.

Since the start of the banking inquiry, most of us were quickly coming to the strange realisation that Mr Nobody must have been the cause of our economic misfortunes. Nobody seemed to be responsible for anything — except, of course, collecting large salaries at the end of the month.

It could only have been Mr Nobody, since every banker who turned up at the inquiry is a pillar of integrity, competence, capability and honesty. Sure, things got a little out of hand and one or two may have overdone it a little but a few meaningless apologies all round and it’s back to business as usual.

The public servants, civil servants and regulators were equally devoid of any responsibility since they were simply following government policy. Sure, it wasn’t their fault if the minister of the day, or the taoiseach, for that matter, didn’t bother to read the many multi-page complex reports that they were given. These reports were, apparently, full of all sorts of health warnings about the potential impacts of the decisions or policies that were to be pursued.

Over the last week we’ve seen the outpourings of former minister for finance, Charlie McCreevy and of former minister for finance and taoiseach, Brian Cowen. As far as these lads are concerned they are the best things since sliced bread. All their decisions were based on keen decision making, expert reports and the advice of their advisers and senior mandarins. And, anyway, it was the bankers, the developers and the greed mongers in general.

Mind you, Charlie excused himself from any involvement in the downturn as he had left the country in fine fettle — in fact, in the best state it’s ever been. After all, wasn’t he around when our ministers, politicians, public servants and a host of others reached the highest accolade of being the best paid of their class not only in Europe but in most of the world.

In fact, according to current supremo, Dear Enda, we were all at it enjoying the fruits of the boom. I suppose you could say that he was suggesting that — as we’re a democratic country — his fellow politicians were only doing what the rest of us wanted.

Soon, the King of the Jesters, Bertie Ahern, will enthrall us all with his version of what went down during his days at the helm. You can bet on one thing and that is that Bertie had absolutely no culpability whatsoever in the severity of our downturn. Bertie used to be known affectionately, by some, as the Teflon taoiseach.

He seemed to be frequently in the middle of a lot of flying manure but none of it seemed to touch him. That, surely, is not going to change now.

Mind you, the current taoiseach gives him a close run for fantastic ideas and utterings. Only the other week, Dear Enda, publicly lectured those malcontents in Athens and advised them to follow our example.

In Enda’s words, we had solved our problems without increasing taxes, of any sort, or slashing supports. No, siree.

Since then, of course, others have been commenting on the error of his claims. I understand the current number of increases or cuts is 45.

Greece is now demanding that Greece be given a 30% debt write off. We’ve already paid €350m in the first support to Greece and if Athens does get this write down it will cost us a €1bn. Funny that the Government does not see that as a serious enough issue to reconsider its decision to pay out over €350m over a couple of years in pay increases to its own employees.

This would all be highly amusing if it was not so serious. These people and their successors are supposed to take the necessary enlightened decisions to take us from the hole in which we find ourselves. On the basis of what we’ve seen to date, I don’t think we should be holding our breath for too long. Our economy clearly needs people who are actually of this world and do not wander about like Alice in Wonderland.