Economy in crisis - Credibility is core issue on NAMA plan

WE may be staggering towards bankruptcy but the growing opposition to NAMA confirms that, in the credibility stakes at least, Brian Cowen’s Fianna Fáil is utterly bankrupt.

The Greens are to hold a convention to consider NAMA even though the proposal is the very bedrock of their coalition partner’s recovery plan.

Labour have long opposed it and yesterday Fine Gael announced that they too would oppose it.

The trust-us argument, the one that got us into this crisis, the one that sustained the fantasies and deceits of the Ahern era, has, thankfully, run into a stone wall.

Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny, who has not enjoyed a reputation for articulating the zeitgeist, spoke for many bruised and sceptical people yesterday when he said: “At its core, NAMA is a €90 billion double or quits gamble ... on the property market. A €22,500 bet for every man, woman and child in this country.”

He continued: “Recent ... court cases have called the Government’s bluff. The courts asked for convincing evidence and argument that property prices ... are only temporarily depressed. Of course, they didn’t receive it.”

That ruling, though it is being challenged, confirms what many people felt in their heart of hearts – that NAMA was a heady cocktail devised to save the skin of bankers and property developers rather than serve the needs of this society and its taxpayers.

That it is the only proposal emanating from the party which enthusiastically played the enthralled handmaiden to our reckless bankers and developers can only give rise to further suspicions. These suspicions have been deepened by absolute government reticence on the proposal, by their reluctance to offer anything other than the vaguest of take-it-or-leave-it arguments.

Those suspicions are deepened too by the fact that, well over a year into this crisis, neither our justice nor regulatory systems have taken action against even one of the people or institutions that got us into this mess.

Is it possible that the Government expects us to believe that we have reached this point without someone somewhere breaking the law? Is it possible that this Government expects us to once again look the other way as white-collar crime goes unchallenged much less unpunished? The Wild West of European finance indeed, but with a blind, deaf and dumb sheriff.

For these reasons, and because the stakes are so very high, there must be a full, gloves-off debate on NAMA. After all, its success or failure will define this society’s capability to provided the health, education and social support systems we all would like to see in place.

Not so long ago one of the worries of the day was that so many people, so many sectional interests, had not grasped the depth of our difficulties. That period has passed. Now the worry must be that our Government, insulated from reality by decades in power, do not fully appreciate how low their credibility has fallen and that any effort to foist NAMA on this society in the present pig-in-a-poke manner is unacceptable.

What is equally worrying is that the Government seems to be unaware of the deep, festering and dangerous anger taking hold in this society and all because there seems to be one set of laws for the bankers and the developers and another for the rest of us. Unless this issue is tackled we may, in time, look back on today’s difficulties with a considerable degree of fondness.