Economic witch doctors looking to give us another dose of bad medicine

NIGHT after night, you can hear the witch doctors, dancing around the fires, rattling those bones.

Sometimes they’re just trying to forecast the future, other times they seem hell-bent on changing it. The trouble is, when the witch doctors start pounding out prescriptions, the rest of us better watch out.

Take last Friday night. Most of us, I suppose, would have been at home with our families. We might have been coming to the end of a long week’s work. If we’re not so lucky, we might have been coming to the end of a long week looking for work. Most of us, I imagine, even at this time of year, would have some little niggling worry in the back of our minds – how to pay the electricity bill, how to afford the school books and uniforms that have to be provided soon.

But if you had turned on your nine o’clock news on RTÉ, you would have seen some very comfortable chap being interviewed in a classy office in the Central Bank. He, apparently, is Mr Maurice McGuire, described on the bulletin as “Central Bank Economist”. He seemed, I have to say, a very nice man. Mild-mannered, well-groomed, soft-spoken. You wouldn’t be sure from his accent where he comes from (there’s a basement in Merrion Street, I believe, where senior civil servants are taught that neutral, hard-to-trace accent – it’s part of the training process for promotion).

Naturally, I don’t know Mr McGuire from Adam, and it’s not that often that someone I’ve never heard of is heading up the nine o’clock news.

I’m not even sure if he’s “the” Central Bank economist or “a” Central bank economist. So I looked up their organisational chart on their helpful (if not very exciting) website, and discovered that Mr McGuire is described as an assistant director general of the Central Bank. He appears to head up a team of economists who do all sorts of important-sounding things, like financial stability and international relations. They even have an economist in charge of special projects – sounds very intriguing.

Anyway, even before I looked him up on the website, I was convinced Mr McGuire must be pretty important. As far as I could tell from the bulletin, not only did he have a Waterford Glass vase behind his desk, he had a big cactus between his desk and the window. Anyone who knows anything about the senior civil service will tell you that’s a killer combination. A free-standing wooden thing on which to hang your coat is the sort of status symbol to which most civil servants aspire – a cactus and your very own vase is to die for.

And Mr McGuire was busy telling the government that it wasn’t one budget they should be trying to bring forward, but four! Bring forward the pain, he was saying. Front-load it. Make us suffer more now, to please the international banks and the financial markets. “The more detail it provides and the more decisions it makes and the more commitments it makes, then the more convinced investors will be to loan us money and to loan us the money at more favourable rates.”

That was one of Mr McGuire’s messages to ministers on the nine o’clock news. And the other one was “It’s not impossible that you would be in a situation where you had to frontload more of the adjustment – in other words, this plan of adjustment between now and 2014, that you’d have to make more of it sooner in order to reduce borrowing costs.”

I think I’ve quoted him verbatim there, slowly transcribed from the news. And I presume he wasn’t speaking in a personal capacity, but on behalf of the bank (the same bank, you might recall, whose track record in managing our banking system hasn’t been too bright in the past).

The odd thing was that he was speaking in the context of the publication of the Central Bank’s quarterly bulletin. That document (again it can be downloaded from their website) is actually forecasting that our economy (based on present trends) should start growing again next year – by either 2.8% or 2.2%, depending on whether you prefer your growth in GDP or GNP. Unemployment, however, will remain largely static, according to their forecasts.

But the bank then goes on to say “public finance data for the first six months of the year reveal a picture generally in line with expectations. The EU Commission has also confirmed that no further actions are required for this year, over and above those already implemented, to ensure compliance with the adjustment programme already laid out by the government and agreed with the commission”.

Mixed messages, wouldn’t you say? The bank has all sorts of cosy things to say about our improved competitiveness, and how the anti-social cutbacks of the last couple of years, which have reduced thousands of families to despair and removed hope from hundreds of communities, are actually good for us. But Mr McGuire is then sent on the telly on behalf of the bank to tell us that we need more pain. Now. Immediately.

It’s absolute nonsense, of course (sorry, Mr McGuire, nothing personal). There isn’t the remotest possibility that the Government could outline the details of the next four budgets now. It will put them to the pin of their collar to do one by December without making a complete bags of it. And in any event, it would be a democratic nightmare. This government might, just might, be able to put two more budgets together before its mandate completely expires. But the idea that they could, or should, tie the hands of an alternative government (which had better have radically different ideas about justice and fairness than the present lot), is a complete joke – and would be scandalous if they attempted it.

But the fact that Mr McGuire was sent on the telly to talk a lot of nonsense isn’t really the point. The point is it’s just like the comic-book legends of old. The rains won’t stop, or the harvest won’t come, or the people are dying of a pestilence. And the witch doctors haven’t a clue what to do. Nothing in their training has prepared them to deal with a really serious crisis.

So, in all the legends I’ve ever read, the witch doctors always respond the same way. First they do a ritual dance, usually involving a lot of decoration and face-paint (a bit more than a cactus and a vase, to be fair). Then they demand a sacrifice – usually a human sacrifice. Lots of blood and gore, and lots of noisy drum beats.

The gods have been made angry, they say. The gods must be appeased. We must offer up more sacrifice. Then, and only then, can we expect crops to grow again and the people to be less hungry.

Now, of course, the witch doctors of old didn’t quite have the gods of the free market, or international banking, in mind. But the formula was the same. Sacrifice the innocent, and the rest of us will recover.

Too bad it’s all nonsense. Too bad that someone (usually someone defenceless) has to suffer in the process. Some things never change.