Toxic truckers wing it as Lenihan plays Comical Ali

IT sounds a bit provocative, to say the least, to hear Brian Lenihan tell us the economy won’t be fixed by driving trucks into the gates of Leinster House.

Has he anything to say to the wreckers who drove the truck that is the Irish economy into the free fall in which it now finds itself?

The driver of the first truck is facing due and speedy process while the other saboteurs enjoy early retirement on the golf courses of Europe and beyond. If we can believe Lenihan and the Taoiseach, the economy must now be spinning like a top, so many corners has it turned. Our finance minister is reminiscent of the spinning Comical Ali during the second Gulf War famously or infamously announcing victory even as US tanks were advancing up his street.

So much for delusion and denial. The fact is this country bought a pup of seriously flawed pedigree when it took into its care Anglo Irish Bank and this pup is growing at such a rate that is swallowing the hand that feeds it.

To say Anglo was of systemic importance to our banking system is nothing more than rubbish. Clearly it was of systemic importance to the Fianna Fáil party and the reasons may be somewhere in the long and cosy association between ‘Seánie’ and the lads in the Galway tent. What on earth has any one bank to do with Ireland Inc, especially a bank that was not a high street operator and catered only for an elite clientele in the main?

To make a comparison with Lehmans is most disingenuous. Lehmans was an American-based bank with a world presence. We are a country that is far smaller and far less populous than any one US state. Sure, it would have been a one-day wonder but once the main banks which were really of systemic importance – the likes of BoI and AIB – were underwritten by the state, it would have been business as usual and the country would have had some chance of regaining its economic foothold before this generation reaches the grave.

Of course we would have some upset among foreign investors in Europe but our government’s first responsibility is to its citizens – not to well-off foreigners who took a punt with Seánie and his bank. Now of course Brians Cowen and Lenihan have so strapped our fortunes to Anglo that we cannot walk away without sovereign default and, as Lenihan says, we can hardly abandon our duties to foreign stakeholders and then go and ask them for more money to continue the bailout. Fair enough provided they aren’t African warlords or the Mafia as easily as the Deutsche Bank pension fund.

But why are we in this trap to begin with? We are carrying the can for a Government that failed to regulate its banking system, that blithely ignored warnings from the EU when Charlie McCreevy was finance minister and later EU commissioner. A Government that still protects its friends and that still has some 700 quangos duplicating the work of civil servants.

A government whose ministers travel abroad at great public expense to “create jobs” while it hamstrings enterprises and entrepreneurs at home with levies, travel taxes, excessive regulation and a blank refusal to look at commercial rates in the light of a collapsing property market and economy.

If commonsense doesn’t kick in sometime soon this country will face social upheaval of a kind that will threaten the very fabric of civic life.

Margaret Hickey

Castleowen

Blarney

Co Cork