Political stability - Election is path to new beginning

IT IS impossible to see how this besieged country’s interests are served by this Government deferring the inevitable.

Their Mugabesque devotion to power has become a destructive force set against the great efforts and sacrifices being made to try to convince the world that we are capable of eventually running our affairs and repaying our huge debts.

That Mr Cowen and his circle imagine they can, despite having squandered their credibility through repeated incompetence and gross miscalculation, impose cuts of €6 billion in the next 12 months without a new mandate goes a long way to explaining why Sinn Féin had to go to the courts to have bye-election belatedly called in Donegal. Our situation has indeed become bizarre when Sinn Féin, not so long ago absolutely indifferent to the need for any electoral mandate at all, turn out to be the defenders of the democracy our Government prefers to keep silent.

Of course there are ulterior motives but the international perception of a bankrupt European state refusing to hold long-overdue bye-elections, and the citizens’ or parliament’s inability to demand them, cannot contribute to a positive image of Ireland.

That the chief architects of our catastrophe remain in office dismantling the basic infrastructure of a half civilised society must sow doubts about social stability in the minds of those who might finance this State in coming years.

The prospect of indefinite political instability is becoming almost as big an issue as the vast sums needed to sustain broken banks. This doubt is partially behind the crippling cost imposed on Government borrowing yesterday morning when the yield on ten-year bonds increased to 7.66% just before noon. The markets don’t believe we will be able to cut our budget deficit as quickly as is necessary and are betting accordingly.

Just as worryingly, if not more so, the cost of insuring our sovereign debt against default reached a record high yesterday as credit default swaps on AIB’s subordinated debt signalled a 63% probability of default within five years.

Two out of three brokers are betting that we’ll default on our loans just before the bands start marching to celebrate 1916. This is not a cheering prospect. It means that the majority of the market, and no matter how you might despise it its calculations are ruthlessly objective and unemotional, expect us to become a client state. They expect us to be dependent on the resources of others and therefore subject to their influence in a way an independent republic would not be.

Hardly the Ireland Pearse died for.

There must be an election because we need a Government with the authority only an electorate in full possession of the facts can bestow. We need an election to show the world that we realise the depth of the challenge facing us all and that will meet that challenge.

Let there be an immediate election to end political instability. And then let us all get behind which ever party or coalition wins to try to sustain even the slightest possibility that 2016 might yet be a year of celebration rather than one regretting wasted opportunities.