Kick out our failed politicians — with no golden parachute strings attached
He noted that the IMF adopts a standard formula in relation to all countries in determining its interest rate.
“This is a standard calculation and it is completely misleading to suggest that it could be renegotiated,” Lenihan added. “Greece sought to have the terms of its loan adjusted in line with our terms.”
He was telling us that we did better than Greece, so why should anybody think that anyone could improve on our government. He had the almighty audacity to suggest that nobody could have done better. That is what is really laughable. There seems to be no limit to the depths of absurdity to which this government plumbs.
We have become an international laughing stock. In the past week friends in New York, Texas and Canada have sent me the link to a video on YouTube of an Irishman involved in finance letting off steam in Canada about what has happened to our Celtic Tiger economy.
Denis Ryan, who is from Newport, Co Tipperary, emigrated to Canada in the 1960s and became a leading member of Ryan’s Fancy, an Irish folk trio that was particularly popular in Canada during the 1970s and early 1980s. Last summer he actually sang for the Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during their royal visit to Nova Scotia. In recent years he has been a successful investment banker in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Filmed on a Halifax Street a couple of weeks ago, Ryan —who is identified only as a real Irishman in the money business — goes into a blue rant. The interviewer is Tony Quinn, a Canadian comic who posed as Jason Calibri, a journalist for the fictitious Financial News. He asked Ryan about the demise of the Celtic Tiger economy.
“In Ireland it’s a tragedy what happened to the tiger,” Ryan replied. “We have four causes. We had a stupid f***ing government, with a regulator that was asleep at the wheel. We had very deceitful and conniving and corrupt developers, and of course, above all, wanking f***ing bankers.”
He added that the bankers had been getting massive bonuses. He said all of them “should be thrown in jail and the keys thrown away for the rest of their life.”
Ryan told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) this week that he asked Quinn to film the interview as his way of expressing his frustration over the financial collapse. Although the interview was a spoof, he was expressing his own opinions.
“I’m disgusted, as you can appreciate, growing up in that country and seeing what’s happened to it,” Ryan told CBC on Monday. Members of his extended family back in Ireland are suffering, he said, “all because of the stupidity and greed of a few people, particularly the bankers,” who are now living in style around the world.
His rant has become an international sensation. Irish strangers were congratulating him in Toronto last week for his attack on the bankers. Canadian, British and Irish newspapers have been trying to interview him, along with the BBC.
Of course, RTÉ would not show that video, not so much because the language would offend viewers, but because it would offend the government, and the station has exhibited a frightening timidity in that regard lately. It was absurd that RTÉ cut Vincent Browne’s questioning of Taoiseach Brian Cowen recently, while Sky News continued to run the questioning. It has come to a very sad pass indeed when we have to rely on a foreign news service for important Irish news.
In little over a week our bankers essentially demolished the political reputation of Brian Lenihan with the controversy over the €40 million in bonuses that the High Court supposedly ordered AIB to pay. The public was not told initially that AIB did not contest the supposed test case in relation to those bonuses.
Bankers are largely responsible for undermining the economy of the country and they should certainly not be rewarded for this. Some people may think that the government deserves credit for acting decisively once the whole thing was exposed, but this really highlights their own blinding ineptitude. They should have acted much earlier.
Following the banker’s bonus fiasco, there was the news that 52 senior civil servants at the Principal and Assistant Principal levels in the Department of Finance have received over €115,000 in bonuses in 2010, while the former Chief Executive of the National Treasury Management Agency received a bonus of €200,000.
Are the politicians so inept that they did not recognise the implications of what was happening, or could there be another more sinister explanation? Most of them probably recognise that their days are numbered and they may just be gearing up for the final great rip off. As things stand they will go with a golden parachutes and golden handshakes.
Many of the current cabinet are likely to retire, because they will be paid more on pension than they would get if they were re-elected. It was recently disclosed that Dermot Ahern will get €67,000 a year more on pension than he would get as a backbencher, if re-elected. It is absurd that anybody should be paid more for doing nothing, rather than working, whether that person is some waster quitting a job because he can get more on the dole, or a politician creaming off the system.
It is no wonder that our political system has become dysfunctional when we are rewarding incompetence of bankers, politicians, civil servants, and other wasters who quit work because they can get more on the dole. The system needs to be reformed radically.
Opposition parties should specify what they would do about this and about the hundreds of thousands being wasted each year in storing useless electronic voting machines that will never be used. They should also say what they would do about that fingerprint machine that was bought some years ago for €20 million, primarily to combat welfare tourism, whereby people are coming in from abroad just to collect dole.
The machine was installed at the Garda National Immigration Bureau, but it has never been used because civil servants refuse to operate it without getting extra pay. They should be delighted that so much money was spent to help them do their job more effectively, instead of trying to bleed the system, which has already been bled dry.
We need a government that would summarily fire every one of those civil servants. They are plenty of people who would appreciate the opportunity to work.
Anyone who thinks that this could not be done should remember that probably the most popular thing that US President Ronald Reagan ever did was to fire the Air Traffic Controllers who were refusing to work in 1981.
He gave them 48 hours to return to work, and then he summarily dismissed the 11,345 who failed to do so.
The Government could do this right now, but they do not have the guts, the integrity, or the intelligence. They should be run out without any golden handshakes or golden parachutes.
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