Will we just carry on in anger and decline?

IN all that has happened with our banks over the last few years there is a great moral question: “Why should the bondholders and international banks who loaned to Irish banks not take the hit for the investments/gambles they took?”

If it had all worked out fine they would pocket the profits as they did for many years before the crash. This is the unresolved question at the heart of the problems in Irish banking.

If debt will not disappear, neither will the anger that this has caused. It will manifest in some form.

As a citizen and a taxpayer, you do have a choice in the matter of whether or not the bank debt gets paid out of your taxes. You do have the power to change the situation. You hold all the cards. By withholding mortgage repayments you can force the ECB to get the bond holders and investment banks to take the losses that are rightfully theirs. They can either return the bank debt back to the bankers and bond holders or they can do without the money that flows from your mortgage to the same banks.

At stake is €70bn (and rising), not including NAMA. So you can act now or keep your mouth shut when the local school can’t be repaired/extended, act now or keep your mouth shut when an elderly parent spends 24 hours plus on a trolley in A&E, act now or keep your mouth shut when you waste your life sitting in traffic for the want of a bypass. Let’s take a lead from the Arab revolts, where the rebels had a moral right to change, and the new technology of the internet facilitated that change. The very same factors exist here, we have a moral right not to have to pay for someone else’s gambling and we have the internet to bring individual mortgage holders together.

Tools such as Facebook, Twitter, etc are in place. Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi, were caught off guard. Will the ECB suffer the same fate? Or will we just carry on in anger and in decline?

Pat Fitzpatrick

Moyode

Athenry

Co Galway