Economy in crisis - It’s time for answers not accusations

IT would be a lot more cheering, and far less stressful, to be able to focus on the great issues of the day — can Kerry beat the Dubs with the elan of old or might Brian O’Driscoll and his teammates confound time and critics to shock Australia tomorrow — but the relentless flow of dismal news simply cannot be ignored.

One of the reasons the data is so dispiriting is that for far too long we turned away hoping ah ‘shure ‘twill be all right. What a terrible price we are paying for that disconnect, that lack of vigilance and misplaced trust.

Nearly every metric is so overpoweringly negative that it seems to be leading to a place none of us want to go, a place most of us don’t even want to imagine.

We’ve had to accept there will be a national fire sale and that at least a portion of the ESB will be sold. This is shameful if unavoidable and made worse by the union threat to strike to oppose it. That threat might be noble if intended to protect the national interest but its objective is to preserve the feather-bedding that led an ESB union leader to call his colleagues “spoilt”.

Yesterday, the CSO reported another, if slight, increase in unemployment, up to 14.5% from 14.4% in August. Worryingly, the depth and stubbornness of the trend was highlighted by the fact that long-term unemployment accounted for 53.9% of those out of work in the second quarter compared with 43.3% a year earlier and 21.7% in the second quarter of 2009.

European Commission forecasts published yesterday did little to lift the gloom either. It warned that euro zone growth is slowing suggesting that it will be even more difficult to create precious jobs.

All of these dismal figures, and the euro zone’s ongoing debt crisis, come together in one aching statistic — emigration rose to the highest level since the 19th century in the year up to April.

Despite enjoying independence for nearly a century and society-changing EU support for four decades, we have returned to levels of emigration we imagined consigned to history.

The CSO yesterday recorded that about 76,400 people — 210 every day of the year — left Ireland in the period. Some 42,300 people moved to Ireland, giving a net outflow of 34,100.

We have a long familiarity with emigration, the scars cut deep in the national psyche. Even if emigration does not sunder families as it once did, even if we can recognise that there can be very positive things about it, these figures represent a national failure of the most basic kind. Yet there seems to be no sense of urgency, no sense of a crusade to confront these failings.

Just this week it was suggested that it might take a decade to change how we teach maths to our children. A decade? How long would it take in Germany? In China? In Denmark? In Holland? A year or two maybe?

All of these figures challenge us in the most basic way and provoke anger and despair in equal measure.

The childish, petty performance of Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and to a lesser extent, Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, in the Dáil at its resumption only added to that sense of defeat and drift.

Mr Kenny must know that his Government’s honeymoon is over and that time for Punch-and-Judy finger wagging has long since passed. We all know who is responsible for this crisis but what we want to know is who will lead us out of it.

Over to you Mr Kenny, you may have only one chance so don’t waste it perpetuating the buffoonery that has destroyed the credibility of our parliament.