Shotgun divorce needed to stop Ireland getting screwed

FOR a new year’s resolution it was extreme.

An Italian husband wanted a fresh start to the year, rid of his wife — he is 99, she is 96 and they have been married since 1934.

It had been a shaky marriage for some time, according to court papers. The final straw for Antonio C was a few days before Christmas, when he discovered a cache of his wife Rosa C’s love letters from the 1940s which revealed she had an affair during the Second World War.

He confronted her, and despite her pleas for forgiveness, they are now believed to be Europe’s oldest ever divorce protagonists.

Unfortunately, it would be far too much to hope our dear Enda Kenny and Michael Noonan would follow Antonio’s lead and instigate their own dash for freedom. No, not from each other, but rather a divorce from the so-called ‘experts’ at the Department of Finance who hold the nation here at home, and the hardline nonsense from the European Central Bank (ECB) that keeps us battered abroad.

In short, Enda needs to man-up and face-down the big boys at the ECB.

But first, a flushing out at the Department of Finance — or as it should really be known, the Department of Delusion — is long overdue.

Sitting through the spin those ‘experts’ put on the year-end estimates — and just how badly they had called them — felt like being in a parallel dimension.

The counter-factual gloss being put on the numbers could be summed up as follows: “Yeah, sure, the deficit has exploded way beyond what we thought, to €25bn, but if you ignore the money we panic-pumped into the banks, it’s ‘only’ €15bn.

“The banks? Yeah, well, we won’t be putting anymore cash into those bad boys again — don’t you worry.

“Well, yes, we did say that last year as well, but hey, stuff happens, dude.

“Ok, so nearly all our predictions were massively off, yet again, from what we forecast at the beginning of 2011, but if you just look at the emergency recalculation we did just a month ago for the Budget, the tax-take expectations are still wrong, but a bit less wrong, that’s progress isn’t it?”

And then came the big one: “Of course, there will be no need for a crisis budget before the summer.”

However, just outside the Department of Delusion, back in the real world, this last statement was drowned out by the alarm bells blaring: “Crisis Budget! Crisis Budget! Crisis Budget!”

But that inevitable pre-summer smash-and-grab tax raid will have a less-threatening name like ‘the supplementary adjustment,’ just like the greatest economic disaster the world has experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s was initially dubbed ‘the credit crunch’ in order to make it sound as innocuous as a new flavour of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

So, perhaps Enda’s other new year resolution should be: ‘Stop’. ‘Lying.’ ‘To.’ ‘Us.’

We owe €200bn. It’s more than the country produces in wealth in an entire year. It can never be paid back, and even trying to keep up the pretence we somehow can pay it back will leave us crippled by two decades of endless depression.

As the Government menaces special needs kids, robs the elderly of winter-fuel payments and harasses loan parents for pennies, it is handing a cool €1.3bn over to the Anglo bond holders who helped dig our financial grave in the first place.

That is insanity.

Noonan talked tough about ripping-up such ridiculous promissory notes, and when the ECB told him to shut up he meekly did.

But, despite us depending on the charity of the ECB and IMF to keep the lights on due to the calamity of the Fianna Fáil-Green-PD administrations of the past, we still have some leeway. Like the bad zombie in a horror film, we possess what the Frankfurters fear most — contagion.

The ECB won’t like it, we won’t get patted on the head any more like the good little ragged children who eat their EU gruel and do as they are told, but we will get noticed and we will win the day if this government finally calls the bluff of the ECB and says about the bond-holder bonanza: “We are not gonna pay it anymore.”

And while we are at it, we might as well end the insanity of our loan schedule and interest rates. The Government should just tell the truth and state the bleeding obvious — it’s too much and eventually we will have to renege on it — but only after half a million lives are wasted on the dole for yet more years, and another 1,000 people a week flee abroad for the dignity of labour.

But, of course, they fear telling the truth will ‘upset the markets.’ Because the markets, seemingly, have the mentality of a nervous — and not very bright — 12-year-old, who must, at all times, be fed sugar-coated lies like the rest of us.

All this against the great irony of shifting geopolitical Teutonic plates that sees the shrinking US military empire withdrawing its legions from the Atlantic-European front, so that its weaponry can be deployed against a rising China in the Asia-Pacific theatre.

And, just who is that creeping into the newly, semi-abandoned Europe from the east? Why, it’s the very same Beijing regime the US fears so much, and the one that the EU is relentlessly sucking-up to as they are the only people with any cash left and the only real hope of throwing a financial floor under the euro.

As US President Barack Obama cut military firepower by half a million personnel abroad, a surge in gun sales at home meant that in the six days before Christmas the FBI figures showed 500,000 background checks on customers were requested from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System by gun dealers — rising to 1.5m across December as a whole. Coincidence?

That set a new monthly record, with the day before Christmas Eve ratcheting up 102,222 background checks, making it the second-biggest day for buying guns in history, a few thousand sales behind the day after Thanksgiving in November.

This chilling statistic suggests Americans might be giving each other something a lot deadlier than thanks come the same time next year — especially if the Republicans go ahead and elect bigot-in-chief Rick Santorum as their new mayor of Crazytown and presidential nominee.

Back home, a shot-gun divorce would see Enda demand a clean break.

After all, there must be a cache of secret love letters between the pygmies at the Department of Delusion and the bullies in the ECB, and both are clearly divorced from reality already — but, sadly, it’s Ireland that’s getting screwed.