Something borrowed ... we subsequently blew

A bailout is defined as an act of ‘giving’ financial assistance to a failing business or economy to save it from collapse.

A loan on the other hand is a thing that is borrowed, especially a sum of money that is expected to be paid back with ‘interest’.

One is an act of benevolence and friendship while the other is hard-nosed business, and the advantage always lies with the lender. In the past, when we borrowed from the financial markets, it was to cover costs (as it is today), but we did not refer to those loans as bailouts.

The fluffy-friendly medicinal language of bailout is a con job by politicians and should be seen for what it is. The Irish economy is not being bailed out by the Germans or anybody else.

German banks lent recklessly to Irish banks who took that low interest money and did likewise with it here.

Between them, they overheated the economies of Europe and when Brian Lenihan privatised our banks and promised to pay all their loans back, he was effectively making you and I bail out the German economy.

If he had not done so, the German banks would have got nothing back from us. The banking system in Germany might then have collapsed, not ours.

We, the citizens had no hand, act or part in the dealings of the private companies that were our banks when they took out these loans with those private German banks.

And though Brian Lenihan made that wild promise, we still cannot pay those original loans so what we are doing now, is borrowing yet more money with interest, to honour the original loans that he guaranteed, re-financing our broken banks here, making the German banks even more profitable through these new loans and promising that our children will work for the rest of their lives to repay them and keep the Germans going.

That is no bailout. It is simply more greed heaped on greed and the sooner we wake up to it, the sooner we pressure our overpaid Government into doing something about it.

John Mallon

Mayfield

Cork