Voters may soon realise their errors

One elderly lady to whom I spoke in the run-up to the Fiscal Treaty Referendum rounded on me angrily when I suggested a ‘No’ vote, asking: “Don’t you want your pension?”

On reflection, she probably realised that would not be an issue for me for some years to come. But she stormed off before I could ask her to reflect on whether handing over final say on our budget to Brussels was the best way to guarantee her own pension.

In order to meet the targets under the fiscal compact, some even harsher budgets will have to be engineered and my suspicion was that further low-hanging fruit like medical cards for the over 70s, free TV licence, gas and more, would all be targeted as ‘extravagant relics of the welfare state model of yesteryear’.

In the last few days, with the IMF’s pronouncements on the same I see that my suspicions were well-founded. And what the IMF says, Brussels and the ECB take note of, more note than they take of our own elected representatives.

The only silver lining is that if the Government starts really hitting pensioners hard in the pockets and savings books at the behest of the Troika, we may see the spell broken, and the largest sector of voters finally realising they’ve been had.

Nick Folley

Carrigaline

Co Cork