Private bank debt - Injustice adds to pain and delays cure

By this time next week we will know how the Government proposes to take another €3.5bn out of this faltering economy.

Most of us will have, by then, worked out how Budget 2013 will impact on our ability to satisfy our family’s expectations and entitlements. However, speculation has been so disheartening that many of us may leave consideration of how we will precisely cope with the cuts for another day.

This €3.5bn figure, along with the €25bn already paid through spending cuts and increased taxes since the financial collapse, represents another life-changing levy imposed on a population weary of retrenchment and misery, resurgent emigration, falling living standards and most of all, unemployment rates touching 15%.

Those feelings, and the gnawing insecurity fostered by reverse after reverse, are deepened by the realisation that next week’s budget is not the closing act in the drama. It is just another incremental step along a hard road we are assured will lead to stability. Let us hope that assurance proves more reliable than the assurances — largely from the same people — that landed us in this appalling position in the first place.

Running parallel to that increasingly difficult road is the — and these words are used with restraint and a complete understanding of what they really mean — immoral and unjust imposition of private bank debt on this country, its resources, its citizens and its future.

In March, our Government will write a cheque for €3.1bn plus another €500m or so in interest to pay bondholders, so any savings made next week are at best theoretical. Over the next two years we will pay €8.5bn to cover bankers’ losses.

Present arrangements mean we will have to write a cheque for €3.1bn every March until 2025 plus whatever interest is accrued on the “debt”. In an irony of Pythonesque proportions, the centenary celebrations of the 1916 Easter Rising — Easter Sunday falls on March 27 in 2016 — fall within days of the due date on that year’s instalment of protection money.

This country-breaking shakedown, presided over by the European Central Bank, has no basis in equity or social justice or justice of any kind. It has no basis in morality or even in the most ruthless market-driven capitalism. It is no more than an unsustainable levy imposed by the powerful on the humiliated and vulnerable. It is more like homage paid in slaves and gold to a distant but ruthless emperor by a medieval suzerain than anything to do with 21st century democracy. Equally, it is a mystery how German or Dutch taxpayers have come to believe that these debts are the debts of the citizens of Ireland rather than the gambling losses of investors who backed out-of-control bankers.

None of this is news but the facts seem to have been written off as just an unfortunate backdrop to our difficulties. They seem to have been assimilated in the story of Ireland as some sort of reality rather than the scandal they represent. Expected as we are to pay €3.1bn plus interest every March for 13 years, we cannot allow the injustice become just a detail stitched into our back story. Our Government has urged patience and because we can never know what is going on behind closed doors, we must have a degree of restraint, but next week’s budget and the bank debt are two sides of the one coin. No amount of spin — in English or in German — can separate them. Yet they must be separated because the imposed arrangements and real hardship around bank debt are unsustainable even in a society as familiar with the evils of colonialism as this one.