Government may need a mandate from the people to get debt deal

IS there, do you think, any real possibility that we will have a general election over the promissory note?

There’s certainly a compelling case for playing the strongest hand we have in the negotiations now nearing their climax. And the ante has been upped, so to speak, by some of the comments made over the weekend.

I know I’ve often said here that no government is ever as unstable as it looks from the outside, nor as stable either. Whenever a government looks particularly rocky, you can bet that there are people working feverishly behind the scenes to shore it up. But by the same token, when a government seems to be in a pretty impregnable position, there are sometimes forces at play that the rest of us don’t see until it’s too late.

On Sunday night John Gilroy tweeted that he thought there would have to be a general election if the promissory note was paid. Over the next few hours his tweet “trended”, and about six hours later it drew a , response from Charlie Flanagan. “I’m glad Labour Senators are so few in number,” Deputy Flanagan said. “Now not the time for a general election.”

These are two interesting people. Charlie Flanagan has been around a long time, and he is chairman of the Fine Gael parliamentary party. John Gilroy is a Labour senator in his first term. But he’s also a highly responsible and committed public representative and a loyal party member. He’s not the type to be sending out wild tweets. Patronising responses to his views are not likely to be the way to make him shut up.

But there is, I suspect, a lot more to this than just a couple of tweets. In the fifty days or so before the promissory note is paid, it is absolutely imperative that the government play hard ball. Clearly the European Central Bank has its heels dug in, and is playing by the bureaucratic letter of the law. So the temperature will have to be turned right up before a deal is done.

Every time you turn on the radio you can hear any number of legal, economic or banking experts telling you all about the promissory note. What it is, how much it costs, how long it will run, all the technical ins and outs about how and why the ECB can’t fiddle around with it.

I’m not, sadly, one of those experts. I’m just a citizen of Ireland on whose behalf a government signed an IOU, without ever consulting me, to honour the debts of a dead bank. It was a bank brought down by greed, and we have to pay for it.

The Government that put us in this situation had no mandate to do it. If they had sought a mandate at the time, instead of entering into endless panic-driven commitments in the dead of night, they could have done a much better deal. But the Government that replaced them sought, and got, a mandate to try to fix the catastrophic mess that Fianna Fáil and the Greens plunged us into.

They’ve made some progress, in a variety of ways. But they can’t honour their mandate if they sign up to something that guarantees endless years of Japanese-style recession. We cannot, as a people, be condemned to a generation of struggle to pay off other people’s debts while we are completely unable to pay our own. The homeowners who find it more difficult every day to make ends meet; the people who depend on a social security system that is being cut from under them; the citizens who pay for, and are entitled to, a set of public services that are being weakened every day — they are the people who gave our government a mandate to negotiate our way out of this mess.

And if that government, in the best of good faith, is finding its way blocked by implacable and impassable European structures, then perhaps the time has come to tell Europe that we can go no further without a fresh mandate from the people.

It seems that right now, our European partners are willing to pay lip service to cohesion. But still they watch as we fall deeper in the mire. A decision by the Irish government that enough is enough — that no more will be paid unless the Irish people have a say — might be the only thing that will shock them out of their complacency.

Over the weekend I read about a new film we’ll all be discussing soon enough. It has been made (along the lines, I gather, of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth) by Robert Reich, an American academic and writer and former Secretary of Labour to Bill Clinton. His movie is called Inequality for All, and it’s likely to spark off a worldwide debate about the failure of a capitalist system built on little else but greed.

In the course of his researches, Reich discovered that there were two years in American economic history when income inequality was at its greatest. In those two years, the richest 1% of Americans earned a quarter of the nation’s total income. Those two years were 1928 — the year before the Wall Street Crash and the decade-long depression it triggered — and 2007, the year before the global financial collapse from which we are all still struggling.

We are paying for that greed. Every struggling family in Ireland is paying a significant share of increasingly pressurised income to repay debts we never incurred. Our government is struggling to find a way out of that, and the current signs are thatthe struggle is running into a brick wall.

SO of course, it’s open to the Government to decide to seek a new mandate from the people before concluding any deal.

Or perhaps they could decide that, instead of a general election, the right thing to do is to tell the paymasters in Europe that if there is no deal which makes the debt sustainable, that the people of Ireland will be consulted before another red cent is paid over. There is a provision in our Constitution that enables a referendum to be held on any matter, and it is also open to the government to put any question it wishes to the people as a whole.

We were bounced into the bank guarantee, the deal with the troika, and the promissory note without ever being consulted. I’ve always argued that a government that can tell its European partners that the people have a right to be consulted is in a much stronger position than a government that can be forced into doing secret deals.

One way or the other, the time is coming when we have to take a stand. We cannot as a people allow generations to be crippled by debt. By all means let’s pay our way out of this unfair burden, but only in ways that we can afford to do it. If that means going back to the people, and insisting on our democratic rights, so be it. Not so much “Labour’s way or Frankfurt’s way” — more “the people’s way or the bankers’ way”.