We have to make hard decisions on debt. Why can’t the Government? By Gerard Howlin

BACK then, red ink was the new red carpet.

The more slavered over your bank statement was the more important you were. Only wimps were “in the black”. Debt, and lots of it, was macho. You didn’t have balls unless you were up for it. It was a lad’s thing but a lot of women were into it too. “Flipping”, “rolling” and “leveraging” were the rules of the game. If you weren’t in, you couldn’t win.

Now the same know-alls, all thin lips and crossed legs, who told you to jump in are tut-tutting when you get pulled under. You can’t open a newspaper or turn on the telly without some armchair-general banging on about the madness of it. Worse still are the wans being preachy and angry about the badness of it. You can’t even sin in peace and private.

The thudding sound of high-rollers falling to earth is manna from heaven for the naysayers and the worrywarts. They are flocking like cackling vultures to pick the eyes out of the sockets of those with the so called foresight to get up off their arse and have a go. Retribution has to be appropriate, it has to be appalling and it has to be a salutary lesson for all. There was a reason they used to stick decapitated heads up on pikes in public places for all to see. Seeing is believing. Terror must to be awful to behold.

How could you have been so stupid anyway? Weren’t you satisfied with the house you had? Did you really need to have that apartment as well? Wasn’t that nice little business good enough for you? You had to go flipping and rolling and leveraging. Good enough for you. It’s Ballymagash not Las Vegas you’re in.

Now the carry-on in the casino that was Anglo-Irish was a bit OTT. The lads lost the run of themselves. Manners wouldn’t have cost them anything either. Seán Dunne was declared bankrupt on Monday. He went down for gazillions. But it is the Minister for Small Business, John Perry, that got my attention. His sins amount to €2.4m. He inherited an undertakers in Ballymote, he built up a supermarket business and then he went flipping, rolling and leveraging around the countryside as you did. Now he is besieged by cackling, pecking, stabbing moralisers looking for his job. They will probably get him and it.

The eerie thing is that now we know that debt was mad and bad, that people have to be punished and somebody made to pay, it isn’t stopping. It is stopping for you and me though. We have had our last lashings of large overdraft and onion gravy for a long time. The red ink isn’t red carpet any more. Opening those envelopes is like being in the theme music for Jaws — it’s scary.

Not scary enough for the Government though. We have to either pay up or get banged up. But the Government takes a more relaxed view. The Central Bank, The Fiscal Advisory Council and the European Stability Mechanism say the Government should stick to its agreed target and make a budget adjustment to reduce debt by €3.1bn through tax increases and spending cuts. The Government — or at least Labour — says no. The target is not €3.1bn they say; the target is a debt to GDP ratio of 5.1% next year. The percentage malarkey is a variation of the multiple of your salary plus anything else you could put on the table to calculate the size of the loan you were good for, caper that got us into this.

But that was then and this is now. They have the billion in savings from the promissory note. A cut less that €3.1bn gets them to their percentage target and well borrowed money — takes the pain out of life — for a little while.

Forget that interest on the national debt is the same as interest on a maxed-out credit card. It sucks up all your spare cash until you pay it down. Forget that light touch regulation, a regulatory system that wasn’t fit for purpose, groupthink and overfed dogs that had been lying beside the fire for too long and didn’t bark when the Hiace vans were reversing up to the back door of Anglo-Irish taking the loot away, were the cause of all this mess in the first place.

For the past week it has been replay in slow motion as ministers were shot down advice and advisers that didn’t suit their political play. If ballooning debt was the problem, if everyone else has to make the hard decisions, why not government too? What is a bit of flipping, rolling and leveraging in the national interest anyway? It used to be that the rich were different; now government is the new rich. They are different.

The really big flip and roll may be yet to come. Some have speculated that Enda Kenny is a candidate for José Manuel Barossso’s job as President of the European Union Commission next year. While such speculation is pleasant to the ear of its object, it is also unlikely. But good things may come for Ireland’s lucky general. The other big job in Brussels is also up for grabs.

The President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy who chairs and coordinates the meetings of the EU’s 28 heads of government will depart and a replacement required. It is this job that may be Kenny’s.

He is a poster boy for recovery, he made a good impression during Ireland’s EU presidency and none of the big beasts feel they have anything to fear from him. Admittedly that might change after they talk to the Fine Gael Five, the TDs who lost the whip, their committee assignments, their offices and any prospects of a future. With Kenny the smile can turn to smacht very suddenly.

The ultimate joy of Enda’s success, if it materialises, may actually be Eamon Gilmore’s. If Kenny did get Barosso’s job, Ireland’s spot in the European Commission would be gone. If he lands the Van Rompuy spot, we must still send out our finest to fill the European Commissioner slot. Gilmore has stuck to the Foreign Affairs brief in spite of all. And if Labour is crumbling around him he has walked out alive from the wreckage of crumbling party’s before.

Rolling the two boys out to Brussels together next year would be like winning Euromillions, against all the odds and with a lot of green with envy people looking on. Then it will be up to Simon Coveney and Joan Burton to pull themselves together, stop laughing, and get on with it. They can have the red carpet, and the red ink. But the Hiace van will be long gone down the road.

It would be the heist of the century: Kenny and Gilmore our very own Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid jumping over the edge together.