Ireland paying price for ‘raw deal’

Ireland has been manoeuvred into a position of subjugation by major international banks and financial institutions, investment banks, etc, who are gradually being exposed as cartels controlling interest rates and commodities markets worldwide and we were ‘easy pickings’ for them.

Modern seismological and oceanographic survey methods have ensured that this country’s natural resources have been seen as ‘having potential’ by these faceless ‘boardroom players’ for a long time.

This time the power brokers did not need to bomb a country and its people to smithereens, then move in with the all-controlling loans of billions ‘helping to rebuild’ while the big corporates moved in to milk the country of its natural resources. All they needed was a country whose politicians and bankers were incompetent and greedy, encourage a liberal economic regime, then flood the country with cheap money. Their ‘end game’ is playing out nicely for them.

Our country’s total debt is now in the region of €200bn with interest clocking up at just under €250 per second.

So, in order to salvage, as best we could, a catastrophic financial mess we ‘swept the boards clean’ at the last general election ready for a new start . . . but hold on. This brutal lesson does not seem to have been learned by our ‘new government’ which has opted to take the lowest percentage return on the planet from the oil companies for our oil and gas at 25%. Above us, second to last on the list is Peru with a take of 40%. There are forty-five countries on that list ranging up to a take of over 90%. In the middle of the table is a comparable country to Ireland, Denmark, with a royalty/tax take of nearly 70%.

If you think this is a raw deal for Ireland, it gets worse. Our ‘representatives’ have opted to give total control of the people’s oil and gas resources to these companies so that: a) it is not within our power to instruct these companies to land oil on the island of Ireland; b) we will have to buy our oil back on the international markets at inflationary prices beyond our control; c) those companies who have discovered oil can sit on their discoveries of Irish oil and gas and wait for investors to ‘buy in’ while the interest on the nation’s debt clocks up at €247 per second and we cannot do anything about it; d) last but most importantly, this government has not put in place a mechanism which would protect Ireland’s security of energy supplies of these finite resources for the foreseeable future.

You would also be hard put to come up with the name of another government who would make such a raw deal on behalf of its people.

The troika may have departed but we, most certainly, have not regained our sovereignty, and the ‘end game’ ensures that already vast revenues which should have benefited the debt-ridden Irish people have been lost to faceless international agencies aided by continuing reckless and incompetent governance.

Joe Brennan

Ballinspittle

Co Cork