Stop fighting stupid fiscal battles

Enda Kenny’s recent visit accompanied with British Prime Minister David Cameron to memorials of the Great War is welcome, emotional, poignant and much more ironic than either man realises.

Almost 100 years ago the leaders of Europe sought to solve political difficulties as they had been solved throughout history; they went to war. No consideration whatsoever was given to the technological advance of weaponry in the previous decades and expecting to fight battles of earlier centuries, they launched Europe and the world into the greatest human made disaster ever to occur.

They are doing the same again. A great economic war is being fought in Europe to prevent a catastrophe, not as bloody, but potentially as disastrous. Leaders fail to realise that policies of bailout, austerity, service reduction and longer, harder work are as useless as Napoleonic tactics were against machine gun, barbed wire and powered flight. Troops classified as lions who did everything asked of them were led by donkeys (forgive the calumny of a noble beast) who had no appreciation of how greatly technology had changed the core of warfare and how strategies and battle plans of the past were futile.

Modern technology has utterly changed the core of economic activity; ability to produce and transport in greater abundance than is needed has eliminated the need for growth and work. Strategies based on growth and work are utterly futile against the modern economic enemy which ironically is unprecedented technological success. There is still doubt if populations, troops in the field will be as lionlike in acceptance of misjudged direction, increasing hardship and mounting despair as were their predecessors in the trenches. There is no doubt about leadership which is proving itself even more determined to ignore technological transformation of the economic battlefield than their asinine predecessors. Leadership is prepared to fight to the last man and woman to prove an ideology that is as outdated as the muzzle loader, cannon ball and cavalry charge.

The economic world is greatly changed for the better; abundance of everything except growth and work which will not be governed by outdated ideology. We should congratulate ourselves on our extraordinary technological success, accept and adapt to it, enjoy the enhancements of life it gives us and stop fighting stupid fiscal battles of the past that we can’t win.

Pádraig Neary

Tubbercurry

Co Sligo