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.