Emasculated mortgage plan is zanier than a WWII plot

SAY what you like about wartime British efforts to turn Hitler into a woman, but at least they recognised a problem and tried to solve it.

How different to our Government’s attitude to the spiralling mortgage debt.

They seemed to believe the crisis would mysteriously melt away on the wave of rapture induced by Enda Kenny suddenly being in charge of the country.

Fianna Fáil levels of smug complacency have gripped the new administration over the past six months. It has done precious little to relieve the mortgage misery afflicting 100,000 households, and rising rapidly.

British (so-called) intelligence actively considered downing Hitler by spiking his food with female sex hormones.

Spies — admittedly from a more sexist era — planned to smuggle oestrogen into his food to make him less aggressive and more like his docile younger sister Paula, who worked as a secretary.

The plot was one of many extraordinary ideas dreamt-up by the Allies and uncovered by Professor Brian Ford in his book Secret Weapons: Technology, Science And The Race To Win World War II, and its sheer crassness and desperation is sadly reminiscent of much of the Brian Cowen/FF handling of the economic crash from 2008 onwards — especially that administration’s appalling indifference to the plight of struggling mortgage ‘slaves’, who were pushed ridiculously extravagant deals at the height of the boom and were panicked enough/foolish enough (delete as appropriate) to take them up.

The previous government’s sole initiative in this area was to impose a two-year moratorium on repossessions, which merely turned back the fuse on the explosive timer — and now that bomb is primed to go up in all our faces once again.

That typical, wholly inadequate Cowen effort could be compared to another bizarre British plot discovered by Professor Ford, involving giant glue bombs being dropped on Nazi troops to halt their advance across France, and the low countries, in 1940 — even if by some miracle it did work, it would not work for long.

Another ‘ingenious’ British wheeze to drop thousands of deadly poisonous snakes across Germany to cripple their economy was shelved.

But what a shame then British prime minister Winston Churchill could not have called on the ‘genius’ of the Bertie/Biffo/McCreevy triumvirate — for did not those three fiscal stooges flood Ireland with unregulated financial snakes, who wrecked the domestic economy and delivered our fate into the hands of foreigners in what Ahern used to refer to as “jig time”?

How different it was all supposed to be under Fine Gael/Labour, but after six months in power they have come up with precisely one concrete idea in this area — to set up a scheme where some householders can have their interest rates temporarily cut by a bit.

In its ineffectiveness, it is like the Japanese ray-gun breakthrough (also uncovered by Professor Ford), which enabled Emperor Hirohito’s forces to kill a rabbit with microwaves at 30 yards — but only if the animal sat still for five minutes while it absorbed the radiation.

The week of confusion began with junior finance minister Brian Hayes insisting the re-capitalised banks were not the answer to the mortgage problem, followed by his boss Michael Noonan then contradicting him and stating the vast amount of public cash pumped into the likes of AIB and Bank of Ireland did indeed mean they could write down some mortgages.

Senior Labour figures, like Dáil housing committee chairman Ciarán Lynch, called for an across-the-board solution modelled on the one put in place in Britain by the much-maligned Gordon Brown, which did so much to protect that country from the worst ravages of the recession.

Noonan, conveying all the empathy to the plight of mortgage holders one would expect of a victorious Tipperary fan for the plight of Kilkenny if they triumph in tomorrow’s All Ireland, kept insisting that a blanket approach was infeasible — which, of course, it is, which is why just about no one except the finance minister was mentioning one.

Funny, though, that no one is trying to scrap the developer greed-forgiveness vehicle that is Nama, while, at the same time, insisting a version that would cost one tenth the revenue, and would help the ‘little people,’ must never be allowed.

Indeed, in the weird war-effort casebook of Professor Ford, such a catch-all scheme like Nama, for mortgagees, would rank as folly along with the giant water-borne Catherine wheel full of explosives and rockets — dubbed the Great Panjandrum — which the Allies spent millions of pounds on testing for the D-Day landings, before realising it would just blow up everyone who came near it.

What is urgently needed is a State body with statutory powers to intervene on a case-by-case basis with banks to impose solutions and lift the dead weight of debt from so many families who are in this grim predicament of losing their homes, not due to boom-time greed, but because of slump-era unemployment. Coupled with this, a radical overhaul to modernise Ireland’s ludicrously out-of-date bankruptcy and personal debt laws is also a must.

Fine Gael and Labour had three years of financial collapse to prepare for all this, and should have had an action plan ready to go into operation on day one after the election.

We should not still be stuck in the crisis-denial mode of waiting for yet another expert group to come up with yet another set of proposals.

After Noonan’s appallingly off-hand radio performance, when he appeared to care far more about small businesses who lost out on property gambles than families in fear of being turfed out on the street, details suddenly leaked from the Government body appointed to allow struggling households give up mortgages and become State tenants in the same homes (and for people trapped in negative equity to move on via a second mortgage, including the hangover debts from their old properties).

Good ideas — but also old ideas, which were tried and tested by the Brown administration in Britain and should have been rushed through here when the Government took power in February. With the crackpot thinking unearthed by Professor Ford, you do wonder how the British ever ended up winning their war of national survival against Hitler — and with the worrying complacency shown by this Government, you wonder how we will ever win our own war of economic survival.