Frankfurt’s embrace is death knell for Irish sovereignty

VOTE Yes or your money is worthless — welcome to Euro democracy.

With unelected technocrat prime ministers already imposed in Italy and Greece, it is now clear EU citizens will be forced to vote for fiscal unity — control by the money men of Frankfurt — with a pencil in their hands and a gun to their heads.

How ironic that 20 years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU is set to embrace Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin’s dream of “controlled capitalism” as it morphs into a market-driven form of the Soviet European Union.

Tánaiste and Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore has already readjusted to the new reality by adopting a very peculiar attitude to democracy as highlighted by his deeply embarrassing attempts to try and ram through the appointment of Finance Department chief Kevin Cardiff to a plum Euro post at all costs — well, the €276,000 it will cost the taxpayer and the reputational cost it has already done to the Irish state, anyway.

Scrambling to try and recover some dignity after the European Parliament’s key budgetary committee voted down the appointment of Cardiff — perhaps due to the triffling matters that he was in office during the economic collapse, in the room when the disastrous bank guarantee was signed, and claims to have been in the dark when the dysfunctional department he presides over forgot about €3.6bn that was left lying about and thus unnecessarily inflated the national debt even further — Mr Gilmore insisted that he would plough on regardless because “the vote did not reflect the debate”.

Surely that kind of illogical thinking is something of a throw-back to his days in the Workers Party which enjoyed such warm fraternal relations with that bastion of democracy, North Korea?

But it is extremely dangerous of Mr Gilmore to try and brush aside the result of a ballot merely because it was “not reflective” of the discussion preceding it considering his promises during the general election which resulted in a record haul of Labour TDs.

We were sold the idea of a “democratic revolution” of transparency and openness, what we got was the unleashing of pre-budget reign of fear and loathing aimed at destabilising the poor and vulnerable in a manner even the torture clowns in the last Fianna Fáil government would have found unseemly and chaotic.

But then, as the ministerial cliché goes, we are where we are, and we have about as much chance of getting our votes — or money — back from Labour or Fine Gael as Church of England Rev Mark Sharpe does in his quest to sue God.

The vicar, seeking compensation for constructive dismissal, clearly faced a tough crowd in his Worcestershire parish as he claims members of the congregation slashed his tyres, smeared excrement over the family car, scattered his driveway with broken glass, cut phone lines and even poisoned his pet dog.

Due to the Church of England being the established religion of the country its clergy are deemed to be legally “employed by God” and therefore not eligible to bring actions for unfair dismissal as the Rev Sharpe is attempting.

The poor chap says it all turned sour just after he took up residence in the vicarage and discovered “administrative mismanagement and financial problems” in the parish.

Now, while Enda Kenny and Mr Gilmore have — just — stopped short of demanding a budget levy to prevent them poisoning our pets, we probably have a case against them in the mismanagement of financial problems area.

The only burning the fabled bond holders have enjoyed since the election is when they use the €50 notes screwed out of lone parents and dole victims to light their fat cigars with.

It is no wonder backbench Labour TDs complain they feel “used and nervous” ahead of the budget with the way they, and the public, have been manipulated by their leadership.

Though he quit the party in disgust, intellectually speaking Tommy Broughan has not got anywhere — it is his Labour colleagues, and more significantly its leadership, who have moved markedly to the right.

They can no longer attack Sinn Féin for originally supporting the bank guarantee now that they have so wholeheartedly belatedly endorsed it themselves. Indeed, Sinn Féin can argue forcefully that it is better to realise you were wrong in the past and have now seen the light than to go in the other direction for the sake of political expediency and the comfort of a ministerial Merc.

On paper, the Soviet Union could claim to be the most democratic society on Earth, but the reality was somewhat different. And now the demand to concentrate total fiscal and economic power in the hands of faceless tecnocrats in Frankfurt and Brussels offers us a similar fate — though this would be a fur-lined cage with a hard currency and soft furnishings thrown in.

The smokescreen row over the threat to Ireland’s 12.5% corporation tax is merely a diversionary tactic to deflect attention from the slashing of our democratic rights.

It is quite logical that the French would be miffed about our attitude to the tax anyway. We are beggars, not choosers in the European context, and it is hardly surprising they dislike us eating the hand with which they feed us.

If, say, you were a window cleaner and you kept giving money to a beggar on your street, you would rightly become very annoyed if said beggar then tried to undercut your business while you were still doling out cash to him.

Far better to just do what the French do, have a bigger headline rate and then offer 8.6% corporate rate back-handers to anyone who will invest.

But if we stopped talking about tax then the danger is some of us might start thinking about the much more malign threat to our rights as citizens and voters.

Of course, when the Dual Monarchy of Merkel and Sarkozy asks us to rubberstamp their surrender of power to the casino money markets in the next referendum, it will be dressed up as a great moment in the evolution of European democracy — a concept that was born in Greece and will soon be buried there under a mound of debt.

In reality, voting No will mean no money and no future, while voting Yes means a little money and a very little democracy.

Some choice.