OPINION: Politics has failed the Irish people

THE budget was a cold one. The restrictions on medical cards for the over-70s and the abolition of the death grant are grim metaphors for that which lies beneath the mindset behind the budget.

Still, the post-budget dust will settle soon enough. The questions, political theatre, and outrage will dissipate. The people, trapped in a repressive political system they could not have envisaged, will soldier on. The unelected “influencers” will keep representative democracy — and especially the “dissenters” and free thinkers — on a tight leash. The “rent seekers” spawned by the economic slump will continue to profit.

None of the analysis or comment prior to the budget had any effect. None of the analysis and comment since will have any effect. The only calculus that matters is the political one. The political orthodoxy that underlies the cult of austerity reflects the proclivity for power and the capacity of the hard left to leverage power to re-engineer society. Much of what has been imposed in the name of austerity is anathema to the tradition of socialism in Ireland. This budget, and previous troika budgets, are anti-marriage, anti-family, and destructive of community.

The last three years have been a masterclass in political manipulation. It’s all a matter of control. Those who acquiesce in a culture of dependency vis-à-vis the troika seek to enforce that same mindset of dependence on all who might challenge their control — you don’t have to be a psychologist to see that. Education, health, and the Church come under this heading.

The budget mantras are, firstly, that there is no alternative. There is a gallows humour when this argument is invoked by apologists for a budget riddled by anomalies and glued together by political expediency — and a quotation from the poetry of WB Yeats. There was an alternative, argued in these pages many times — a managed exit from the eurozone. That option is still there, albeit at a higher cost.

The second mantra is that the austerity budgets are succeeding because they are bringing down the budget deficit in line with troika benchmarks. Nobody, least of all the Government, asks at what cost to longer term growth. The counterpart to this premature and over-rapid reduction in the budget deficit is massive skilled emigration, suffocation of growth, and the associated rise in the overall debt burden, including the future haemorrhage in debt-servicing costs.

Not accidentally, a systematically underfunded healthcare sector, hobbled by a broken-backed private health insurance system, is rapidly generating future liabilities. Graduating classes of nurses are emigrating in droves — on a scale never seen before.

Policies on medical manpower are confrontational and counterproductive. Why are those who know this is happening afraid to call it like it is — the alternative to “adjustment by austerity” was “adjustment by growth”. (Assuming there was political leadership in any of the mainstream parties that could inspire and motivate voters to do for this country what they have been forced to do for strangers.)

The austerity approach was favoured and imposed by strong economies and by the ECB/European Commission — both of which were ringfenced against the negative consequences of policies driven by their agenda.

Economic historians in the future will ponder why the political leaders of debtor countries did not insist that adjustment should be symmetrical (rather than falling squarely on the weaker deficit country). They will ask why the voters bought buy into those eurozone benchmarks.

They will ask why the troika adopted such short-term perspective within which to push through austerity. They will ask why, when even the theoretical basis for austerity collapsed, countries continued to willfully impose such policies on member states. They will ask why the peripheral countries, including Ireland, did not form their own “coalition for adjustment through growth” to challenge the centralist Germany agenda.

All these questions have been sapped of their relevance by the oppressive effects of austerity — and the fact our capacity to respond has been emasculated by a transference of governance from national parliaments to those who propagated the austerity option.

The question is no longer asked of the eurozone: Why are the troika’s economists more insightful than those who engineered Ireland’s transformation in previous eras — why are centralist bureaucracies presumed to be better custodians of the national interests of member countries than the politicians elected by the people as trustees of their values?

Talk of exiting the bailout makes no sense as some kind of achievement when account is taken of the costs, both in human terms and in the debt-servicing costs payable to our “partners”, into the foreseeable future. It makes even less sense when many of those who have the qualifications and the commitment to help the economy recover, are exiting the country.

It makes no sense when account of the monstrous obstacles to recovery that remain — and the extent to which the output gap — the opportunity cost of misconceived policies — is already compounding our inability to escape a mountain of debt on the national balance sheet.

And for all this, we have transferred the governance of this country to the propagandists for failed policies.

* Ray Kinsella is a professor of banking and financial services and works at the Smurfit Business School in UCD