Wednesday 25 January 2012

If debt is a tumour then bailouts are chemotherapy!


Sadly, too many of us will be familiar with the maxim: if the cancer doesn’t kill you the chemo will. Recently over in England, I had to explain to my friends and family that however bad the UK economy might appear to them, with its trillion pound debt, the atmosphere in London was so preferable to the melancholic treacle we have to wade through every waking moment in Ireland.

When they asked me what’s it like living in a bailout country, I found myself describing awful things: our stunned outrage over the €1 billion paid to the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, which is nothing more than the new fascia of the dead bank previously known as Anglo-Irish; our utter disbelief at the €1.25 billion being paid to unsecured bond holders, because we know that if we mere proles failed to pay back an unsecured loan, the bank would sell our debt to bastards who’d come to our homes and take away our furniture and TVs; our seething frustration at the closure of hospitals all over the country; our boiling rage at the loss of schools and teaching jobs; our pathetic impotence in the face of VAT tax rises, because purchase tax damages the poor so much more than it hurts the rich; the demise of our self-respect as we either lose our jobs or face penury paying the new Universal Social Charge alongside the new Bank Levy, PRSI, the new Property Tax and Income Tax (blimey - nearly forgot Income Tax there, so blinded was I by all the new taxes!); the raging anger about …

… the raging anger about all of it, all of it all of it, because all the good that was in our lives and this nation is being slowly destroyed, poisoned, killed off to save invisible greedy rich people who gambled and lost.

And then it struck me. They’re trying to kill us in order to save us. The debt that neither Paddy nor Patricia Public was guilty of creating arrived like a tumour in the body of this nation, and now, with this disgustingly misnomered ‘bailout’, we are being pumped with chemotherapy, which in its efforts to kill the debt is destroying all that was good and healthy about us and the country in which we live (although it won’t succeed, because we and Ireland are just so bloody great, we will refuse to succumb).

A very dear friend of mine died of cancer a few years ago. She refused to have chemotherapy, preferring instead to enjoy a long happy Summer. My memories of her are not filled with the terrible sights of her treatment taking its toll, but rather of her beautiful face laughing over the kitchen table, as she prepared her healthy dinner and felt happy with her choices.

We all have to die sometime, but what’s the rush?
Why are we being forced to suffer this chemo poisoning now, when we all know this tumour is nothing more than an abstract number on a Troika computer screen?

2 comments:

Paz said...

As I was reading this Enda was spouting off on the TV how we had to pay and dismissed a noble winning economist who said that paying the unsecured bond holders, as just a commentator.

Charlie Adley said...

Crazy times indeed Paz!