The all-too-intricate programme of the IMF, EU and State omits all thought of fixing our decrepit democracy
AT LEAST in all of this, it is good to know that our new masters have a sense of humour. In the EU/International Monetary Fund/Fianna Fáil programme, there is a measure that sure cracked me up: “Enlarge the scope of the ‘inability to pay’ clause.”
It refers, of course, not to the inability of the Irish people to pay the gambling debts of the banks, but to the inability to pay even the savagely reduced minimum wage for the poor slobs at the bottom of the heap.
But the best laugh in the programme and in the four-year budgetary plan is that its Siamese twin is what is not there at all. In the 150 or so pages of both documents, there is not a single mention of the political and administrative elite and the need to transform its operations.
The mandarins of the EU and the IMF had time to decide on such details of policy as the number of GPs and the payment of pharmacists. Not once did it occur to them to suggest that a so-called “national recovery plan” would have to deal with the ultimate source of the problem: a decrepit democracy in which there is no accountability and little protection for the public interest. Why might that be? Because a renewed Irish democracy would not be as supine as our zombie government? Because it might be stroppy enough to insist on some fairness, rationality and solidarity from our European partners?
These absurdities – the grotesque use of “inability to pay” and the pretence that the state of our democracy is not an issue – reveal the unspoken deal behind the deal. On the one side, the governing elite agrees to sacrifice any sense of what is good for Irish society to help stabilise the euro. On the other, that elite gets to keep its privileges.
It’s only when you look at the detail that you get the full flavour of this combination of nastiness and idiocy. On the taxation side, for example, the protection of the very wealthy is breathtakingly brazen. As the think tank Tasc has pointed out, someone on €300,000 a year will pay an extra €1,860 in income tax. A person on €40,000 will pay exactly the same: €1,860. In percentage terms, someone on €36,400 will lose more than twice as much of their income as someone on €100,000. Politicians, senior public servants and bankers will get away very lightly when compared with ordinary workers.
A similar hypocrisy emerges when we look at the cuts. For all the guff about “labour market” measures and incentivising work, the programme will lock vulnerable people into long-term unemployment. We know, for example, that huge numbers are kept out of the world of work by inadequate levels of literacy. About one-fifth of our adult population is unable to read and write well enough to function in a modern economy. What does the EU/IMF/FF plan propose to do about this? A 5 per cent cut in all the programmes meant to address this problem: adult literacy, community education, the school completion programme and Youthreach. Is this really what the EU is for – preventing governments from teaching people how to read and write?
And what happens to those who are to be left in these ghettoes of ignorance and mass unemployment? We know the answer to this too: drugs. The drug economy is one area for which we can confidently predict stellar growth rates in the next five years. The programme is a massive stimulus package for one set of entrepreneurs – the gangs that will shovel more heroin and cocaine into collapsing estates.
And our new masters are happy with this, too. Money for drug treatment programmes is being cut. And when communities try to build alternatives to this spiral of destruction? Funds for community and voluntary organisations are being slashed.
The “recovery plan” repeats the usual blather about the smart economy as our one salvation. Ask the chief executive of any multinational corporation in Ireland, and they will tell you investment in education is crucial if we are to retain our current place in the global economy, never mind improve it. What is the plan actually doing? The non-pay element of education spending will be cut by a massive 16 per cent.
This, then, is not a plan to improve the economy, to prevent social chaos or to reform our rotten systems of governance. It is simply a plan to keep a failed system afloat for long enough to steer Ireland into a backwater of debt and despair.
If they aspire to lead a democracy, Fine Gael and Labour must not just criticise the plan. They must repudiate it.
PS: Apologies to readers – my promised list of demands for political transformation took longer to set up than anticipated. It is now live at fintanotoole.ie
PPS: Does Mary Harney still think we’re closer to Boston than to Berlin?
Fintan O'Toole will discuss his book Enough is Enoughat the Town Hall Theatre in Galway tomorrow night