Irish politics discussion thread

see also: http://www.flickr.com/groups/irishelection/pool/

what do ppl think- is there now any way to remove or radically downgrade the toxic bank guarantee, or is our only opton a renegotiation of terms of repayment?

It strikes me as insane that the state has taken on these liabiities, but has anyone put forward a coherent plan of how the removal of the guarantee could be viable 'going fwd'f

I think there should be some kind of discussion about what the costs of letting the banking system collapse would have been - how paralysing of the economy, how long to get over that paralysis and so on. If you start thinking like that you can start heading towards quantifying those costs, which brings you to the stage where you can say "well, the cost of guaranteeing the banks is enormous, but it is less than letting them fail", or vice versa.

To be honest, this should really have been done before the bank guarantee scheme (or the world's cheapest bailout, as Lenihan called it) was implemented.

he'll never budge on insisting that it needed to be put in place in full, there and then. Quite what he spent the interim between that and renewal doing is a mystery.

From David McWilliams' recent book, Follow The Money: The Tale of the Merchant of Ennis, we learn that Lenihan, a lawyer by training, received his first lessons in banking and finance at McWilliams' kitchen table - on the 17th of September 2008.

Before that, McWilliams tells us, Lenihan had learned everything he knew about finance from a biography of Alan Greenspan(!) that he had picked up over the summer. We learn that Lenihan had no idea that Irish banks were in trouble until after the failure of Lehman Brothers just two days before.

Less than two weeks after that late-night cram session at McWilliams' kitchen table, Ireland announced to the world that it would fully guarantee its banks liabilities -- for both depositors and bondholders.

We now know that this hasty decision would lead to national bankruptcy and the specter of sovereign default. But at the time, Lenihan -- not unlike a number of other clueless politicians scattered throughout the formerly industrialized world -- was only following the advice being offered by the "experts" who surrounded him. Shockingly, among those "experts" were none other than a team of advisors from Merrill Lynch.

Turns out that a week after the Finance Minister's introduction to basic finance, the Irish government paid Merrill Lynch $10M for a seven-page report that told them:

* "All of the Irish banks are profitable and well capitalised.”

Lenihan is one of the best-respected members of the outgoing government btw. FF are basically the opposite of technocrats.

Nakhchivan - I am pleased to hear that it was bozo private sector consultants who supplied this bad advice.

ALthough presumably they are the kind of people that Fine Gael will soon be appointing to head the new Dept of Finance.

dont believe but maybe a tenth of that. Mcwilliams is an arse.

ff mo was to outsource all decisions and therefore political responsibility.

lol @ dave "yah sure"

Can't afford to come home to vote, tho can't really see what merit it'd have.

i'll vote for the best independent, labour, fg candidates i have to choose from locally, in that order

the most o_o thing abt that quote yesterday was the $9m paid to merrill lynch for a shoddy nine page term paper of panglossian wishful thinking

i mean ilx could have done that for £50 to the server fund

that is not o_o to anyone even slightly intimate with the governmental culture of the past fifteen years.

the multimillion reports were then shitcanned or brought out as gospel depending on political convenience.
The knowledge economy how are ya

oh i don't claim any such knowledge obv xp

but for the desensitized, i can say that is a particularly terrible and stupid and unforgiveable example of corruption/stupidity/etc

mayo prediction, fwiw:

3 fg, 1 ff, last seat btwn fg, lab, ind

thats proporsh rep rite

wher do the fine fael ppl in mayo live

Not entirely informed Wicklow prediction: 3fg, 1lab, 1ind (ex-ff), "Jaws" Roche retires on a ministerial pension.

the ff ppl in mayo live all over the county, and will be enough to get their man home.

If i detest anything more than ff, it's cute hoor ex-ff defector inds

He has served since then as an independent TD, and has voted for and against the government, based on his assessment of where he believed the public interest was being served whether it would help his reelection prospects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Behan

To be fair, Michael Martin should be surreptitously encouraging his people to go "independent" and rejoin the party when they scrape into the Dail.

yep, a good ff stroke that would be.

Is there anything to prevent it, i wonder? Prob not.

have asked before, but is anyone aware of a site/resource that records td voting records.

Given that it's their actual function, it's really a hugely underreported aspect of their activities.

Course, party politics renders each vote in the dail pretty irrelevant anyway.

fuck, i meant to ask where do the fine gael ppl live, obv the ff ppl are everywhere like nitrogen or dogs

fine gael live around the ffailers, but in smaller houses and are envious of their good teeth

cant vote

THE PILL, I ASK YA. THE FECKIN PILL MIND

not all bad news on the economy front. hopefully a bit more of this in the next 12 months, tho a lot depends on how the new govt handle the property/mortgages question

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0217/breaking27.html

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/04eYfYVedW6Wg/610x.jpg

soooo

how ye votin ye cute hoors

kinda surprised to hear i have no right to vote...i guess a line would have to be drawn with ex pats somewhere but plenty people of my age might want to vote based on their chances of ever being able to live in ireland again or bring up kids there.

but sorry, that's a tangent...

is it feck a tangent, it's a fuckin disgrace tbh

disenfranchise those that are gone abroad, disenfranchise a significant proportion of those that are here so that they have to go abroad, what's the fuckin point/benefit of that?

i had thought people coming home to vote was a thing...has this always been the case? seems a bit fucking dense, as i say, i don't even know if i'd ever want to live back home except during all this at some point the thought struck me "fuck if i have kids the current state of ireland means it's massively unlikely they'll grow up in ireland," and despite the fact i take the piss out of the country i suppose i had some notion that i might be able to go back.

that plus, paid taxes there for 7/8 years.

WTF

http://www.finegael2011.com/game/

when are we gonna be able to vote with an internet password?

when that happens, we'll be able to bypass these killinascully motherfuckers altogether

lol wtf is that

what are they thinking...

lost my third life trying to jump joan burton btw

her nasal siren song saw me crash against the rocks of her craggy oratory

THA PEKKKKKKPLE OF DIIIIIIIIS CCCCCCCCOOOOOOOOOOUUUNTTTTTRYYYYYYYYYY

jesus.

i found some site that takes your answers to a couple stock questions and tells you what party you're closest in policy too. i am 'hardcore labour', but she terrifies me as part of any potential govt.

was also 'strongly sf' fwiw. news to me, prob based on a fiersh opposition to the IMF deal.

i fucking can't stand her. she can't speak, it really offends me when politicians are crap speakers. her post budget speech was horrendous, reading awful "jibes" off notes and pausing midway through in befuddlement at her own lines.

can only see her and ring scrapping it out for a social protection sub-ministry, tho i've a feeling that labour be looking for er to get a decent front bench position

labour's best performers really are quinn and rabbitte though, gilmore and burton always strike me as the league cup front two while the two stars watch from the sidelines, hoping they don't have to come on to recover a fuckup at halftime

loking more and more likely that FG get 4/5 in mayo, btw, tho it seems to me that the last seat could go any way really. FG (Mulherin)/IND (Kilcoyne)/LAB (Cowley) and maybe even the SF lead candidate (Conway-Walsh) could surprise on transfers.

yah p much all my friends have left by now and are royally pissed off to realise that they have no vote anywhere now

dont worry they'll get their own david mcfuckingwilliams subcategory out of it sher

great

I love how people are surprised to discover that you cannot vote if you are not resident in Ireland. It brings me back to the early 1990s when people were always going on about this. Next thing we will be having Larks in the Park and having remakes of the Commitments.

Who's on for Feile?

I happened to be home for the last election, didn't really consider it this time though.