Irish politics discussion thread

has the stuff about the mass graves ever been investigated? like causes of death and stuff?

i listened to liveline yday (for my sins, i followed a link on twitter) and there were people saying their relative had died young due to fumes inhalation and stuff.

it's sort of hard to imagine it wasn't a cruel and abusive environment, but yeah, the report at least says it found no evidence of that. it also finds that most people didn't actually spend that long in the laundries, again contrary to the way the media has tended to handle the issue. and that they didn't make any money.

it does seem to debunk quite a lot, but nobody seems willing to really ask the key questions, really bad coverage overall.

Eleven grand buys you fuck all whitewash. In itself that's a good coverup

so this prom note thing. is there any decent steer on what the fuck to think about it? i'm unsure why there's so much negative reaction when the only analysis i read was on irish times and appeared to be guarded but positive. at the same time it does seem v little info is clear, and maybe this is why people are annoyed?

Hahahaha wtf i go to sleep early *one* fucking night

i dont know.it appears to have been a fairly slick and well-planned operation to liquidise the assets of a bank worth -18bn before those assets (due to an anticipated run after leaks yesterday) became worth -31bn

that's the positive.

the negative will out in the wash ito how and what this means for the ecb debt, which is probably further entrenched as irish public debt and with maybe fewer options on the table to deal with it.

who knows, maybe we'll write off the lot and walk away (less depositor guarantees capped at 100k) but i kinda fuckin doubt it

yeah that's pretty much the take i got from what i read last night. i don't get why people on facebook/twitter etc seem so enraged, without making any clear arguments.

plus are there really any rules anymore in any of this?

I dont know re rules, but we own the bank and guaranteed the bondholders, which was the problem. I highly doubt this changes that, we can hope.

Ppl on fb etc froth at any mention of ibrc/ecb. Rightly so!

It could all a serious poker move, or it could have been done with ecb approval (first word yesterday tacitly suggested this but seemed not to have been accurate-nult- by 7.30pm).

the deal on the notes will now almost certainly be done

There is the risk that ECB won't play ball as they, in spite of much vaunted independence, are as political as any other EU institution.

This does appear to lessen the amount we pay each time but it does not reverse austerity measures. We will still be borrowing to pay the debt back.

C/r in my hand from minister x to which i must reply like he's not a fuckin moron:

one of my constituents has a telephone no. similar to yours and she's pyoor mithered will ye change?

― ben foster five (darraghmac), Tuesday, February 5, 2013 11:40 AM

I want to know what the reply was!

This does appear to lessen the amount we pay each time but it does not reverse austerity measures. We will still be borrowing to pay the debt back.

yeah it's still only a tiny amount of the overall debt i believe.

It will ease the current repayments significantly but not change annual budgets as agreed, which means that the money saved will go to more constructive uses like job creation and suchlike.

yes ecb is political, but imo now was a good time for this if they weren't going to do a deal which tbf had widespread support across many other relevant institutions and spheres, the political capital was there to chance this imo.

the reply was brief. Every day i get complaints from certain labour td's that we are implementing their legislation. Those replies are brief too.

xp 30bn over 200bn is not that tiny, and i'd bet the repayment profile of that 30bn is a lot more punishing and less flexible than most of the rest.

It will ease the current repayments significantly but not change annual budgets as agreed, which means that the money saved will go to more constructive uses like job creation and suchlike.

I want to believe!

Every day i get complaints from certain labour td's that we are implementing their legislation. Those replies are brief too.

Ah. This sounds sadly like every workplace ever.

Also today: Latest troika report.

Yeah im placing a bit of trust in the current bunch, people dont give a fuck for enda et al but i'd not like to face them across a 25 drive table

and i think it's no coincedence that the ecb monthly meeting and troika reports happen the day after this move

Coincidence?

idk, internet killed my folen's spelling book

What in the world is a 25 Drive Table?

We send life-long politicians who were teachers against financiers and highly qualified individuals and we wonder why it goes wrong?

It really only goes wrong in cases of gross incompetence or corruption. There is no such thing as a qualified politician imo, just good ones and bad ones. And i'd not rush to compare business spheres and politics.

the deal has been done, the details look good

Lol. Nm, denied.

Lol also at jackeen not knowing 25, the card equivalent of the irish financial system

Good news.

does it have other names? fairly sure i've played cards with the man in question here as a kid.

Idk what to say lads

25 is this game, right. There are cards. The rules are as follows.

there must be a minimum of two new players in every game.

randomly assign trumps and ranks to cards.

deal cards.

everyone puts down a card at random

tell the new players that they lost, take their money.

this is called a 'trick'

continue until they cop

play again when new people move into the village.

think this was called whist

by my southern relatives and granny

Everyone has the local variations alright

The clues are all there tbf, 'trick' when they take money off you in 25, and 'whisht' is what they cluck at you if you dare ask the rules in t'other

yeah "trick" was used alright in "whisht". this could be factored into your football theory on our distrust of trickery.

It's all going into my master's application, once i can narrow it down to a single discipline, i'm scouring the unis to see if any of them offer that mythical topic 'footballing philosophy'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=dUd6mH7hRmo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2PtsSKE4mY

just watch one then the other

That Masters sounds like something DCU would do.

This 25 reminds of the 'cards' storyline in Blackadder.

Lol @ jackeen. A badge I wear with pride. On my anorak. To Bohs matches. After pints in Fagans.

Is it me or does this not seem like the worst deal in the world?

Depends on what you mean by 'not'

you could be neither nor, like me

The seanad is a great argument against the seanad.

but likewise the dail i spose.

there are ppl in there voting in legislation that dont see the benefit of paying 31bn over 30 yrs vs 18 or w/e, even at much lower rates, in the midst of crippling recession and forever railing at austerity. they cant see beyond a credit union loan metaphor, let alone as far as concepts like npv of cash, the govt multiplier, keynesian spending, pick yr justification for arguing that today was a good day- idk would i be more cynical to believe they're pointscoring or that they're as stupid as they look.

Loads of people seem to think that way, this idea that we should pay the debt as quickly as possible or it's somehow disturbing that we still have national debt in 40 years.

I understand the anger element but I don't see what their actual logical point is, I mean, should we fuck ourselves even more just on a point of principle? That'd probably make things even worse for our children's children.

I plan to do a McGough on my children and be a burden anyway. Now they will just have to factor this in. No big change.

Straightforward critique of McAleese Report here from humanrights.ie

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2013/0208/breaking57.html

i can only thing of wallogina that's more than 25% cunt, and yet as a nation here we are

The counterfactual scenario by which the Government simply declared that the promissory notes would not be honoured would likely have triggered a full-blown sovereign debt crisis. After all, the scheduled payments under the promissory notes were owed to the Central Bank of Ireland under the ELA facility.

The rules of this facility are that losses have to be made good by the national government, so that non-payment of the promissory notes would simply have increased the effective level of Irish sovereign debt by the same amount.

Given this sequence, any attempt by the Government to unilaterally reduce the face value of the debt would have been interpreted as a type of sovereign default. Furthermore, it is implausible that the reputational impact of an attempt at a selective non-payment on the liabilities owed to the euro system could have been contained, in terms of relations between Ireland and other European governments and the risk-averse element of the investor base for sovereign debt.

The ability of the pillar Irish banks to use Irish sovereign debt (or Irish government guarantees) to avail of cheap euro system funding would also have been severely impaired under this alternative scenario, since the credibility of the ECB in preserving payment discipline across the euro system would require it to tighten eligibility criteria and collateral rules in relation to Irish sovereign instruments.

For these reasons, any decision to renege on the promissory notes could only have been in the context of a wider decision to seek sovereign debt restructuring, which would be a radical break from the current economic strategy. (The wider debate on sovereign debt sustainability will doubtless continue to run.)

this stuff isn't really simple, but here's a decent rundown of why (i) doing the ecb deal wasn't 'accepting' the 31bn promissory note as sovereign debt (as it was this anyway in all the ways that mattered long before FG took power) and (ii) why the SF-backed plan to default on this debt would very likely be catastrophic.

i'm on record itt railing against the state taking on these debts, even in the face of everything crashing down around us, but that option must be three years or more ago now- and it was shaky then at best, it was just that we had fuck all to lose really.

i'm not sure why there's all of a sudden a revisiting of the issue now, after three years of hard progress towards recovery (yesterday being not the smallest step on that route). strikes me as partisanism of the most blinkered type, and as easy to see through as anything.

I was against it too. Still am philosophically but pragmatically it's ours now as I just don't know that we can separate it out anymore. It's no longer a case of "We'll bursht the euro lads" but a simple fact that we can and must prepare for the future where this will need to be paid again.

I genuinely haven't an idea re. Croke 2.0. The Dublin Bus thing is interesting but not relevant (structures involved, purpose of entity, etc.). It does set something of an interesting precedent if the LRC findings are upheld by both sides. I've a wonder how relevant it is anymore.

As a side note, I believe Mary Lou McDonald doesn't sleep! She's on the radio again. Also on the radio is Varadkar. I thought he had been banned from talking to the meeja due to his curse of terrible soundbites.

Maybe it's the history of SF that causes me to distrust their policies (or nicely nicely act) but there is a real disconnect with reality behind some of their policies. There is also the fact that they separately came up with an austerity budget that again affected the lower paid. It's like they develop some form of amnesia (not just in relation to where the missing are - old joke) about what they've promised/said.

Also this whole Daly thing is just getting odder. At least it's gone to Ombudsman. I genuinely wonder though how effective that body is, like do the Guards talk to them at all?

This craic of 'she wasnt drink driving' is a quare way of reporting that she was indeed drink driving

https://twitter.com/GerryAdamsSF/status/302734470690242561

WTF

should have gone to the cinema as well, bride of tiocfaidh's on

Thats p much illegible stuff, wish he'd tioc it in tbh

Tioc Norris

not bad, not bad

Can't wait to get home and change my display name. #saturdaynight

Rip not_marty_whelan

He's only getting going, believe me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOQyl7ZpoH8

A very good speech by Kenny. I particularly like the clapping the public gallery at the end. Now, I suppose we need action as well as words!

Youtube though: "Clare Daly and Wallacea [sic] are a disgrace." what does that have to do with this!?