The most difficult part about taking a 'blog-break' is coming back. You want to, sometimes you even try to. But it just doesn't happen. Well, Fintan O'Toole's piece for the New York Times finally got me out of the shell. It's simply superb, and you must read it to know how, what Krugman calls the VSP's (Very Serious People [Peoples?]) are opportunistic as ever and eager to pounce on a half-opportunity to showcase what they perceive as a victory.
What O'Toole cleverly does is to develop a simple humanist view. If Ireland is willingly or unwillingly being put up as a poster-boy of eurozone austerity success, then what explains the seemingly contrarian reality on the ground?
The premise here, and what has been since the beginning of the crisis, is the Northern view that the prolonged pain of austerity (nobody's denying the pain at least!) is necessary for the good reward in the end. But history can't be written till the present is complete, and with several years of results to observe, perhaps we'll be seeing more of these in the near-future. So, O'Toole uses the age-old 'Rocky' analogy. There is no victory. After all, 'still-standing' is a victory dependent entirely on perspective and although the 'slump' seems past, are we capable of asking ourselves firstly whether it had to take that long and secondly (and quite obviously!), are we really 'cured'?
For this, examples are brought forward and light is shed on what O'Toole terms as the 'irrational exuberance' of the North exemplified no better, than by Schauble's irrationally exuberant "Ireland did what Ireland had to do. And now everything is fine."
Irrational exuberance is too kind. Idiocy would be shorter and sweeter.
For there is an Ireland that begs to differ:
"The domestic economy outside the gated community of high-tech multinationals. Outside Dublin, property prices are still falling. Wages for most workers have dropped sharply. Unemployment remains very high at 12.8 percent — and that figure would be higher if not for emigration.
There’s always been a simple way to measure how well Ireland is doing: Go to the ports and airports after the Christmas vacation and count the young people waving goodbye to their parents as they head off to the United States, Canada, Australia or Britain, where they have gone to find work and opportunity.
Other people protest in bad times; the Irish leave. And they’ve been doing so in numbers that haven’t been recorded since the 1980s. Nearly 90,000 people emigrated between April 2012 and April 2013 and close to 400,000 have left since the 2008 crisis...There’s no great mystery about why they’re going: They don’t believe in the success story. A major study by University College Cork found that most of the emigrants are graduates and that almost half of them left full-time jobs in Ireland to go abroad.
These are not desperate refugees; they’re bright young people who have lost faith in the idea that Ireland can give them the opportunities they want. They just don’t buy into the narrative of a triumphant rebound."
But of course there's more. In contrast to the No Bondholder Left Behind initiative, now acknowledged by all even in the North to be as foolish an idea as any, the ordinary citizen has borne the full brunt of austerity. Lavishness on one hand, good old fashioned cuts on the other.
Asmussen, Djisselbloem, Rehn, Schauble. They all have different faces but they are cut from the same cloth and sing the same tune together in harmony. If anything, Ireland could be a eurozone poster-child for a mirage or an oasis - something that you want desperately to be there but it isn't - an economic facade that tries its best to mask the reality within.
O'Toole ends in the best way possible - with numbers. In 2009, Ireland's debt-to-GDP was
64%. Last year, it peaked at 125%. Blossoming debt with shrinking spending. It's a dubious duo that Ireland has the misfortune of representing.
What O'Toole cleverly does is to develop a simple humanist view. If Ireland is willingly or unwillingly being put up as a poster-boy of eurozone austerity success, then what explains the seemingly contrarian reality on the ground?
The premise here, and what has been since the beginning of the crisis, is the Northern view that the prolonged pain of austerity (nobody's denying the pain at least!) is necessary for the good reward in the end. But history can't be written till the present is complete, and with several years of results to observe, perhaps we'll be seeing more of these in the near-future. So, O'Toole uses the age-old 'Rocky' analogy. There is no victory. After all, 'still-standing' is a victory dependent entirely on perspective and although the 'slump' seems past, are we capable of asking ourselves firstly whether it had to take that long and secondly (and quite obviously!), are we really 'cured'?
For this, examples are brought forward and light is shed on what O'Toole terms as the 'irrational exuberance' of the North exemplified no better, than by Schauble's irrationally exuberant "Ireland did what Ireland had to do. And now everything is fine."
Irrational exuberance is too kind. Idiocy would be shorter and sweeter.
For there is an Ireland that begs to differ:
"The domestic economy outside the gated community of high-tech multinationals. Outside Dublin, property prices are still falling. Wages for most workers have dropped sharply. Unemployment remains very high at 12.8 percent — and that figure would be higher if not for emigration.
There’s always been a simple way to measure how well Ireland is doing: Go to the ports and airports after the Christmas vacation and count the young people waving goodbye to their parents as they head off to the United States, Canada, Australia or Britain, where they have gone to find work and opportunity.
Other people protest in bad times; the Irish leave. And they’ve been doing so in numbers that haven’t been recorded since the 1980s. Nearly 90,000 people emigrated between April 2012 and April 2013 and close to 400,000 have left since the 2008 crisis...There’s no great mystery about why they’re going: They don’t believe in the success story. A major study by University College Cork found that most of the emigrants are graduates and that almost half of them left full-time jobs in Ireland to go abroad.
These are not desperate refugees; they’re bright young people who have lost faith in the idea that Ireland can give them the opportunities they want. They just don’t buy into the narrative of a triumphant rebound."
But of course there's more. In contrast to the No Bondholder Left Behind initiative, now acknowledged by all even in the North to be as foolish an idea as any, the ordinary citizen has borne the full brunt of austerity. Lavishness on one hand, good old fashioned cuts on the other.
Asmussen, Djisselbloem, Rehn, Schauble. They all have different faces but they are cut from the same cloth and sing the same tune together in harmony. If anything, Ireland could be a eurozone poster-child for a mirage or an oasis - something that you want desperately to be there but it isn't - an economic facade that tries its best to mask the reality within.
O'Toole ends in the best way possible - with numbers. In 2009, Ireland's debt-to-GDP was
64%. Last year, it peaked at 125%. Blossoming debt with shrinking spending. It's a dubious duo that Ireland has the misfortune of representing.
