Irish Times

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

It didn't take long for the new government to display their Thatcherite colours - Harris's shine will tarnish quickly.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Diable Rouge wrote: It didn't take long for the new government to display their Thatcherite colours - Harris's shine will tarnish quickly.

You saw what happened when we privatized a whole hospital?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-30740956

You can perhaps make a case that this isn't as bad as having a private provider just pick out the bits of a hospital it wants, but it certainly didn't go well.

[Lang Spoon]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Harris is a repellent young fogey. Can't see his schtick ever getting him to the top. Has a face too many folk instinctively want to punch. Bet the grannies think he's such a polite well turned out young man though.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Diable Rouge wrote: It didn't take long for the new government to display their Thatcherite colours - Harris's shine will tarnish quickly.

In fairness, never has a government ever looked less likely to be able to get that one through.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

This should be mandatory reading for the next Labour leader.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Privatising hospitals, sweet jesus.

These bastards are really, really dangerous. They need to be electorally crushed like Labour were.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote: But the rental market is not static like that. There is a shortage of rental housing and some people can't afford to pay rent. If you give them a rental allowance then all you are doing is driving up rents. Sure, they might have a few quid in their pocket for the first year, but eventually the rental market will adjust and soak it up. And then you are worse off than where you started. Except if you are a landlord.

hmm, I think you're just underestimating how far behind rents, rent allowance has fallen, and possibly over estimating just how affordable the increase in rent allowance, would make rents for people.

also I think you're overestimating just how many landlords are prepared to take people on rent allowance. We've made a right hames of things.

I don't see how I have suggested any of that.

FG's solution to the housing problem is your typical subsidy to landlords disguised as a subsidy to tenants. I've seen it enough countries to know what the outcome will be.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Proof Stephen Donnelly and economist Dan O'Brien aren't the same person.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Well, the Burton announcement is official, and Kelly, Seán Sherlock, Brendan Howlin and Jan O'Sullivan have all been touted - so the contenders would be more than half of their current Dáil ranks!

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Alan Kelly will be on Friday's Late Late - could be car-crash TV in the making.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

It's Ryan Tubridy, what do you expect.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Somehow managed to miss this article at the time – Ireland paid 42 per cent of the cost of the European banking bailout, with each person being hit for an average of €9,000.

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/42-of-europes-banking-crisis-paid-by-ireland-219703.html#.U2ZtPhvk0dc.facebook

The Germans paid €491 per person. The EU-wide average was €192 per person.

I'll remember this the next time some Fine Gael type starts droning on about how "every other country pays water charges".

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

what do those two things have to do with each other? And given that we're never going to pay that money back, how much do you think it costs us on an annual basis in interest payments?

Part of the reason that the germans felt perfectly happy to leave us carrying the can is because interest rates are now so absurdly low. I wonder why exactly the govt wasn't prepared to push for debt sharing. Perhaps we pissed them off so much in order to create the bubble.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Wait, that €9000 figure can't be right...

the figure of €9,000 for each Irish person does not take into account the €18bn put in from the National Pension Reserve Fund.

Aha.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

So it goes down to maybe €6,500 per person. That's still astonishing, more than ten times what the Germans (who never stop moaning about it) paid per person. Imagine the reaction if those boyos had to fork out six or seven grand each.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

no, it means that it goes up to nearly €13,500 per person. But that amount of money wasn't handed over. Instead our national debt went up. But because it's now under control again, we're now paying about 1% it costs about €400 million a year in interest, or €100 per person, for eternity.

I've been thinking about this, and trying to find some sort of common logic or framework, between this and greece, and it comes down to a weakness of regulation in the aftermath of the Euro. Greece's problems all stem from inadequate supervision of what the greeks were up to in the running of their economy, and all that secret borrowing.

Our problems essentially stem from a clear and repeated public defiance of EU advice about managing our banks, and preventing a property bubble. McCreevy was telling them to fuck off and to stop be jealous of our Irish Genius.

So when the whole lot came smashing down in 2008, and when without consultation with the EU, we Guaranteed all the banks off our own bat, they are kind of left wondering, why the hell should they wind up picking up the tab for the bank guarantee? They would view it as a little late to start calling for european solidarity in the face of financial disaster, that we deliberately charged headlong into, only pausing to give the EU the two fingers every couple of steps.

If the reward for telling the EU to fuck off, doing our own thing, is then to be bailed out by europe, then no-one would ever follow an eu regulation again. Everything that is done to us and greece is for the benefit of Italy and spain.

In the aftermath of the crisis, They've been able to impose stricter budgetary rules, and a much greater EU level of oversight, and now the ECB has a much greater role in overseeing sovereign banks so now you have something closer to the rules that needed to be put in place before the foundation of the euro, but governments steadfastly refused, because politicians wanted to retain control of the means to distribute clientelism, and also to create growth (start a bubble)

as far as I can see the Germans are at least consistent, in that they didn't also seek to spread the cost of their bailout across the EU. It helps that it's basically a drop in the ocean to them, but they would have been major beneficiaries (in the short term) of a system that spread the cost of bank bailout across europe.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

One of the things that has emerged in recent years is that the bank guarantee came off the back of serious arm twisting from Trichet and friends. It was certainly not a unilateral decision by Ireland.

Secondly, I don't think that representing the problem in terms of countries, as you have done, has been very helpful, seeing as what transpired was essentially a European banking crisis within a poorly designed currency union. The solution that has been carried out in Europe is the equivalent of the taxpayers of Nevada being held responsible for the losses of New York banks in the Nevada housing market. Sure, it was a lot to do with incompetence on the part of the Nevada politicians, but it was essentially a US banking problem that needed to be solved at the federal level. Of course there is no federal level in Europe, so an exercise of hanging the periphery out to dry was the logical conclusion of a continent run by domestic politicians. And that's what the Germans did; they got the European Nevadans to bail out Deutsche Bank.

Now that the European politicians have shown that they are willing to risk the future of their currency to get a few extra seats in domestic elections, the Euro is no longer taken seriously as a potential global currency. We can look forward to a few more decades of dollar hegemony. Paul Volcker must be laughing at us.

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Six Garda stations set to re-open, including Stepaside, coincidentally as requested by Shane Ross. Dublin TDs never pull strokes, of course ...

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Everyone knows it's the culchies who got Ireland into a mess. If only Dublin could be independent. If they formed a government in 2007 based only on the Dublin results then they would have returend an FF/Green coalition headed by Bertie Ahern. I'm sure that would have worked out great.

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Is Katherine Zappone the first Irish minister who is a naturalised citizen? Or even first TD to be so?

[Ginger Yellow]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

One of the things that has emerged in recent years is that the bank guarantee came off the back of serious arm twisting from Trichet and friends. It was certainly not a unilateral decision by Ireland.

That's true of the senior debt guarantee, which pretty much every European government did, explicitly or implicitly, in the immediate wake of the crisis. It was the guarantee of all liabilities that took the rest of Europe by surprise (and really pissed them off because of the deposit flight).

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

antoine polus wrote: Is Katherine Zappone the first Irish minister who is a naturalised citizen? Or even first TD to be so?

De Valera must have had to acquire Irish citizenship - would automatic status by descent have been a principle in the Victorian era?

[Diable Rouge]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Ex-TD Colm Keaveney is the latest individual to be sued by [redacted].

[anton pulisov]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Diable Rouge wrote:

Is Katherine Zappone the first Irish minister who is a naturalised citizen? Or even first TD to be so?

De Valera must have had to acquire Irish citizenship - would automatic status by descent have been a principle in the Victorian era?

Even if it had existed it would most likely have been from the father's side only in those days.

The question is if Dev was ever naturalised at all. I have a feeling he probably didn't have to bother.

[Borracho]

The 2016 Irish election is over!

Labour had a South African TD, Moosajee Bhamjee, representing Clare in the 1990s.