Fine Gael & Fianna Fáil ARE the Crisis. The 2020 Irish election explained
Sometime after the crash of 2008 and the intervention of the IMF it was decided by the ghouls of the troika that Ireland’s only real reason to continue to exist was to be a tax haven for multinationals to funnel their astronomical profits offshore, tax-free. After the absolute colossal gombeens of Fianna Fáil led us over the ledge, only one political party were ready to step up and take the mantle, only one party dared to take the hard decisions, only one party were brave enough to oversee the total corporate sell-off of the entire country like a modern-day raj administering rule here on behalf of vulture capitalists and cuckoo funds. These Blue Shirted modern heroes were the only ones with an ideology so ready-made and extreme that recognised that yes; it was the normal people on the streets, at least the ones that hadn’t been forced to emigrate yet, yes they, and not the banks, that had to pay for the rampant recklessness of the financial system and implement perpetual austerity, take the brave decisions to dismantle our public services, watch the healthcare system fall into ruin, sell off all our state assets and anything that wasn’t nailed down, and actually on seconds thoughts, everything that was nailed down too. Yep, sell it all, sell it all to the very same investors and speculators that caused the crash in the first place. Thing is, unlike the constant narrative that’s wheeled out that Fine Gael were forced to make the hard choices, the truth is the policies they implemented in Ireland that caused so much suffering, that’s seen catastrophic societal breakdown, mass emigration and the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the rich, it’s actually what they represent.
It is their ideology.
It always has been.
Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are the crisis.
“People reared in workhouses, as you are aware, are no great acquisition to the community and they have no ideas whatsoever of civic responsibilities. As a rule, their highest aim is to live at the expense of the ratepayers. Consequently, it would be a decided gain if they all took it into their heads to emigrate.”
William T Cosgrave — First Taoiseach of the Irish Free State & Fine Gael icon
1. Freedom and Bondage — The Irish Free State
Often in Ireland politics feels like it’s removed from the rest of the world, the media especially likes to treat the centrism of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil as the natural order and adopts a dismissive attitude of any other analysis of society that’s outside the narrow confines presented by the establishment. Of course, that’s because since the formation of the Free state the same establishment has been in place to defend their interest and that of capital, the same strata of a society dominated the professional classes, including the media. The old Ireland that remedied any radical thought with a hurley around the feet and then the head, right back into the obedient embrace of a Catholic theocracy. The same joyless, sexually repressed, sadists that dictated this authority represented by the church and class were to be respected and feared and which stifled and suffocated generations of Irish people. A place where social mobility was nonexistent any hope to fulfill yourself intellectually, sexually, creatively or in many cases just survive with enough to eat you were expected to leave. And millions did.
One of the first acts of the First Finance Minister of the new Irish Free State, Ernest Blythe, after the end of the Civil War in 1923 was to cut the Old Age Pension by a shilling. The defeat of the republican forces containing the bulk of those radicals and socialists who had fought in 1916 and the war for Independence left the stage open for what can only be described as the counter-revolution. The victors in that Civil War, the pro-Treaty Free State government, was made up of businessmen, professionals, and middle-class conservatives and ensured the perpetuation of the highly-centralised state administrative system which closed off access to power from the broad mass of ordinary people. The professional classes, property owners, capitalist industrialists, and bankers still had that access and the influence that went with it. So too had the Roman Catholic Hierarchy. There was even enough time when fearing their dominance on power and capital being threatened by Fianna Fáil entering the Dáil, The new Irish free state establishment, well, supported and fostered actual goose-stepping, nazi saluting fascists. Eoin O’Duffy was the Blueshirts leader and the first leader of Fine Gael, something they seem reluctant to acknowledge, go on their website and marvel as they don’t mention it at all. Thankfully for fans of subjugation, rather than being a socialist threat that would shake up the status quo, De Valera and Fianna Fáil rapidly proved to be nothing of the sort, winning power in 1932, and with that, the establishment of today was set in place.
100 years of it.
This is all completely normal.
And the thing is they wouldn’t mind a ghoulish dystopia because, as a lot of us suspect some people are getting really bloody rich. Ireland joined the EU in 1973 and adopting an economic approach reliant on Foreign Direct Investment, the Maastricht treaty was signed in 1992 and to join the euro and the Single Market, the eurozone periphery was expected to liberalise and deregulate its banking sector, Low interest-rates and intense competition between newly entered European banks and domestic Irish banks drove an unprecedented property bubble one of the largest asset-price bubbles in the history of the world. The Irish economy had transformed into one almost entirely reliant on credit, domestic demand, and not much else but it was cheered on by the establishment, their cohorts in the media, the developers and landowners. The Irish wealthy connected class borrowed billions in a frenzy as Fianna Fáil the dopes continuously poured petrol onto the fire by adding even more tax incentives for property investment. Bertie Ahern even said people should go kill themselves if they questioned it. The Celtic Tiger was the darling of the economic world, the perfect neoliberal model for small countries to follow.
Then the bubble burst.
The debt owed was 5 times more than the entire economy. Every bank that operated in the State had loaned large sums of money, a lot to developers, secured on land and were essentially bankrupt. It was the establishment’s reaction to this event starting with the 2008 bank guarantee, NAMA and Troika bailouts that show exactly who owns the Irish state, who does it value and whose interests does it serve.
“This bank bailout is a simple transfer from taxpayers to bondholders, and it will saddle generations to come. The only thing that might give you solace is that, as chief economist of the World Bank, we see this type of thing happening in banana republics all over the world. Whenever a banking crisis happens, the financial sector uses the turmoil as a mechanism to transfer wealth from the general population to themselves. I’ve been very disappointed to see that it has happened, not only in banana republics but in advanced industrialised countries.”
Economist Jason Stigeltz in 2012
2. Crisis Capitalism, Shock and The Aftermath
For the last decade, Ireland went through something described by author and journalist Naomi Klein as “The Shock Doctrine”, also known as crisis capitalism and it’s only through a major crisis manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations and trust funds with influence in government, would the type of society we see today in Ireland be able to be imposed. The short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines that when the dust settles leaves states stripped of all its assets, their people much worse off but the architects of the crisis, ending up as the beneficiaries and Ireland was no different.
The entire story is extremely murky, I mean we went from the reckless lending of global banks along with unregulated speculation almost brought down the world economy to actually, we’ve decided that the banks and private investment funds that created the crisis aren’t going to pay, in fact, Hey Ireland, we’re going to make it sovereign debt so now the Irish people are going to pay. In fact, you’re going to pay 42% of the entire European banking debt. Oh and now since instantly bankrupt your state, you’re broke you’re going to have to pay for it by taking this massive, €64billion unpayable loan, with interest that you’ll barely be able to service, saving even unsecured bondholders while selling off all your public and state assets to same speculator ghouls that caused the crisis. And since you’re so damn reckless Ireland will submit to a program of supervision meaning that the ECB would gain leverage over the Irish government to seek specific changes to the way Ireland was being governed. It’s called a Bailout and you have to accept or else “a bomb goes off in Dublin”.
“But that’s not fair”, said some of us while the rest figured out what class of a scam government bonds spread yields, credit default swaps and Memorandum of Understandings were. “We all partied”, said Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in unison while serving us up on a platter to international capital, Ireland’s wealth the sustenance they need to fill the dark empty cavernous void of greed at the heart of the system. But that hunger is never satiated so all the land and property and distressed mortgages we acquired through NAMA to bail out the property developers and Anglo, we’re gonna sell those for buttons to vulture funds to make the lives of families in negative equity hell. The recapitalised banks flush with all our money they will then get busy screwing over more Irish families with tracker mortgages overcharging billions while handing out handy pamphlets on the most effective forms of suicide after been made homeless in a ditch.
And just in case you were wondering, apart from the people of Ireland, none of them are ever going to pay taxes ever again, not the Banks, not the Vulture Funds or Apple or Facebook or any multinational corporation we’ll pay millions in their legal defense to not pay billions in tax owed to us because we’ve also decided that Ireland’s only future and purpose is to be a corporate profit funneling banana republic, facilitating the richest people in the world to hoard their wealth in tax havens while the citizens live under perpetual austerity.
This is all completely normal.
In 2020 Irish national debt is €206billion. Ireland has paid €60 in interest over the last decade. Hundreds of thousands of Irish people emigrated all over the world, Massive cuts affecting the most vulnerable health services, disability support slashed. 10,000 people are homeless. 35,000 people at risk of homelessness and massive negative equity rental prices have soared 200%.
If you think about it, in normal circumstances would Irish people vote for a completely failing health system one of the worst in the developed world that is so bad that A&Es are overflowing, people dying on waiting lists, corpses rotting in the corridors, yep, I’ll say that again, corpses rotting in the corridors which incidentally Fine Gael with their customary empathy claimed there was no evidence of even as hospital staff mopped bodily fluids and tried to console distraught relatives. Of course, wouldn’t vote for this but if people have means they are forced to pay for private insurance, because well, they want not to die and so it’s normalised that access to healthcare is dependent on wealth. And of course, private corporations are there to provide it at a tidy profit while subsidised by the state or given public land for free. There’s a reason global investors have entered the Irish primary care centre market ‘because it offers relatively high-profit opportunities’ And fuck anybody that can’t afford it, poverty is a moral failing and if only they got up early in the morning they could be too living the Irish dream.
Do you think Irish people would vote for a party that had “we definitely need more homeless people” on their posters? Or even; let’s make it impossible for people to ever afford to buy a house or have a place to live that, in exchange for all your money, you can microwave baked beans from your bed that’s also your kitchen? No, but that’s exactly what results from their policies because no matter what you’re constantly told about the left, it is Fine Gael that are the extremists. Oh and guess what Fianna Fáil’s solution to the housing crisis is, they call it first-time buyers incentive but it’s just a subsidy for private developers. After everything, they’re responsible for. Driving the price of property up again while their developer friends get a tasty profit, the same policies as before the crash, most of them are landlords, greedy and stupid gombeen men.
Nowadays Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy a man so out of his depth that just his picture on Wikipedia is enough to explain the entry on class privilege is living embodiment of the corrupt ruling class that the British and then the Free State has foisted on us generation after generation. Representing Dublin Bay South, the former constituency of beady-eyed arch anti-republican Michael McDowell. His grandfather, an accountant, famously swindled millions of the rich and famous of Irish media and art world. His father, a barrister, senior counsel and erotic fiction author made millions during the Mahon Tribunal and in doing so, actually shows it’s findings of how corruption is so entrenched in the Irish elite’s way of doing business, it is, the Irish elites way of doing business.
So, what could be the reason Eoghan Murphy, born into the Irish elite will not build social housing to alleviate the housing and homeless crisis? It couldn’t possibly be to defend his class interests and the profits of the private landlords, the hoarding landowners while the inflated price of the property now means it’s an even more lucrative for vulture funds to repossess peoples homes? This is the Fine Gael-property investor cabal. You know, the club that you’re not in. These Vulture funds didn’t buy all that land, private property and stressed mortgages at knockdown prices from NAMA to not profit massively. These people don’t give a damn that it leads to young people finding it impossible to find somewhere to live, people are driven to suicide from stress or families being evicted with nowhere to go. It is the same policy the British carried out and enforced with RIC thugs in the 19th century however callous Fine Gael are, even they wouldn’t try to commemorate those tools of our subjugation like the RIC and Black and Tans, oh right, but it’s not like they’re bulldozing homeless people of the streets…
The Redacted Media
Still groggy from the shock, the Irish people are suddenly beginning to ask questions, that the inequality and injustice isn’t just the natural state of society and just the way things are we’re beginning to get angry at those in service to elites and the financial industry, at all our expense. We have seen in recent years a growing resistance like the hugely successful grassroots campaign against water privatisation and the Raise the roof housing protests. I mean we have alternatives, and thankfully the media in Ireland give a voice to these concerns and alternatives to the government. Yes? No. Which unfortunately means I have to talk about the role of the Irish media in modern Ireland.
Political journalism in Ireland, on the whole, exists to maintain the status quo and as with the political sphere exists only to serve their masters with capital and the market. There is a huge problem with the private, concentrated media ownership in general, If the role of the media is to provide a vital watchdog, speak truth to power and is vital to a healthy dynamic democracy lets have a quick, horrified, look at the rotten putrid corpse of the media here:
In the private media: We can sum it up like this: A cozy relationship between <REDACTED> and government, leading to a reduction in scrutiny and an undermining of the ability of the media to hold the powerful to account; and the ability of <REDACTED>, to dominate Irish media and have a substantial influence on news agendas and the content received by audiences.
For those of yous not aware, the Independent News and Media (INM) controls much of the daily and Sunday newspaper market along with private broadcast media and the majority shareholder is the one and only Denis Redacted O’Brien.
According to a 2016 report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) into the concentration of Irish Media:
“democracy would be threatened if any single voice within the media, with the power to propagate a single viewpoint, were to become too dominant”.
Ireland has one of the most concentrated media markets of any democracy. Accumulation of what has been described as “communicative power” within the news markets is at “endemic levels”, and this, combined with the dominance of one private individual media owner in the State, creates what the Media Reform Coalition has described as
“conditions in which wealthy individuals and organisations can amass huge political and economic power and distort the media landscape to suit their interests and personal views”.
There will be extreme election interference during the election debate and it won’t come from Russian bots, or Shinnerbots no matter what convicted liars like Sarah Carey summon from the nightmares of her dark overlord to spew over the pages of the Independent. To paraphrase actual journalist Caitlin Johnson the interference will come from the billionaire class and its political and media lackeys. And it will be perfectly legal. On all the traditional media outlets, the narrative is the Irish people’s choice is Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will have very lively debates with panels stuffed establishment figures that will frame it this way over and over and over again.
With this media landscape and most people too busy trying to pay rent, in debt, working long hours, commuting long hours in traffic jams in terrible public transport, thinking of how to afford the unaffordable childcare that after forced privatisation is unviable both for parents and providers. It’s a low key drudgery that forces most of the population to disengage from politics and accept everything as inevitable, that’s this is the best we can do. You know you’ve heard it at work or in every bar; Politicians, they’re all the same. Something is nagging at the back of the Irish psyche though and it’s beginning to manifest even as we’re told that the recovery is complete, the economy is strong and everything is fine now. There are signs that Irish people are angrier, that no matter the number of times RTE claims that Gerry Adams was in the IRA, the IFA or the ESB it’s beginning to sound desperate and so transparent that it’s having the opposite effect. Maybe Ireland, one of only three other European countries that have never had a left government are finally pissed off enough to begin to realise it doesn’t have to be like this.
The Election Campaign
The highlight of the election was the leaders debate that kicked off the election campaign that spectacularly backfired so much so, noted revolutionary and human 2x4 Pat Kenny remarked halfway through “You’re both kind of in agreement here” summing up the history of politics for here for the last 100 years but although it’s 2020, not 1936 a time when the Catholic church were waving Blueshirts off to fight for Fascism in Spain and ghostwriting the constitution with DeValera through the medium of fear, cruelty, and guilt, It’s obvious the only difference between the two parties is the different ways they attack Sinn Fein.
Michal Martin the Fianna Fail leader is a man with all the gravitas of a wet sock and the charisma of several more wet socks stuffed into cheap polyester suit found himself arguing at one point that he was less of a total disaster as health minister than his opponent Leo Varadkar, who, fresh from been called a tory boy and the reincarnation of Thatcher by a member of the public, which by his usual standards of human interaction is a roaring success, seemed to be on a one-man charm retreat, he had the presence of a man that had been just told that there’s an election and well, someone’s gonna have to explain the last nine years to the people. So uninspiring was this exchange that the only entertainment for the viewing audience was to cringe at the screen as Varadker visibly strained to express basic human empathy. Surprising that he risked it though since the only recognizable human characteristics he’s shown before is a smug disdain for the poor and novelty socks in place of a personality.
Both politicians were so thoroughly out of touch and unconvincing, I got the feeling that a lot of people watching, not in a dissimilar way to the fall of communism when people decided they just didn’t believe in the system anymore, people on couches all over Ireland were having a similar epiphany. Two soulless, grey, opportunistic empty suits with several fat state pensions, with no vision for the future, or even worse, the exact same miserable vision for the future. That they don’t have any intention of making us a real functioning country or address any of the issues affecting people (which pisses me off because we can’t truly enjoy laughing at everybody else falling into proto-fascist dystopias) The beige, empty waffling mundane horror of the nature of our rulers, Placeholders for the status quo.
The second leaders debate with the rest of the party leaders and it didn’t get any better for the lads as the studio audience resembled an Assembly of Russian Factory and Mill Workers in pre-Revolutionary Russia repeatedly bursting into rapturous applause every time Richard Boyd Barret said anything, between which Mary Lou eviscerated them, showing the ruthless efficiency of Denis O’brien’s lawyers to sue somebody for libel. Leo Varakar often a man with a whiff of Tsarism about him, by the end, had the energy of a corpse doused in acid and dumped into a mine shaft. Whereas Michael Martin like an unstable tightly wound ball of spite, the constant attacks at the Sinn Fein leader just gave the impression of him as petty and disingenuous, the human equivalent of a cantankerous cup of watery tea whose leadership is as convincing as a limp handshake and with a lack of substance only rivaled by the word “Republican” in Fianna Fail the “Republican Party”
3. The Revolution
People are angry and it’s happening all over the western world, but since the Irish media’s coverage of international affairs amounts to a cut and paste from ex CIA political analysts or outlets like Reuters, who helpfully admitted recently that they have been funded by the British MOD, people that feel resentment and anger and are looking for answers find it’s difficult to contextualise the way globalisation has affected populations everywhere. So I’ll just summarize.
What Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil represent is the last gasp of a corrupt failing order. They are our own local face of a decaying global system that’s based on infinite resources on a finite planet, in a massive debt crisis with gross inequality so extreme that 26 individuals own more wealth than almost 4 billion people. A system to survive condemns the vast majority of humans to perpetual poverty due to unsustainable and inequitable consumption.
It’s greatest values are consumerism, debt and isolating people from each other, pointless wage slavery that author David Graeber calls Bullshit jobs, millions of people even the middle classes toiling away in meaningless, unnecessary jobs, and knowing it. Creating an environment of disastrous mental health issues and a lack of meaning and connection in people’s lives cured by prescription of opioids and Prozac in the west and for the rest of humanity the rosy prospect of toiling away their horrible brief existence in mines, struggling to breath while scrapping out Cobalt with their bare hands to feed the corporate green revolution need for batteries. it’s a system that’s actively destroying our habitat, a total eco collapse that quite possibly leads to our extinction as a species.
Wasn’t the free market supposed to eliminate inefficient, unnecessary jobs, jobs that if disappeared tomorrow wouldn’t change a thing? With all our technological advancement wasn’t capitalism promise that by now we would be all working less, our basic needs met instead of manufactured scarcity with shite wages that barely cover the necessities of living and the super-rich having seemingly decided that given their infinite possibilities, what they want to do is to f**k trafficked children, This world, where obscene wealth hoarding by the rich on the back of the workers is a called a virtue. That wealth probably hidden on a Carribean island, cleared of pesky native picaninnies 100 years ago by the British empire but today has the GDP of the American arms industry yet the only thing there, is thousands of shiny PO boxes for shell companies that contain papers that simply read, the bearer is entitled the entire fucking resources of the planet. A world where entertainment on a Saturday night amounts to guessing when exactly Israel’s or Trump’s violent neurosis finally snaps and the world comes to a nuclear end over a perpetual war for control of resources that is not only normal but vital, to protect their monopoly on the distribution of energy and service the world economy, a dogmatic belief in a system of economics although so completely, demonstrably disastrous but continues to exist because of our collective delusion that rivals the Catholic church telling us that in fact no, that cracker stuck to the roof of your mouth has undergone transubstantiation and yes, you’re cannibalising the flesh of a 2000year old dead Palestinian.
and this is all completely normal.
The manufactured consent served up by shady establishment organs like Institute of Statecraft the integrity initiative and Newstalk lunchtime with Ciara Kelly spew establishment narratives peddled by media and designed to fit whatever online information bubble we’re trapped in by Google and Facebook is a powerful force but increasingly even that isn’t enough to sustain the mental gymnastics required to miss the colossal failure of Neoliberal economics and the establishment in Ireland that enforce it.
Because as we have seen the Irish establishment only cares about themselves and their masters in the finance industry. They have pumped billions into banks and allowed the vulture funds to make billions in profits while they hover over working families. They forced tens of thousands to emigrate while Multinational corporations pay not a cent in tax. The endless scandals of Fine Gael in power, Now Fianna Fail think it’s their turn again. They will attack anybody who wants to tax banks, build homes and reduce rents. They will be called dangerous and extreme while these parasites continue to get rich but there’s a real chance for change here for the first time and they’re really shitting it this time. So Yeah, I think we can do better. We have to. In Ireland, it starts by getting rid of both of them. Sinn Féin’s result is the biggest shock to hit the Irish establishment since its foundation. Even if, on RTE the revolution will not be televised
It’s only the beginning.
