The Irish economy from 2001 onwards was driven by construction.
The elite developers connected to the government and the banks built housing that simply wasn’t needed, and now there are over 300,000 homes empty, derelict, or not even started. In a population of just over 4 million with 1 million concentrated in the capital Dublin who was responsible for the planning?
Who made the decisions, or did the government just turn a blind eye, as they creamed the taxes off the top?
These are questions that need to be answered along with a million others concerning the banking system or the lack of one. No controls, non-existent regulations and illegal planning.
Irish house prices were 42% over valued in 2003 and between 1993 and 2006 they rose by 520%!
In 2007 the USA’s GDP was 300 in a population of 320 million. In Ireland the GDP was 700 in a population of 4 million!
Between 2004-2006 the Bank of Ireland lent 220 billion, 75% of its loans were non-secured.
Ireland’s elite ran the economy like a casino and rewarded itself free chips with huge pay rises across the board. It backed 15 elite property developers who led the government on an endless merry-go-round of new developments. At one stage Irish developers were even outbidding Sheikhs in London!
The rollercoaster rolled on at high speed till the crash in 2008
Bertie Ahern was on a greater salary than Barrack Obama and Tony Blair combined, and now he’s pensioned off to the backbenches with a nice little earner for life.
These people have ruined Ireland forever. The bankers like Sean Fitzpatrick, David Drumm, Patrick Neary at Anglo were distributing finance like confetti. 80% of Anglo loans were concentrated solely in property. Again, this is not an accident, it was all by design, planned this way.
Finance Ministers Brian Lenihan, Charlie McGreevy and Brian Cowan are still free to live their lives. How can this be so, what sort of society lets people like this remain at large, when, God forbid, people who can’t pay their mortgages, cars, gas bills will be jailed or worse.
In fact suicide rates in Ireland are up 25%.
It’s all very well for Olli Rehn from the IMF/EU/EMU saying that Ireland will recover. Is that right Olli, I ask you, what do you care, all you wanted was to enslave a proud country with a huge debt that wasn’t theirs in the first place, so that your paymasters can strip Ireland of its natural resources and enslave a population to another 25yrs+ of debt.
I read somewhere that one Irish pilot on a salary of 50k owned 12 homes across Ireland, and he has since defaulted on his combined debt of EIGHT MILLION.
The list of fraud and greed is endless, and I’m sure more is yet to come out on the crazy decade of extravagance that the elite were allowed to create under the imaginary bubble of a property boom.
However - where we stand now we need a solution
Political parties in Ireland can no longer be trusted, this is plain to see, they are for the most careerist politicians who have no morals, no ideas, and will not stand up for the people who elect them, frankly they do not care about our nation.
We could do worse than to follow Iceland.
They have overthrown their corrupt government and bankers and voted in a team of THIRTY-ONE normal folk to look after their country’s affairs, a co-operative so to speak.
This is no longer about left or right it’s about good versus evil
We all have to believe that the good will out.
© Words Paul Gallagher/ ZANI Media
