No surprise that markets are worried for Ireland

Date Published: {J}

Let’s face it, we’re buggered aren’t we? A telling figure: Emigration has now risen to its highest in 21 years – since the 80s in other words. It’s hard to think of a more symbolic way to say that all the good done has been undone. Soon we must give up our mobile phones and return to digital watches with calculators. Prepare to watch Dallas all over again, only this time backwards. Which when I think about it will actually make more sense.

The government just raised another billion or so of petty cash to keep the country going for . . . how long? That will only last us to the end of the year. Yet they try to make it sound like a promising sign. At least people were willing to lend to us at hugely inflated rates! And even that overlooks the fact that a couple of days ago the European Central Bank had to intervene by buying up Irish debt. So basically, the markets are willing to lend us money as long as (a) we pay keep paying higher and higher interest and (b) for as long as the ECB keeps rescuing us.

We’re buggered.

Can part of this premium we’re paying be put down to the allegedly tired and emotional interview the Taoiseach allegedly gave at the Ardilaun Hotel allegedly last week? You wouldn’t want to overemphasise this; it isn’t like the markets ever had any confidence in this government anyway. After all they’re the same people who took an economic bonanza and turned it into crushing debt for future generations.

I want to pause here to point out the whole ‘Celtic Tiger’ (there’s a phrase I swore I’d never use) was not wholly an illusion. We did at one point have a genuine high-growth economy. We were attracting good investment. There were hit Irish shows, movies and music, almost an embarrassment – or in the case of Riverdance, literally an embarrassment – of riches. In the 90s the country was making and doing successful things. But when the whole world hit recession in about 2000 we seemed to hardly feel a bump. That should have been a warning sign. The economy was already beginning to float on an air cushion. This of course was the massive, parasitic inflation of the property market.

So the main reason foreign investors are wary of Ireland is obvious: The people who should have taken firm action on the economy ten years ago are – somehow, incredibly – still in power now and, by pretending that clearly insolvent banks will one day magically heal, still avoiding necessary action.

Of course it doesn’t help to also have a leader who looks like he might be caving under pressure. You and I know he isn’t of course. Brian Cowen is in no way an alcoholic, not at least by our standards. To us, staying up all night drinking and singing is a perfectly natural way to deal with the imminent insolvency and economic collapse of your country. But it is hard to blame the markets for being worried that he might take to drink, when they’ve seen what he did to the place sober.