Now is the Winter of our discount rate

Date Published: {J}

I’ve been taking long walks in the snow. What else can you do? I recommend you try it too if you can make it out of town somehow. Carefully of course – though once you’re on new snow it seems pretty safe, the treacherous bits are mainly where cars have flattened and polished it into a layer of solid ice.

If it were not for cars to slip on it indeed, there would be little to worry about. I heard a woman on the radio complaining that there was no mention of snow in the Government’s handbook on major disasters. It’s snow! A nuclear accident is a major disaster, not something that looks nice on Christmas cards.

It gives you perspective, walking across a beautiful white blanket under blinding sunlight. The snow comes and cleans the Earth, making all quiet and all one. The sun comes and lifts the snow away. Powers far greater than we oversee this world, mend and renew it. What, really, can the machinations of little human things like banks and politicians do to us?

Kill us of course. Destroy our life savings. Take away our homes, wreck our careers, drive us into penury. But apart from that, there’s really very little they can do.

We have been caught up in a strange piece of economic theatre, unwilling performers for a global audience. The play is a murder mystery called A Killing On the Markets, and our part puts us right at centre stage. We’re the corpse. We’re pretty much expected to lie still here while the bigger players argue about who it was that killed us and how to stop them before they claim another victim.

The bailout plan is pure theatre. Nobody expects this to actually work, the object is to show that they can prevent a country collapsing financially without having to throw much money at it. It’s a statement to the markets: there is no percentage in coming after the euro.

The intention is to give the governments and central banks breathing space while they figure out what the hell to do about the euro, but sooner or later – and probably sooner – the markets will have another go.

Maybe at Portugal next, maybe Spain or even Italy. Maybe us again. The markets are a mechanism for seeking out and exploiting weakness, and while there is still systemic weakness in the common currency they will continue to sniff around the door like a pack of wolves.

Meanwhile we have to live with this completely unworkable, counterproductive deal. It may be theatre as far as the rest of the world in concerned, but it’s going to mean real devastation to the people of Ireland. Is this why we joined a common currency?

The idea of sharing the euro was that it would make our economies grow closer together. A noble objective and one I’ve always supported, but if it means instead that we are to be some kind of sacrificial bulwark for the core countries then it is actually doing quite the opposite.

If the euro cannot survive without sacrificing our lives and our futures, then the euro cannot survive. We must ditch this deal, and the first step is to ditch this Government.