Where does Syriza’s debacle leave its Irish cheerleaders?

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Anyone who followed the results of the recent referendum on the bailout and austerity will have become familiar with the Greek word for no – Oxi.

Alexis Tsipras and his colleagues in Syriza came armed with the result to Brussels saying they had a mandate to end austerity – only to be quickly rebuffed.

One of Margaret Thatcher’s most famous pronouncements was her call for the IRA to be denied the “oxygen of publicity”.

Well, it seems all other EU leaders did exactly the same over the weekend denying Syriza the “Oxi of publicity”.

I have written before that you have to feel sorry for Tsipras and his colleagues. They did not create the catastrophe in Greece and campaigned against the austerity policies.

The problem was this; to end austerity you need more cash (the country cannot survive on its own two feet – it needs to borrow into the foreseeable future).

And when the country is broke as Greece is, the only moneylenders are the hated Troika.

They were the facts on the ground; not nice, unsavoury, unfair perhaps – even unjust.

It wasn’t all a one-way street though. Greece badly needed to reform its shabby public administration, stamp down hard on corruption, tackle widespread tax evasion (not just among the rich), and rid itself of the myriad of cumbersome, inefficient and unfair side deals that riddled its system. It did some of them but failed to meet other key conditionalities.

In the end it boiled down to a clash of ideologies and approach. Of course, there are EU elites and of course there are EU States which are more powerful than others (none more so than Germany).

But the political reality is that Greece is alone among all of the Eurozone and EU countries in what it seeks.

It has elicited open support from not a single other EU State. And they are not faceless bureaucrats. All of them have been elected democratically.

So how will this all work out for Irish politics? Well, there is a case of wait and see because as we write there is no guarantee that the deal will be accepted in Greece, or even in some of the EU States that have adopted hawkish positions such as Slovakia and Finland.

Domestically, Sinn Féin’s response has been muted so far, as it awaits developments. But there is no doubt the agreement represents a big political set-back for Sinn Féin.

The party has Superglued itself to Syriza in the past year. Alexis Tsipras was feted by the party in Dublin. Pictures of Tsipras and party leader Gerry Adams together in Dublin were widely distributed. Syriza’s new finance minster Euclid Tsakalotos was the special guest at the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis in the spring. The Greek flag and the ‘Oxi’ signs appeared at many Sinn Féin public events.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.