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Does Leo Varadkar believe in ghosts.
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From Fine Gael
February saw the biggest ever monthly increase in the live register in absolute terms, proving that Fianna Fáil has killed the Celtic Tiger. The crucial 5% barrier has been broken with unemployment now running at 5.2%, the highest since August 1999. The spectre of mass unemployment has returned to haunt the country.
The Average Rate of EU unemployment is above this. Countries such as Germany have higher unemployment rates. Which is impressive with the way the housing market is going that we are still lower. We are far far from the “spectre” of 20%. The fall of the celtic tiger is far more due to international effects rather then what Fianna Fail have done. When in fact we have not an awful lot of control on our economy anyway. But other then this being just a plain silly scaremongering press release. It is a wasted press release.
Enterprise Minister Micheál Martin must make a clear statement on how it plans to restore confidence in the Irish economy.”
No Leo you must make the clear statement about how you plan to restore confidence if you want to get elected. Convince the electorate that you are better not that Fianna Fail are crap.
Simon, since there isn’t an election on the horizon, it is not Leo’s job to be focused right now on getting elected. It is his job to provide opposition and highlight where the government is has gone wrong and what it should do now. Convincing the electorate that FG would be better while not drawing attention to where FF are crap is a recipe for the voters thinking that FF will do what FG suggest eventually.
Prior to Christmas anyone saying the economy was heading for choppy waters was told they were guilty of ‘talking down’ the economy and some poor souls were even encouraged last year to take their own lives by An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern.
Also, the newly employed are disproportionately male so in some areas of the country we are beginning to see the return of large scale unemployment. A government with some foresight would have planned that capital expenditure would happen now in areas like school building which could be undertaken by those being let go from housing construction at a lower cost than would otherwise be the case. Instead the government is going to take its foot off the gas in those areas.
It is his job to provide opposition and highlight where the government is has gone wrong and what it should do now.
Where is the “what it should do now” part of the release?
Is everything supposed to be in the one press release, Simon?
Yes if you want to highlight that you are better then you should be saying why you are better. For the full impact of a statement from the “shadow cabinet” should be “a” messed up “x” and have no more ideas. We however do have an idea to fix it and it is as follows.
It makes you look fresh and full of ideas and the government the opposite. This statement just makes you seem bitchy without any ideas your selves. You shouldn’t be waiting to be asked “Well what would you do about it” you should just volunteer it. Make people compare and contrast in your favour. Doom and gloom comments just get buried in the papers with all the other doom and gloom news.
I think i said this before but Fine Gael/Labour have to look like the alternative cabinet and make people want that cabinet. That does not suddenly happen a year before the election that is built upon 4 years of stuff.
Not sure how crucial the 5% barrier is. The tone is a bit melodramatic. I have to agree with Simon on this one. Its not about settling into the role of opposition and just reacting its about creating an alternative and demonstrating how its better. For me personally the FG strategy of Presidential Enda was not the way to go. I would have liked to have seen a coterie of 3-5 well known FGers hammered home to the electorate as forming the basis of a cabinet not just Enda as Taoiseach. I thought FG had a very low profile beyond Enda and Richard whereas the public were familiar with a cabinet full of FFers. The introduction of Brian Hayes and Leo Varadkar now does at a bit of width and maybe creates the impression that any FG cabinet will comprise of people who are at least recognised. However to get there they need to offer a vision and attract people.
What, like Tony Blair does?
The rhetoric of opposition spokesperson (and this is seems to be a universal) has always tended towards the extreme. Leo is no exception. The crucial question is will the increase in unemployment numbers be largely confined to the construction sector or will it spill out to other sectors (e.g. the retail sector in the event of lower consumer spending). Another critical aspect is not so much the 5% barrier but the turnover - if people find work in a relatively short-time or whether we are witnessing a slow increase in longer-term unemployment. It remains to be seen how the trends will evolve.
I would like to take up one thing Simon states: ‘The fall of the celtic tiger is far more due to international effects rather then what Fianna Fail have done.’ While this is true to some extent (sub-prime meltdown, international growth rates, etc.) a key element is the shift away from export-related growth to property/consumer spending led growth. And this is a feature of the long standing deficit in the economy - the failure to create a vibrant indigenous enterprise base. The economic growth of the 1990s was fueled by multi-nationals. We failed, however, to build on this growth by developing a strong native enterprise base. There was a sense that property speculation was equivalent to creating goods and services that could be traded internationally (at least in terms of maintaining high growth rates). This is the ultimate failure of the Irish economy - one that David McWilliams analyses in the recent Sunday Business Post. Yes, an internationally open economy cannot ‘control’ all aspects of its environment - but what it can control, Government policy (and the opposition) has failed to address in a meaningful way.
This country is in a mess of our own making. If you walk naked into a storm and get ill, you can’t blame the weather; you should have sat inside or worn a coat.
We imported lots of stuff we haven’t yet paid for (cars, TVs etc.) and therefore deserve the recession that’s upon us now. The US was just a middleman in our dealings with China for example, the Chinese have a trillion dollars and we owe lots of money to Americans. Taken together, this is just what happens if we borrow stuff from China. There is no point asking the ECB cutting rates and debasing the euro - we owe dollars to China and America, not euros. Taken as a whole I suspect the EU’s debts are mostly denominated in dollars, anybody got figures on this?
This insanity was due to some psychological nonsense whereby lots of Irish people thought they were rich. It’s easy to import luxury goods when you think you’re rich, but someday we have to do some work and pay off the bills. Anyway, many fools in Ireland thought that they were rich because other Irish fools were willing to sign big mortgages - the whole thing is so laughable that we shouldn’t waste time discussing house prices any more - it was all just a mirage which caused us to become lazy and to borrow to import.
Government could have stopped this. The property bubble should have been nipped in the bud. It wouldn’t be nanny statist - if anything the vested interests in the property sector (including selfish voters) were doing the interfering. Keeping trade and debt levels under control are just the sort of thing that government does do all the time, but the eye was taken off the ball.
We all need to understand the last 10 years (or maybe 90 years) in order to understand the present and plan for the future.
There is no point asking the ECB cutting rates and debasing the euro - we owe dollars to China and America, not euros. Taken as a whole I suspect the EU’s debts are mostly denominated in dollars, anybody got figures on this?
Surely as the dollar falls and euro rises our debt in dollars drop compared to our value of currency. The fact that our debt is in dollars doesn’t matter we can pay for it in Euros.
Indeed Simon,
but there’s a bit more to it than that I think. To recap: as a gross oversimplification, I think it can be summarized as ‘the eurozone owe lots of dollars to China’. Individuals in Europe owe euros to their banks, those banks owe dollars to US banks, and the borrowed dollars end up in China because the whole developed world borrows goods from China.
If the euro plummets, so do our euro-denominated wages. We still have to do a dollar’s worth of exports to be able to pay off one dollar of debt. The euro is to a large extent just internal matter to the eurozone. Most of the international debts and trade deficits are (I presume) in dollars.
A plunging euro might seem nice for indebted individuals in the eurozone, but their banks still owe the dollars and therefore the EU as a whole would still be in debt and we’d just have a complete banking system failure.
Individuals borrowed euros from banks. Those banks borrowed dollars. The euros were used to import stuff. The importers used the euros to buy dollars in order to buy the stuff off China. All the euro transactions cancel out and it ends up that the EU owes dollars to China.
PS: I suppose I should make the obvious warning that I’m not really qualified (in the traditional sense of the word) to rant as much about economics. But the traditional pundits have been proved wrong for the last 6 months by every piece of news.
woo that is very complicated territory that you are getting into there. One that i myself are only begining to look into all be it in my amatur way. The current fall in the dollar is making aot of countries such as China move more of their foreign currency reserves into Euros. Also some nations (i think Iran and Venezuela) are moving the pricing of oil to Euros as well. This means that what the US had for so long with the world’s reserve currency being the Dollar giving them a “free lunch” so to speak this is moving to Europe. (America has been running a trade defeict since the 1970s so it is nothing new about 30% or so with Europe this year http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c0003.html)
This might interest you.
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/pls/portal/docs/PAGE/PGP_PRD_CAT_PREREL/PGE_CAT_PREREL_YEAR_2008/PGE_CAT_PREREL_YEAR_2008_MONTH_02/6-15022008-EN-AP.PDF
Anyway maybe someone more qualified would better answer that question.