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Very interesting take by Henry over on Crooked Timber on the Financial Times by Matthew Engel article over the weekend on how bad things have gotten here.
The Fianna Fail party’s support seems to be cratering, despite the ineptitude of the leader of the main opposition party, Fine Gael. The last major opinion poll saw Fianna Fail coming third behind the Labour party for the first time since polling began.
In the past, Irish voters have taken a remarkably supine attitude towards political corruption. But then, the major scandals broke during a period of rapidly increasing prosperity. Now, not only is the bezzle out in the open for everyone to see, but voters appear to be drawing connections between massive fraud among the economic elite and their own prosperity (there was a 125,000 person protest march in Dublin yesterday). It wasn’t too long ago that pundits like Thomas Friedman were depicting Ireland as a poster-boy for liberalized deregulation and economic success. Now, the country is better seen as an advertisement of all the things that can go wrong when swift liberalization, lax regulation and cosy relationships between business and politics come together.
Soem interesting comments in the thread – notably from our own P O’Neill and EWI among others. It is interesting to see just how badly things are getting for our international profile – irrespective of the soundbites back here – poster children who fall from grace are rarely back on the pedastal any time soon.
I guess it’s a great distraction for them – the Brit journos I mean – who were all over the market boys like jam a couple of years ago.
GB had the right formula, the rest of sluggish Europe had a lot to learn from it; the euro would collapse before..well sooner or later it inevitably must and the free-for-all non-regulated Sterling British model of economic success would reign supreme. Sound familiar?
A bust housing bubble; a quaking financial sector; billions already poured into ailing banks like water into a bottomless bucket; a currency in free-fall; a national debt that’s about to reach for the stratosphere; tens of thousands of jobs being lost every week – on any reasonable interpretation of the economic facts they’re far more likely to default on their sovereign debts than we are in the medium term. No wonder they all want to write about Ireland. A ‘cute hoor’ way of sniping at the euro,to boot.