This weekend I was honored to be a guest of a group of real patriots of our country - a group of extraordinary people who over 40 weeks, one Sunday after another, take their families and friends into the streets of Ballyhea and Charleville to protest against the injustice of the banks bondholders bailouts.
It is a remarkable group of people - coming from all walks of life, united not by an ideology or by a vested interest, but by the knowledge that what is being done to our country behind the veil of the banking crisis is simply wrong. It is wrong on a multitude of levels - ranging from ethics to politics to economics to social justice. The people behind this protest are also united by their concerns for the future of Ireland, for the rising wave of emigration, for the simple fact that our country capacity to recover from this crisis is being destroyed for the sake of rescuing a handful of institutional bondholders.
I felt truly honored - and there can be no other word to describe it - to have been asked to speak to these courageous people last night, to share a delightful pint and a long conversation with them, and to march alongside them today.
Here are a couple of pictures from the march.
The group run a website listing all bonds coming due for repayment, called bondwatchireland.blogspot.com and a Facebook page for their events (link here). These are, in my view, a must to follow for anyone concerned with what has been happening in Ireland over the last 3 years.
It is a remarkable group of people - coming from all walks of life, united not by an ideology or by a vested interest, but by the knowledge that what is being done to our country behind the veil of the banking crisis is simply wrong. It is wrong on a multitude of levels - ranging from ethics to politics to economics to social justice. The people behind this protest are also united by their concerns for the future of Ireland, for the rising wave of emigration, for the simple fact that our country capacity to recover from this crisis is being destroyed for the sake of rescuing a handful of institutional bondholders.
I felt truly honored - and there can be no other word to describe it - to have been asked to speak to these courageous people last night, to share a delightful pint and a long conversation with them, and to march alongside them today.
Here are a couple of pictures from the march.
The group run a website listing all bonds coming due for repayment, called bondwatchireland.blogspot.com and a Facebook page for their events (link here). These are, in my view, a must to follow for anyone concerned with what has been happening in Ireland over the last 3 years.
6 comments:
Thank you Constantine for taking the time and trouble; hopefully your example will prompt a few more to take up the cause. This single issue - it's crushing us at so many levels, not least the emotional, it has an almost universally adverse effect on all of us here, we should universally resist it.
That the bank bondholders should be rewarded for their failure of judgement is wrong; that their private debt should be transferred to the public purse, wrong; that the ECB should use its muscle to so bully a weakened nation, wrong; that the EU/EC should be complicit in this abuse of one of its smallest member states, wrong; the logic that we should assume a debt - before interest - of €72bn, just to enable our Central Bank to borrow €100bn, much of which goest to then pay those failed bank bonds, wrong.
Worst of all wrongs, however, that our own political leadership should agree to all this, that they should be so governed by their fears (fear of the market, fear of the ECB, fear of Merkozy, fear of the media, fear of the party whip) that not a single one of them, not a one, can find it within his/her own conscience to cross the line and just say 'No, enough of this obscenity'.
So, again we thank you Constantin, not just for your visit this past weekend and the encouragement you offered, but for your incessant efforts to get people to understand just how wrong this all is. Keep up the fight, you and all the others at that level - David McW, Paul Somerville, Brian Lucey and so on - and we'll keep up our fight down here. Contagion - bring it on!
The man who wrote above me.... he is a true Irish hero, like so many others, unknown to the public....!
Sorry Diarmud, but I mean it!
Best
Georg
It really is like pulling teeth this effort to get focus on the awful and critical effects of bailing out those gamblers ( bondholders),but with validation from a man such as this ye must feel some hope of a recognition of the need to act. Well done......
Well done to all involved in this protest. The good people of Ballyhea and Charleville have set a fine example to every other community in Ireland. For once we have a voice like Diarmuid telling it like it is. The citizens of Ireland have been led up the garden path. My wish for 2012 is that more people mobilise themselves in this way all over our country. If Constantin and other well informed commentators would form a new political party they would have massive support and we would finally see our way out of all this madness.
Best wishes and Happy Christmas to all!
Well done to all involved in this protest. The good people of Ballyhea and Charleville have set a fine example to every other community in Ireland. For once we have a voice like Diarmuid telling it like it is. The citizens of Ireland have been led up the garden path. My wish for 2012 is that more people mobilise themselves in this way all over our country. If Constantin and other well informed commentators would form a new political party they would have massive support and we would finally see our way out of all this madness.
Best wishes and Happy Christmas to all!
Well done to the Ballyhea & Charleville Protest Against the Bailouts. i to am appalled at what is being done to this country by out politicians. I naively voted for FG in the last election in the vain hope that they would be different, how wrong i was, the election was pointless, we should just have left FF where they were. We have been betrayed by our political class. the Dail is nothing more than a panto at this stage with the the opposition simply saying the opposite of what the government proposes, knowing full well that they would exactly the same if in power!. We do need a new political party, with real leadership, not one that does what civil servants tell them to do.
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