We all know FF made a mess of things. With a national government, each party would blame the others for any mistakes.
Ireland's Unemployment problem is solved
- Thread starter Sunny
- Start date
We all know FF made a mess of things. With a national government, each party would blame the others for any mistakes.
They have been talking about that for years and announced the 450 jobs a few weeks back. Of course most of the project doesn't have funding and is to be done over at least 10 years or something!
PetrolHead
Registered User
- Messages
- 300
Fair play to FF. I knew they would get us out of this mess.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2010/0928/economy.html
OMG...
I've never seen a press release so dripping in desperation...
With those muppets at the helm we're headed straight for the rocks...
Lads... I'm off to the bar to get Taoiseach'd... who's with me...???
[broken link removed] is the link to lisbon.ie, it lists out the consequences if we vote no, but its actually an uncanny description of our current situation.
How so???
Is this new phrase going to get used everywhere and maybe get into the dictionary
Can't wait for the weekend, gonna hit the town and get Taoiseach'd!
We would have been toast well before now. Only reason we have been able to borrow and still have a banking system is because of the ECB and the fact that we have access to a €750 billion stability fund if needed. Europe doesn't want to leave Ireland to the wolves. If we had voted no, I don't think the germans would give a damn about us. Voting yes to Lisbon didn't get us into this mess. It does give us a chance if surviving it though.
With all due respect, that is just your opinion and it sounds like the type of scare tactics that came out of the yes camp during the Lisbon debate. I don't remember anything in the Lisbon treaty preventing us from borrowing if we voted no and we havent touched the stability fund so both those arguements don't stack up. In relation to the banking system, Icelands banking system went bang and they are currently paying less interset than us on their Government bonds.
My initial point was, and if you take a look at my previous post, nearly every one of the consequences listed for voting no to the Lisbon treaty are happeing to us right now.
We were told that if Irish banks failed our credibility would damaged and we would not be able to raise money in the international markets and who the whole ethos was that we couldn't let what happened in Iceland happen here. Iceland is now paying less interest on their government bonds than we are which means that the markets have more confidence in Iceland than in Ireland.
I don't think Iceland are in a better position that us though. Take a look at their economy.
Tak a look at ours.
I'm going to be shot for quoting wiki - but here goes:
"On 28 October 2008, the Icelandic government raised interest rates to 18%, (as of August 2010, it is 7%) a move which was forced in part by the terms of acquiring a loan from the IMF. After the rate hike, trading on the Icelandic króna finally resumed on the open market, with valuation at around 250 ISK per Euro, less than one-third the value of the 1:70 exchange rate during most of 2008, and a significant drop from the 1:150 exchange ratio of the week before. Iceland has appealed to Nordic countries for an additional €4 billion in aid to avert the continuing crisis.
Thousands of Icelanders have moved from the country after the collapse and about half of those moved to Norway. In 2005, 293 people moved from Iceland to Norway, while in 2009 this figure was 1,625 Icelanders to the same country."
Imagine what it would be like here if we had to devalue our currency to 1/3 of what it is today? Or if we had interest rates of 18%? Also, Iceland have already called in the IMF.
We don't have to be touching the stability fund. The presence of the fund and the fact that the ECB can buy Irish bonds means that as bad as things are, they could be a lot worse than they are if we didn't have European support.
People keep using Iceland as an example but no offence but that is amateur economics. Show me the last funding deal a Icelandic bank did in international markets.
This is absolutely true. In addition to that, the focus shouldn't be on "job creation". This is much too simplistic a view. If all we needed to do was create jobs then the easiest thing would be for the state to employ half the unemployed to dig ditches, and the other half to fill them up again. What we need is productive jobs, and the it is impossible for the state to provide productive jobs.
What is needed is capital investment in productive and competitive industries. What these are should not be decided by governement, the market is well capable of showing what is needed. If the government were serious about encouraging employment in the private sector, then it would scrap the minimum wage, reduce employer PRSI contributions, and reduce/abolish corporation taxes. All these would make Ireland more competitive for domestic and foreign investment.
HAHAHAHAHA
This is typical of government, and why its size should be restricted. I'm sure the reason for the additional jobs is going to be something like "extra services", but all it is is additional, unnecessary and damaging bureaucracy. I don't recall the numbers, but when the regional health boards were merged into the HSE, the number of especially managerial staff went through the roof.
Great system, where when you run an inefficient service way over budget, you get rewarded with extra money. Why on earth would they not increase their staff numbers?!?!?!
What got us into this mess is government at domestic and EU level and the ECB. Giving these institutions more power is making things worse, not better. If the Lisbon treaty had been designed to restrict the powers of the EU then it would have been a good thing. But increasing one of the largest and most wasteful bureaucracies on earth, and giving it powers that reduce/restrict economic and personal liberties will provide zero benefit.
The ECB was a central culprit in this mess, and Ireland would be better off if it were forced to restructure its debts now rather than later.
But you are assuming that there would be no support from the EU or ECB if Ireland had voted no. If anything the events of the past year, especially involving the way Greece seriously fudged its books on levels that can only be described as fraud, show that no matter what you do as a country you will be bailed out. It is complete fiction to suggest that anything else would have happened if Ireland had voted no.
No, we got ourselves in this mess. What other European country under the ECB has managed to allow a banking crisis almost destroy their economy. What other Country allowed something like Anglo happen under noses, fueled the bubble by pouring tax breaks into an already heated property market, allowed the public finances become so unbalanced and relaint on one sector in the economy etc etc.
We can blame other people if we want but the fault lies 100% with us. Not the ECB, not the EU and not the Lisbon Treaty.
Do you fancy Merkel's chances of presuading the German parliment to bailout Ireland and overpaid workers if we had said no to Lisbon. Supporting Greece will probably cost her the next election as is.
The German public, along with the French public, were not in support of the Lisbon treaty. Even Sarcozy said that France would have voted no if it had been put to the people. So your argument here is actually confirming the matter that the Lisbon vote would have made zero difference on a possible direct bail out.
I never said that Ireland was not to blame, it certainly needs to carry most of it. But what you are ignoring is that the ECB is in charge of the money supply and interest rates, and the individual member central banks collectlively control the ECB.
You say that banks lent too much and too risky, but where does that money come from? The central bank!!! So any reason you apply to the commercial banks here and their involvement in the mess are equally transferrable to the ECB which provides the money in the first place.
Every single country in Europe, even Germany, is in the midst of a banking crisis, this is not an isolated phenomenon to Ireland. But Ireland also has a personal debt crisis and a state budget crisis which is why the markets believe that Ireland is less likely to repay its debts than other countries and therefore makes Ireland's situation worse.
The point is that the solution to problems rooted in too much government interference is not to increase governments' size and power.