Are there any politicians or political parties in this country who are in favour of the 3.1bn adjustment in the budget?
I haven't found any here in Cork, and nationally there doesn't seem to be any. Even Fine Fail, who you'd have hoped might have learned something about fiscal responsibility since their fiscal recklessness destroyed the country, are in favour of a 2.4bn adjustment. If we lived in Germany, Holland, Switzerland etc. there'd be at least a few politicians if not a party advocating paying down debt and taking a long term view.
But all I can find is the likes of the Fiscal Council (what is the point of them if the government can go and ignore them? Are they as useless as the financial regulator was before the crash?) and certain economists advocating going ahead with the full 3.1bn cut - i.e., the same kind of people who warned about the property crash that nobody saw coming.
Ireland - continually doomed to failure? Or perhaps I am wrong in thinking that blind optimism isn't the way to go. We are one of the worlds most optimistic nations, and sher don't things always work themselves out in the end.