Re: The Guardian: Michael D. Higgins Becomes Irish President
Post 3
Time to Choose Your Symbol
Ireland’s Bread and Circuses
by HARRY BROWNE
Dublin.
Last Monday, the Irish state paid €1.465 billion (about $2 billion) to senior unsecured boldholders in Bank of Ireland, as part of its obligation under the blanket guarantee of Irish banks issued by the government three years ago this week. This was, according to the Bondwatchwebsite that is keeping a grim tally of these things, part of a total of €4.3 billion paid this month by a government that continues to impose crippling austerity measures on its people.
That’s a lot of bread being taken from our mouths and fed to international financiers. You’d think we’d be up in arms about it. But Ireland’s chattering classes love, above all other things, an election, and next month’s presidential election in the Republic is offering one hell of a circus to distract us from the beggaring of the people by the state, in partnership with the unholy troika of the EU, IMF and European Central Bank. The story of how we are bleeding into the coffers of the bondholders barely merits a mention.
The three frontrunners, according to bookies’ odds, all come, broadly, from the Left. Poet and politician Michael D. Higgins has been holding up the left wing of the Irish Labour Party almost single-handedly for many years — so many years that his age, 70, is seen as his chief vulnerability. No one calls him “Higgins”: he is always, mostly affectionately, “Michael D.” Left-wing campaigns have usually been able to count on his support even when his party leadership was not so sure; the slight downside, from campaigners’ point of view, was the passionate but long and rambling speech he was sure to make at your event. Few who were there will ever forget the night in 1989 when hundreds of solidarity activists filled the National Concert Hall to welcome Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. Michael D. seemed like he would burst with emotion as he made the main welcoming address, but it was anyone’s bet when it would finish so that Ortega could speak. (When Ortega did speak he was so dull that we were instantly nostalgic for the interminable passion of Michael D. — only the sight of Ortega’s beautiful wife Rosario Murillo sitting on stage in her spectacular blood-red dress kept our eyes from shutting.) As a government minister looking after the arts and communications for a few short years in the 1990s, Michael D. achieved real popularity with the constituencies who benefited from his department’s largesse.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/29/irelands-bread-and-circuses/
