I write these words on a train that has just pulled out of Enniscorthy taking me to Dublin for an NUJ event.
Dublin is, of course, the seat of government here in Ireland.
It is where the IMF team have their hotel rooms.
I knew some weeks ago that the International Monetary Fund had prepared a coup de tat against the Irish people.
They have been aided and abetted in that by our political leaders.
We voted them in so this was an act of national suicide.
I just received a text from a Fine Gale party manager in Donegal South West saying that the Fianna Fail brand was holding up remarkably well despite all.
In that case we don’t deserve to govern ourselves.
I was in Enniscorthy to speak at a public meeting of See Change the publicly funded campaign to end stigma, prejudice and discrimination against people with mental health problems.
It is a worthy and worthwhile campaign.
I doubt the IMF will agree as their bean counters take a fiscal chainsaw to our health budget over the next few years.
However we did this to ourselves. Collectively we allowed Fianna Fail to run a free fraud zone for bankers, developers and assorted cronies.
The Irish political lexicon has a term for it the “Golden Circle”.
The term in intertwined with the scandalous career of Charles Haughey.
It was “CJ” that ushered in an era of the most appalling hedonism in Fianna Fail.
Although the party appropriated the iconography of Ireland’s struggle for independence it was self-interest for the Golden Circle as opposed to self-determination that interested Haughey and his cronies.
In the “Ninety Eight” Enniscorthy’s narrow streets ran red as poorly equipped Irish volunteers fought with professionally trained British soldiers.
In my fathers’ Mayo 1798 is still remembered as “bliana na bhFrancaic” the year of the French.
The British government banned any mention of the year for fear that people would remember.
“Who fears to speak of Ninety Eight?” was a rallying call.
In the period of the United Irishmen (1791) a young Scottish radical wrote a poem about Scotland’s capitulation to England’s expansion throughout the archipelago.
“A parcel of Rogues”, which became a song, was about how Scotland had not been defeated on the battlefield, but had been sold out by her own in the act of Union in 1707.
Fareweel to all our Scottish fame
Fareweel our ancient glory
Fareweel even to our Scottish Cname
Saefamed in martial story
Now Sark rins to the Solway sands
And Tweed rins to the Ocean.
To mark where England’s province stands
Sic a parcel of rogues in a nation
What force or guile could not subdue
Through many warlike ages
Is wrought now by a coward few
For hireling traitors wages
The English steel we could disdain
Secure in valours station.
But English gold has been our bane
Sic a parcel of rogues in a nation.
I would, ere I had seen the day
When treason thus could sell us
My auld grey head had lain in clay
Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace
But pith and power ‘till my last hour
I’ll make this declaration.
We were bought and sold for English gold
Sic a parcel of rogues in a nation.
Robert Burns went on to become a Scottish icon in death, falsely remembered in a thousand Masonic piss ups, but his song hit the mark.
The predatory expansion of the English state could not have succeeded without being ably assisted by local allies in the Celtic countries.
In Ireland at least in this part of it, we had, in the 20th century rolled back that historical tide.
We had ejected the British and we had started, with many wrong turns, to carve our own place in the world.
The Mayo side of my house were “out” in 1916, my grandmothers brothers served time interned in Frongoch prison camp and those lads were central to the insurgency in West Mayo in 1920-21.
By the end of the fighting my grandfather was an “OC” running a network of couriers, spies and assassins under the noses of the British.
My paternal grandparents were founder members of Fianna Fail and it gives me no pleasure to look back on the failure of the Fianna Fail project and, perhaps, the entire Irish independence project.
What happened in Dublin over the past week brought to a halt a process that had started in the Mansion House in January 1919.
Indeed go
Going back to the carnage of Enniscorthy to the ambush at Carrowkennedy and the political triumphs of 1918 Irish sovereignty was the central theme.
We were saying quite clearly that we weren’t British. We wanted to be separate and, if need be, we would assert that right in arms.
The corrupt credit binge facilitated by Fianna Fail and their cronies has brought this state to insolvency and where the Irish people no longer elect their real leaders.
Dail Eireann has no become as powerless as the Scottish parliament or the Northern assembly in matters fiscal.
A clear ability of any sovereign parliament is the ability to determine spending, revenue etc.
This power is now, effectively, been taken away from Dail Eireann.
As with the UK government in 1976 when the IMF laid down the terms of their £3 billion bail out of bankrupt Britain the people from the International Monetary Fund will set the country’s economic and fiscal policy.
The UK is weighing to bail out this insolvent polity.
This act of altruism is actually highly self centred as all the banks across most of the developed world had, in effect, unprotected sex with each other is if the Irish bank fails then it takes under a major slice of Britain’s’ banks.
Just as the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sent the dominoes toppling towards Northern Rock and the Bank of Scotland so the failure of Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland would send another tsunami over the City of London.
As for our gallant allies in Europe the threat of Ireland’s fiscal mess to the stability of the cannot be underestimated.
If Ireland falls then Portugal could go next. The nightmare scenario is that such a collapse of dominoes would topple Spain the fourth biggest economy in the euro zone.
At that point critical mass is achieved and the possibility of an entire currency going into meltdown is highly likely.
However the effect that anyone experiences as history washes over them are the local and the national.
The Irish independence project has been halted.
It wasn’t halted by the Brits or the Eurocrats, but by our own.
Although the TDs we elects have little real power any more we should punish those that have brought this ignominy down on us.
If Fianna Fail aren’t in opposition for a very long time then I hope that the IMF stay permanently because we aren’t fit to rule ourselves.
That is the lesson of Fianna Fail.
They should just go, but they have proved they have no shame and, indeed, they have no gra for this country.
I hope against hope that they will be sick with shame on their deathbeds for what they have done to this country they claim to love.
Little chance of that of course.
They have no shame.
Last night in Enniscorthy I was in the company of the fine people of Ireland.
People concerned about their local health service and giving of their time freely, as I was, to make things better.
They did not cause this chaos, they did not cause this national shame, but they and their children and my children will pay of it.
After 90 tumultuous years of independence we are, again, no longer in charge of our own destiny and that really should be Fianna Fail’s epitaph.
I have a horrible feeling that it won’t be the end of them, but it should be.
