Emergency; Jim Connolly; jim@td4clare.com

                                                                   State of Emergency

According to Article 28.3.3.of the Constitution of Ireland, a state of emergency can be declared to secure the public safety and the preservation of the state in time of war or armed rebellion.

A state of emergency gives total power to the Oireachtas to enact laws deemed essential for this purpose. This was done in 1939 at the start of the Second World War.

I argue that Ireland is now under such threat due to economic factors that a state of “financial emergency” should be declared as soon as possible.

It would then be possible to deal immediately with the deliberately contrived tangle of self protective contract laws that politicians, professionals, trade unions and the Civil Service concocted over the years which, they insist, make it impossible to radically reduce the cost to the nation of paying their super sized salaries, expenses, bonuses and pensions ----- even in these desperate times.

A state of financial emergency could be also be used to do a house clearing of the miles of red tape which act as a stranglehold on enterprises old and new across all sectors. One published example illustrates the point: A truck delivering new cars from east to west has to get 4 licences at a cost  of  250 each  to travel through 4 counties.  The extra paper work, cost and time wasted is indefensible. It represents more work for bureaucrats, of course, at the citizen’s expense.

Also at home, it would clear the way to legislate in favour of those trapped in negative equity.

On the international front, a declaration of a state of financial emergency would finally demonstrate to the world Ireland’s  determination to reform its economy which currently threatens financial stability in the EU.

A referendum would be required to insert “threats to the economy” along with war and armed rebellion in Article 28.3.3. in the Constitution [ if it isn’t already in there somewhere].Examples exist in other countries.

The next government could do this quickly and, if passed, Ireland could be in a far healthier financial  space by the middle of 2011.

Even our new Taoiseach might at last be earning less than the president of America.

If elected to Dail Eireann I will try to persuade enough Independents to unite on this issue to make it happen.

Danny Lordan

Danny Lordan

Convent Road

Clonakilty

Co Cork

My name is Danny Lordan and I was born in Clonakilty on 2^nd August 1951. I have lived and worked in Clonakilty all my life. Like many families growing up in Ireland in the fifties, I saw many of my aunts and uncles emigrate to the USA and the UK. There was very little work or economic activity in Ireland. For a few years in the sixties we saw a small bit of economic activity but this was soon again followed by long years of near depression, emigration and stagnation. We had similar experiences in the seventies, eighties and nineties. During these years we saw alot of our siblings emigrate again to the USA the UK and beyond.

Then along came the “Celtic Tiger” years (whoever thought up that sound-bite should be shot, as it is the most inappropriate and meaningless tag name imaginable). I am not going to comment further here about what went on in Ireland during these years. It has been well documented and spoken about ad-infinitum. Suffice to say that after the passing of this period we now find Ireland and its people in very difficult and traumatic circumstances.

This has been caused primarily by an utter lack of leadership, patriotism and vision. Vested self and party interests have sucked the very life blood from our once great country and its people. What has happened is an outrage. The system of Government has utterly failed the citizens of Ireland and nothing more than its complete abolition will save this country.

Ireland needs new leaders, men and women with vision and the will to re-establish the organs of state. We need leaders who will radically overhaul our system of governance and re-appraise our vision of Ireland. We need leaders who are honest and who will work for the common good of all.

I am prepared to do whatever I can to facilitate that transformation. I love my Country and I know that the Irish people will overcome their current difficulties with their strong hearts and spirit. We have survived many years of oppression and famine to say we will not triumph over this adversity. We need to get back to our communities and build this country again from the ground up. This time the people need to be sure that they never again give away their power to parties or self interest groups that plague our country and rob it of its rightful inheritance.

Join me in the re-birth of a Nation. You can contribute your ideas to http://www.emeraldquill.net/. Together we can create all the changes required.

Le Dea Ghui          Danny Lordan      

Vincent Browne ( Irish Times )

Delusion of no choice is the ultimate trick

VINCENT BROWNE
Wed, Dec 01, 2010
The real genius of our warped social system is the fact that the rest of us have been persuaded it all makes sense
HOW DID we devise a society in which a private, rich elite got control of the country’s financial institutions, which made them spectacularly rich.
And then when the financial institutions were about to collapse, because of the recklessness of the rich elite, our democratically elected Government thought it in our interests to bail out these institutions, even though doing so would impoverish our entire society while the rich, reckless servants of this elite (ie the bankers) walked off with massive pensions paid for by the rest of us?
And, incidentally, I am not talking here about Sean FitzPatrick, whose life has been ravaged by what has happened, but about the boyos in AIB, the Bank of Ireland and Irish Nationwide. And how is it that our society ordains that those who must pay for the crisis are not just the rich elite and their cheerleaders in Government, but by society generally, including those who hardly benefited at all in the good times?
Isn’t there something wrong with a social arrangement which rewards some people hundreds of times more than others, not because of the social benefit they bring to society but because of a quirk in the wealth-distribution mechanism that privileges people because of their social position and/or their membership of a protected profession and/or their placement in the financial network and/or their lucky dip into the goody bag of State preferment?
And the genius of the social system that brings us these absurdities is that it brings with it devices that persuade most of the rest of us that this all makes sense: that there is no other viable social arrangement, that our democratically elected governments and politicians should collude in these mockeries of fairness and rationality; that any other arrangement has never worked anywhere else and therefore could never work; and/or that any other arrangement would bring not liberation and real democracy but, inevitably, tyranny and even more misery; that allowing people a direct say even on profound transformations in our societal arrangements is a recipe for mob rule and chaos.
That latter delusion is the ultimate triumph of the system we have bought into – that even we ourselves should have no say in the decisions on how we are to be governed and by what rules and by what standards.
For this is precisely what has happened. We, in this society, have been inflicted with the massive debts of the financial institutions controlled by a reckless, rich elite; and the consequence of this is that those who have benefited least from our bizarre social arrangements are now further impoverished; and all of us have had to surrender our sovereign entitlement to determine our own financial and social arrangements to foreign institutions, with us having no say at all in that surrender.
What is really depressing about all this is that it is apparent none of this will change with the people being given an opportunity to exercise their “democratic right” to vote in national elections. The “democratic right” extends only to deciding which of a coalition of parties is to form a new government and neither of the available options – the present crowd and the Fine Gael-Labour crowd – will make any appreciable change, no matter what the people might want.
Not that the people want anything that much different anyway for they have been persuaded by the media there is no alternative. Nobody, for instance, asked anybody involved in the EU-IMF negotiations why a further debt burden has to be heaped on us to give a further bailout to the banks.
Indeed, nobody asked why is it worse to allow banks to collapse than to allow societies to collapse or why it is worse to allow banks to be broken than to allow lives to be broken.
All the more surprising when even that bastion of the financial and business world, theFinancial Times , also thinks this is bizarre. On Monday, it said in an editorial: “As Ireland can no longer ensure the solvency both of its sovereign [ie State] and of its banking system, Europe must choose between two contagion risks. Put an end to Dublin’s suicidal promise to make whole its banks’ senior creditors and risk a wave of bank failures. Or keep the Irish State on the hook for private losses and risk an even more virulent spread of sovereign troubles. This should be a simple, brutal choice: many banks cannot survive a sovereign default. This is a time to strengthen sovereign defences and prepare for bank restructuring [ie let the banks take the hit.]”.
© 2010 The Irish Times