Either Newsweek haven’t been paying much attention to reality or they’re just being willfully ignorant, as Cowen has overseen the biggest banking bailout in Europe by some distance, with Irish intervention into the banking sector at a massive 231.8% of GDP, compared to an EU average of 31.2%. (The second highest public intervention in the EU was Belgium’s at 92% of GDP.)
Maybe in Newsweek’s alternate universe throwing billions of euro of public money into banks to cover their losses doesn’t count as spending or, more probably, to the likes of Newsweek, bailing out banks is the right way to spend money, maintaining public services and jobs is the wrong way, and so Cowen remains a hero to them.
Aside from the bank bailouts, Cowen has helped saddle ordinary Irish people with levels of unemployment that ICTU put at a minimum of 17.5%, the biggest drop in GNP in the EU during the first year of the recession, the return of mass emigration, a gigantic and ever increasing debt/GDP level, the second highest cost of borrowing on the market for any EU country, 300,000 empty houses…and on and on.
For someone that has so slavishly attempted to please the markets by plundering public services, one might have expected better results -some “Fiscal taskmaster”.
One (ex-) Fianna Fáiler who won’t be winning any awards is Senator Ivor Callely. Following in a long Fianna Fáil tradition of corruption, it was revealed that Callely had fiddled his Senate expenses, claiming €81,015 since 2007 for travel from his second home in Cork while actually living in Clontarf, and this has been followed by the recent revelation that he had claimed over €2,000 from 2002 to 2005 for mobile phone handsets bought from a company that had actually ceased trading in 1994.
Callely, fresh from briefly fleeing the country and clearly disgruntled that Fianna Fáil had bothered to investigate one of their members over corruption allegations, has refused so far to resign from the Senate.
Cowen and Callely represent the two sides of Fianna Fáil – craven acceptance of the capitalist agenda and blatant corruption. The sooner that working-class people in Ireland see the back of Cowen, Callely and their ilk and replace them with a real alternative the better.
Contracting Out is a company headed by Sue Holmes, a senior consultant adviser to NI Water. This outsourcing company was awarded a contract by NI Water without any competition from other firms involving 130 days work by the firm at £775 a day, amounting to £100,000 of public money. On top of this, Holmes’ company had a 6% “success fee” for “savings identified” (not actual savings) of which she had claimed to have identified savings of £23m!
With harsher spending cuts in the pipeline, the Assembly’s current batch of cutbacks are already hitting schools and other educational facilities hard in East Belfast. In July, with construction set to begin, the Education Minister Caitriona Ruane announced that Strandtown Primary School would not be getting the new school building it was promised years ago.
Up to 1,000 firefighters poured into the conference room of TUC headquarters for a mass meeting of the London Fire Brigades Union (FBU) on Tuesday night (24 August).