Fintan O’Toole, over at Open Democracy, telling it how it is and how it might be.<\/p>\n
The long-threatened arrival of the IMF bogeymen was a major loss for Ireland as a proud, independent nation. But this should not blind us to the opportunity to reinvent and restore our sovereignty.<\/p>\n
On the\u00a0News at One<\/em><\/a> on 18 November, the\u00a0RT\u00c9<\/a> reporter Brian Dowling mentioned that one of his colleagues had called the department of finance that morning to ask where the talks between Irish officials and representatives of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund were taking place and who exactly was attending. He was told: \u201cYou really have to ring the IMF.\u201d The international bankers, it seems, were already in\u00a0charge<\/a> – even of the job of telling the Irish people who is in charge.<\/p>\n The arrival of the IMF was a case of long threatening come at last. Those three letters have been the secular equivalent of the fires of hell: the ultimate warning against resistance to the government\u2019s strategy of making the rescue of the banks the overwhelming national priority.<\/p>\n The bogeymen are now in the building, but their coming has been foreshown so often that it seems both inevitable and anti-climactic. Watching the furtive shots of the disappointingly avuncular-looking\u00a0Ajai Chopra<\/a>, whose IMF team had come to scrutinise our books and negotiate our\u00a0fate<\/a>, it was hard not to think of TS Eliot\u2019s line from\u00a0The Hollow Men<\/em>: \u201cThis is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Or, in our case, with a drone. Instead of drums and trumpets, our little\u00a0apocalypse<\/a>was played out against the background noise of the\u00a0taoiseach<\/em> and the minister for finance murmuring evasive and mechanical denials. When the world\u2019s media tuned to a\u00a0D\u00e1il <\/a>speech by\u00a0Brian Cowen<\/a> on 16 November that was expected to address the crisis, they heard only robotic assurances that there was no \u201cimpending sense of crisis\u201d and impenetrable Cowenspeak about the \u201cfront-loading of consolidation\u201d.<\/p>\n If anything, indeed, the only thing the government managed to communicate in the course of the week was its own terrifying irrelevance. With Brian Cowen assuring us that Ireland is \u201cfully funded\u201d and Brian Lenihan\u00a0claiming<\/a> as late as 17 November that the Irish banks had \u201cno funding difficulties\u201d, the effect was merely to present Irish self- government to the world as a comic distraction from the real business at hand.<\/p>\n The two Brians painted themselves as the most deluded optimists since\u00a0Comical Ali<\/a>stood before the cameras in Baghdad and insisted with a straight face that the Iraqi army was crushing the Americans, even as the latter\u2019s tanks appeared on the horizon.<\/p>\n The new motto of the state seemed to be drawn from the Roman satirist Juvenal\u2019s summation of autocratic folly:\u00a0Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas<\/em>. Or: This is what I want, I insist on it. Let my will stand as a reason.<\/p>\n (this part republished under Creative Commons licence)<\/p>\n