Drinking and the death of rural Ireland - the demise of pubs, the drink driving permit and isolation

Small rural pubs like this one in Templemore, 
Co. Tipperary are closing at a rapid pace

Don't you just love the way that story about Kerry County Councilor Danny Healy Rae's proposal on drink driving has gone global?

The bould Danny outraged all the politically correct nanny staters in Ireland last week by suggesting that customers in small rural pubs should be allowed to drive home slowly along quiet country roads after having a couple of pints.  

But it wasn't just the horror at what he was proposing that got to the PC brigade.   What made it even worse for the High and Mighty here was the international coverage the story got, since it fitted all the stereotypes about the Irish and booze, and it had the added bonus of an eccentric looking Kerryman at its center.

The sophisticates in Dublin were rigid with embarrassment.  Oh, the shame of it!  We were being made look like idiots -- sorry, that should be eejits -- before the entire world!

Papers, TV networks, the Huffington Post and other sites across the Europe, the U.S., Australia and further afield ran the story, with varying degrees of accuracy and extra chuckles added in.  

Most of them were in the Begorrah, Hic, Ye Won't Believe This! vein.  The headlines varied from the one on the U.S. Gawker site, "Lawmakers in Ireland to allow 'moderate' drunk-driving" (which is completely inaccurate) to the misleading one in the Toronto Star, "Irish county passes motion to let certain rural drivers drive while legally drunk" (they wouldn't be if the proposed legal change was made) to the follow-up one in Australia, "Irish county councilor insists drink-driving fight isn't over yet" (which managed to get the word fight in as well drink).  Seemingly the story even ran in China.  

"I know where I'm moving to," was a typical comment by readers on sites and blogs around the world.   For a day or two, the wilds of remote Kerry on the south west tip of Ireland seemed to be the center of the worldwide web.  

Here in Ireland, of course, we did not see the funny side.  We rarely do. We're remarkably thin-skinned when it comes to appreciating jokes, send-ups and humorous put-downs, especially if the words drink and Irish are mentioned in the same sentence.   

So the great and the good and the Holier Than Thou here all lined up to publicly ridicule and condemn Healy Rae for his "outrageous,” "irresponsible,"  "backward" suggestion.   The vitriol poured on him was quite extraordinary.

And no tactics -- including some papers getting comment from the mothers of youngsters who had been killed in road accidents -- were too cheap for the PC brigade to unload on him.

What none of them mentioned, however, was that he had a point. The pubs all over rural Ireland are dying.

The old men with the peaked caps who used to drive in a few miles from their farms out in the bogs for a pint or two in the evenings can't do it anymore because of our drink driving laws.  As a result many are suffering from isolation and depression.

The little country pubs are closing -- dozens of them every year -- and a way of life is being lost, a way of socializing which has been at the heart of rural Ireland for generations.

The effect of this has been devastating in the more remote and sparsely populated parts of rural Ireland.   Unable to go to the pub in the evenings, because they are afraid of being caught driving home again after a few drinks and losing their driving license as a result, they don't go out.

If you live a few miles from a village down a bog road, losing your license is not something you want to happen.   How can you get to the shops? To Mass? To the doctor? So rather than risk it, you stay at home.

Long before last week's controversy we were aware of the problems that this is causing, particularly for older people in rural areas.  The lack of social contact can lead to depression and worse.  So there's clearly a problem there.  

So far the PC brigade (mostly in Dublin) have said that the way to deal with this is taxi-sharing, local transport, pub owners bringing customers home in a minivan, etc.

This sounds sensible, but none of it works.  Public transport in rural areas is almost non-existent, and sharing taxis and minivans ignores the reality that people may want to go home at different times and that they may live many miles in opposite directions from the pub.

It's been tried and it rarely works on a sustainable basis.  Also many of the people we are talking about cannot afford to pay for taxis home.  They can just about afford the price of a couple of drinks.

The motion which Healy Rae introduced at the council and got passed on Monday of last week was actually a reasonable compromise.   It called for legislation to be introduced -- and it has to be national, not local legislation -- which would allow rural Gardai (police) to issue permits to allow rural dwellers to drive from their local pub "after having two or three drinks on little used roads driving on very low speeds."

Clearly when such legislation would be framed other qualifiers could be added in, like a high minimum age (over 40?), a clean driving record, a small engine car, a low maximum speed limit, a maximum distance from the driver's home and so on.

Healy Rae suggested the alcohol limit should be equivalent to two or three drinks (" a maximum of three.")   That could be kept at two, although clearly a lot depends on physical size and when the drinker last ate.  The present limit can equate to less than one pint for someone of average size who has eaten a small meal a couple of hours previously.

So Healy Rae's motion was not radical. It was a modest attempt to find a solution to a complex problem.   Or at least to start a discussion on how such a solution might be found.

The reality is that the kind of drinkers Healy Rae has in mind are not the problem.  The problem are the younger drivers who get out of their heads by downing a bottle of vodka and handful of pills and then get in their cars and go screaming down the road like a racing driver.  They're called boy racers, although a lot of them are in their twenties or thirties.

One of the mothers who was quoted in the media here this week condemning Healy Rae lost her son in a road accident and campaigns against drink driving.  But the young man who killed her son had consumed seven pints, six bottles of beer, five cans of beer, two vodkas, three shots and a line of cocaine before getting behind the wheel.

Of course everyone wants to keep someone like that off the road.   But there's a long way from that to the older, responsible, cautious driver carefully making his way slowly home after a couple of pints in his local pub.  

In case the Healy Rae line might gain some traction, all kinds of "experts" and politicians immediately flooded the media to put forward the conventional wisdom and insist there could be absolutely no change.  The idea was so stupid it wasn't worthy of intelligent discussion, they insisted.

A spokesman for Alcohol Action Ireland said that alcohol, even in small amounts, impairs driving ability.   Well, yes it does. But then so do lots of drugs we don't normally test for, like cocaine and marijuana, uppers and downers, ecstasy, and numerous prescription drugs like anti-depressants, blood thinners and so on.  Even normal cold and cough medicines can have an effect in high doses.

Then there are people with various medical conditions (diabetes, respiratory and heart problems and so on) whose driving can be affected either by their problems or by the drugs they have to take.   I know one elderly woman who has a bad case of "restless leg" and regularly kicks out to straighten her knee and relieve the tension when she is driving!  

The question is how much does alcohol in small amounts affect a person's ability to drive, and is it more than the effect of many other factors like the ones described above which are rarely considered.

I think we all know the answer to that one.

Small amounts of alcohol are no worse than small amounts of many other factors.  It's just that we have a thing about alcohol, to the point where it has become an obsession.

“Almost one in three crash deaths in Ireland is alcohol related. Even in small amounts, alcohol impairs driving ability - any amount of alcohol increases the risk of involvement in a fatal crash,” the Alcohol Action spokesman said.

Irrefutable evidence?  Hardly.  This is not evidence, it's propaganda.  

All the first sentence means is that in one-third of road deaths here, the driver(s) had some alcohol. We don't know how much.  It's possible that he or she had just one or two drinks.   Or maybe just one drink but also a handful of pills.   Or maybe they had a bottle or more of spirits and a load of other drinks as well.

We just don't know.   We don't know how much of a factor alcohol was in these deaths, although the implication being made is clear in the second sentence.  

The emotive line "any amount of alcohol increases the risk of involvement in a fatal crash" suggests that any drinking risks causing fatal car crashes and kills people.  Yes, a small amount does increase the risk but by how much?

More than lack of sleep and the risk of nodding off at the wheel?  More than getting hyped up by drinking too many cups of coffee or Red Bulls?  

This absolutist attitude to drink and driving ignores the truth staring us in the face.  What causes the death of people in most car crashes in Ireland (and probably everywhere else) is SPEED, not alcohol.

As Healy Rae says, if you have had a couple of pints and you drive slowly and carefully home along a quiet country road you know like the back of your hand, you are far less likely to kill someone than an alcohol free driver roaring down a main road at 90 miles an hour who may be on something.  

Healy Rae's motion, which calls for mature rural drivers to receive special permits that would allow very moderate drinking and driving, was passed by Kerry County Council by five votes to three.  Twelve councilors were absent from the chamber while another seven abstained from voting.  

Healy Rae, from a well known Kerry family of political mavericks, is himself a small bar owner in a rural area. There's no doubt he had one eye on his bar business and the other eye on increasing his vote when he put the motion to the council and got it through.  

There's also no doubt that many of those who were missing or abstained when the vote was taken did not want to be seen opposing the motion no matter what the big boys in Dublin think.  They know there's a lot of sympathy for this view at grassroots level.  Of course they also know that the chances of the national government agreeing to act on the Kerry Council motion and change the drink-drive law are nil.  

Country people know that an absolutist approach to social issues like this is unfair and disproportionate.  They know that the present regime is killing most of the small country pubs in Ireland -- hundreds have shut down in the last few years.  In the Healy Rae native village of Kilgarvan the village once had six pubs, now it has two.

The problem could be fixed, with a little common sense all round.  Unfortunately, given the power of the various PC groups in Ireland these days, it won't even be considered.

Meanwhile, the death of rural Ireland continues.

New Catholic Church leader in Ireland won’t change much - Eamon Martin’s take over from Sean Brady as Primate of Ireland

Monsignor Eamon Martin

Last week saw the beginning of the changing of the guard in the Irish Catholic Church.   Whether it will mean much of a change in attitude remains to be seen.

The jury will be out on this for a while, but the early signs are not good.

The new man at the top is to be Monsignor Eamon Martin, formerly of the Derry diocese, who was named last week as an assistant to the current head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady.

Brady had requested last year that someone be appointed "to help him with the workload."  The reality, however, was that Brady's position had become completely untenable following the revelations in a BBC TV program last year about his handling of the case of the notorious Father Brendan Smyth back in 1975.

Smyth perpetrated the most appalling child abuse north and south of the border and also in the U.S. when he was sent over there.  He was an obsessional, predatory abuser over four decades from the 1950s to the 1990s  as he was shifted around from parish to parish and even from country to country.

Dozens, possibly hundreds, of children were abused by him. Eventually, he was jailed in the north, and subsequently in the south. His case was so controversial that it led to the fall of the Fianna Fail-Labor government here in the 1990s over the attorney general's handling of Smyth's extradition.

Having brought down a taoiseach (prime minister) back then, it's not that surprising that Smyth, who died in prison here in 1997, is now responsible for bringing down a cardinal as well.

Brady has been clinging on since last year, but he had lost credibility and his position became hopeless. His problem was that he had been involved in the church investigation into Smyth in 1975 after accusations of abuse had surfaced.

This investigation was conducted by Brady and two other priests for the local bishop in the area where Smyth had been operating. Brady, a canon lawyer, has always insisted that his function was simply as a note taker. He passed his report on to the bishop for action and little or nothing was done.

What the BBC revealed last year was that during the investigation one boy had given Brady a list of names of children who were being abused. Brady did not inform their parents.

The program also revealed that the boy remembers that Brady played an active role in the investigation, interrogating the children who had made complaints.  This was confirmed by one of the other priests, who has since left the priesthood. So Brady was not just a note taker.

The questions that were asked during the investigation -- with Brady playing an active role -- were outrageous.  The boy, who Smyth had got to masturbate him during regular visits to his home, was asked if he liked doing this. He was also asked what happened to his body during the sessions and whether he would have done this with another boy or man.

This questioning was not only inappropriate but irrelevant. The boy was only 13 or 14 at the time and so was not old enough to consent.

Apart from his active role in the questioning and his failure to involve the police or to follow through on his report to the bishop, the most damning revelation was that Brady, although he had a list of names of children Smyth had abused, did not contact their parents to tell them. This was unforgivable in the eyes of parents who saw the program, and from that moment on Brady was a lame duck cardinal.

Last year he attempted to explain his actions -- or lack of actions -- by saying that he did everything that was expected of him as a priest back in the 1970s.  But that only made matters worse, and since then he has had zero credibility.

Mind you, all this has not stopped Brady trying to conduct business as usual, with the Catholic Church here a few weeks back condemning "the culture of death" that was being promoted in the developing debate about the introduction of very limited abortion in Ireland.

The church has been adopting its usual stance as the moral guide for the nation, urging legislators not to "exploit" the death of the Indian woman who died in a hospital in Galway last year from septicemia after being refused an abortion during a prolonged miscarriage.

But, of course, it is hard to occupy the high moral ground when your leader has no credibility.  So Brady, 73, has to go, and it is clear now that Rome wants him gone sooner rather than later.

Last week's appointment of  Martin as his "assistant" is supposed to carry Brady up to his planned retirement in 2015, but don't be surprised if he is gone in a few months.

So what of the new man?  Martin's new title is Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh (Brady is Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland) and at 52 is a virtual teenager in church terms.

When he ascends to the top job he will be one of the youngest men ever to lead the Catholic Church in Ireland. In that sense he is being seen as a clean break with the previous, discredited generation.  He is also an engaging communicator with a relaxed style.

But behind the genial exterior there is a steely conservatism that was immediately on view when the announcement of his appointment was made last week after a Mass in Armagh.   Asked about the current abortion debate, he firmly responded that it was the church's duty to protect life from the moment of conception to the time of natural death.

Flanked on one side by Brady and on the other by the Papal Nuncio, Martin's remarks made it very obvious that although the generations might be changing, there was no change in the message.

So don't expect any discussion of grey areas.   It will be absolutes as usual.   The church will lay down the law. The faithful (what's left of them) will follow.

Afterwards there was a more relaxed gathering in a hall in which the new man answered questions from the media, surrounded by admiring priests, nuns and some children.

There was one particularly revealing moment. In answer to some question, Martin said that he had grown up as one of 12 children in an ordinary family in Derry. There was a momentary pause and total silence.

Then Brady beamed an ecstatic smile and led the applause as all the clerics in the hall clapped and smiled happily. Twelve children!  Isn't that wonderful!

Well, no it's not. It's more than likely the result of the church's ban on contraception.

But then this has always been a very Irish attitude to sex and family size, one encouraged by the Catholic Church. Sex outside marriage is wrong. But once inside marriage, sex is acceptable, as long as it is natural and no contraception is used.

The "big families" that were so common in Ireland until recently were something to be celebrated, even if the family lived on a small farm producing barely enough income for a couple to survive on, or even if the parents lived in a small council house in a town or city and earned barely enough to feed and clothe themselves.   Parental responsibility did not come into it.

It was the state's duty to provide housing, schooling, health care, unemployment benefit if the parents were out of work, and so on.  So there was no reason to limit family size.   In fact the reverse was the case, because the more kids you had, the more benefits you got.

Martin smiled in a slightly embarrassed way as the applause rolled around him. Unspoken in the air hung the idea that the clerics were thinking.   Oh, these Catholic fathers!   They could be rogues! You couldn't be up to them!

This kind of traditional humor is built on attitudes that have bedeviled us here for generations and are still alive and well in the Catholic Church, particularly among traditional Catholics.

It's no accident that the chosen new leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland recently has taken a prominent role in asserting the church's pro-life message.   Last month Martin was at one of the pro-life vigils in Dublin, and in Derry he is coordinating a 40-day campaign of prayer and activism within his diocese to oppose abortion on either side of the border.  Under any circumstances.

Behind the almost casual style he presents, there is a formidable organizer at work. Martin has a reputation as a church administrator of great ability.   His nickname among clerics is “The Machine” because he works so hard and is so thorough about everything he does.

He is young, conservative and tough, even if it's hidden behind an informal, engaging personality.   It's church business as usual, then.

Abortion debate underway in Ireland - hard questions need to be asked and the country's Catholic history reviewed

A pro-life poster in Dublin to publicize a rally.

Here's a question for you on abortion -- imagine you have a pregnant daughter who has developed a medical condition which will mean that if she continues with the pregnancy and has the baby her health in the future may be damaged.   She may not die, but her long-term health may be compromised.

What do you do?  Do you encourage her to have an abortion, or do you advise her to take the chance and go ahead with the pregnancy for the sake of the fetus she is carrying?

There is no easy answer to a question like this.  Even if you believe in a woman's right to choose, is an abortion in such circumstances right if your daughter is half way through her pregnancy?  Or is the line of acceptability even later or much earlier in her pregnancy?

Let's take a different scenario, one in which no health issues are involved, the woman is healthy and the pregnancy is progressing normally.   In many western countries the right of a woman to choose whether to continue with a pregnancy is accepted up to the end of the first trimester, or 12 weeks. 

The rules vary -- in many countries a woman is expected to give physical or psychological reasons why she cannot continue -- but in practice the decision is hers. 

Beyond that time frame it becomes more difficult, with a wide variation in what is permissible. Between 12 and 20 weeks, abortions in some countries can be difficult to get, with more assessment and paper work required.  Late term abortions (at 20 weeks or later) are contentious even in liberal countries.    

Even countries which have had legislation and services in place for years still find abortion a difficult matter to deal with, the U.S. being an example.  In cases of incest or rape, or serious fetal abnormality, early abortions are accepted without question in many countries, although even these are opposed by many in the pro-life movement.  

So to repeat, there are no easy answers to questions about abortion. 

The debate in other countries has been going on for decades.  Here in Ireland -- Holy Catholic Ireland -- somehow we never got around to it. 

Instead we exported the problem and turned a blind eye as thousands of Irish women every year traveled to Britain for an abortion.  This allowed us to adopt a superior moral position and claim that there was no abortion in Ireland.  Talk about being holier than thou!

As societies in the west faced reality over the past 50 years or more and became more conscious of the rights of women, legislative changes happened elsewhere allowing abortion in defined circumstances. 

Aware that this was happening elsewhere, in Ireland around 30 years ago conservative Catholics got together and campaigned for a constitutional amendment which would prevent the introduction of abortion in Ireland.   They believed this would prevent a government sneaking abortion in by legislation. 

To introduce abortion, a government would have to have a referendum (a national vote) to remove the constitutional prohibition.

The Catholic fundamentalists put pressure on our politicians to introduce a constitutional amendment and our gutless politicians, afraid to refuse because it might give the impression that they were pro-abortion, went along with the idea.

The 1983 referendum was passed after a bitter debate. It inserted wording into the Constitution which acknowledged the right to life of the unborn and the equal right to life of the mother.  

This lacked definition, although it seemed to mean that any abortion from the moment of conception was unacceptable, even in cases of rape or incest or fetal abnormality.  It also failed to define exactly what would happen if there were a conflict between the life of the fetus and a very sick mother.  

This might have been cleared up to some degree if legislation had followed, but none did.  There were many liberal voices in Ireland at the time -- this happened in the 1980s, not the 1950s -- who warned that this was a dangerous legal situation, leaving doctors and women vulnerable, and could result in deaths in Irish hospitals. 

The 1861 law we had inherited from the British meant that abortion was already illegal in all circumstances, and it could be argued that the amendment had modified the application of that.  But no one was sure and successive governments were too cowardly to legislate.     

Nine years later, in 1992, we had the X case.  X was a 14 year old girl who became pregnant after statutory rape and was suicidal.  Her parents made preparations to take her to Britain for an abortion, which she wanted, but the attorney general in Ireland got an injunction in the High Court to stop her traveling.

The case caused uproar and Ireland was compared to a police state like East Germany.

After an appeal, the Supreme Court decided that the girl could travel because evidence showed her to be suicidal and therefore she had a right to an abortion under the 1983 referendum wording which guaranteed "the equal right to life of the mother."

In its decision, the Supreme Court said that the girl could have an abortion because there was a real and substantial risk to her life, instead of just to her health. 

In fact the girl had a miscarriage shortly after the Supreme Court judgment.  But the phrase "a real and substantial risk to the life of a woman, as opposed to her health" became the test by which medical staff would work to from then on.  

But again, there was no legislation to give clarity to what the Supreme Court finding would mean in medical situations.

Another referendum was quickly held and passed on the right of women to travel and to information about abortion.  A third part of that referendum to remove possible suicide as grounds for an abortion was rejected by the people.  A further attempt 10 years later, in 2002, to remove the suicide grounds, also failed.  

Over all this time -- it's now 20 years since the X case -- there has been no legislation to bring clarity to the grounds for abortion in Ireland.   Twenty years ago the Supreme Court produced a broad principle based on the Constitution, but we need detailed legislation to make clear what medical staff are allowed to do in our hospitals.

The failure to do this may have been what killed Savita Halappanavar, the unfortunate Indian woman who died in a Galway hospital last year.  That caused uproar here, and rightly so. 

We are still awaiting the findings of the official investigation into what happened.  But there seems to be little doubt that some of the medical staff in the hospital felt that the Constitution prevented them from acting on the woman's requests for an immediate termination to end her prolonged miscarriage. 
She died from septicemia.

That appalling case put abortion back on the public agenda here.  But it was already on the government's agenda because the European Court of Human Rights a couple of years ago demanded action here on legislation after several women brought cases to Europe seeking clarity. 

The present government set up an expert group to report on possible abortion legislation and that took a year or more to produce its advice, giving several options. 

The one the government is going for -- the only one that makes any kind of sense -- will allow for abortion here under very restrictive conditions.   A request for an abortion may have to be approved by not one but two senior doctors, for example. 

Last week saw the debate on abortion opened out into the public arena when the outline for proposed legislation was the subject of three days of special hearings before the Oireachtas (Parliament) Joint Health Committee.

The committee was given the task of hearing testimony and preparing a report for the minister for health who will bring in the legislation for abortion in Ireland.

All the interest groups trooped in to have their say, the doctors, lawyers, constitutional experts, campaign organizations both pro-life and pro-choice,  religious groups and even the atheists.  (This was another tactic by the government to widen responsibility for whatever happens by consulting everyone, and they are playing it brilliantly.)

To everyone's surprise, the presentations and questions proceeded in a mature, civilized fashion, a welcome contrast with the hysteria that gripped the country in the 1980s.  Maybe we've grown up a bit since then. 

There was most concern at the hearings about the so-called suicide risk -- where a pregnant woman claims she must have an abortion because the pregnancy is making her suicidal.  Twenty years ago Catholic fundamentalists here tried to have the suicide option ruled out, but this was rejected by the people in two national votes.  Despite this, they are at it again.

The likely result is that a suicide risk as the grounds for an abortion will be very restricted, with possibly two senior doctors, one of them a psychiatrist, needing to give their approval.  There is also likely to be an appeal system when a woman is not happy with what the doctors decide and that could take a final decision even further away. 

Another idea is that the decision will involve doctors from more than one hospital.   It all sounds like a lengthy and difficult way of dealing with these situations.

One organization giving its views to the committee last week was the Catholic Church, with a bishop present to lay down the law.  And that's what he did. Some things never change. 

The arrogance from such a discredited organization is breathtaking.  One reader of the Irish Independent reacted by posing the question, “What do they want, more unwanted babies who will have to be adopted and taken into institutions where they will be fodder for abusing priests?”

That may be a bit extreme, but the reader had a point.

There will be more detailed coverage of the church's position here as the abortion debate develops in the weeks ahead. 

Ireland’s New Year’s resolution should be to pay no more bank debt, further crippling the Irish people

The downfall of Anglo Irish Bank, among other institutions, 
continues to devastate the Irish taxpayer.

At the start of what will be a critical year for Ireland, our politicians should be making lots of New Year resolutions on behalf of the country.   We could suggest dozens of resolutions for them on all sorts of policy issues.

But on the basis that the fewer you make, the more you are likely to keep, we will suggest just one resolution for 2013.  When it gets down to it, it's the only one that matters.

That resolution is as follows: In 2013 Ireland will tell Europe and the IMF that we are refusing to pay any more of the bank debt that is crippling the Irish economy and beggaring the Irish people.  

Rejecting the bank debt will not mean we are home free.  Far from it.

More than half of the huge national debt we have built up in recent years is due to the massive budget deficits we have been running, mainly since our economy went bust.  We should tell Europe and the IMF that we will be paying that back (minus the part that relates to bank debt). That is our responsibility and we are working on reducing our budget deficits.  

But what is not our responsibility is the tens of billions in bank debt (around €90 billion depending on how you count it) that has been and is being dumped on to the Irish taxpayer.   This year we should tell the IMF and Europe that our 2013 resolution is not to pay any more of it back.    

We will have our chance to begin this process pretty soon.  The next bit of the bank debt mountain we are supposed to be dealing with is a €3 billion promissory note payment that is due in March.

Depending on which minister you listen to, we either will refuse to make the payment or we are going to insist on a deal from Europe so that we won't have to make the payment.  These public rumblings by ministers are being made for Europe's benefit, but the reality is that we do not know if Europe is going to let us off the hook and we are rapidly running out of time.  

Read more: Signs of recovery boosted as Ireland beats EU/IMF deficit targets

There is a much bigger scenario at play here, relating to the overall bank debt mountain.  But before we deal with that let's look at the promissory note issue for a moment.

The game of chicken the government is playing on the promissory note payment due in March is missing the point.  That is just this year's payment on the total €31 billion promissory note debt which we are paying back at €3 billion a year over ten years.  

By coincidence, the amount saved on the deficit in December's budget was just over €3 billion and the fallout from that will be incredibly difficult here this year, involving all kinds of cutbacks, extra taxes, the new property tax and so on.  Yet we are supposed to be handing over this amount (€3 billion) in repayments every year for 10 years because of this promissory note.

Bear in mind that the €31 billion promissory note only deals with the debts of two of the smaller banks here, the now closed Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide rogue banks.  

The bigger scenario -- the one that is being forgotten in the argument about the promissory note -- is all the rest of the bank debt.   The promissory note is only one-third of the total bank debt mountain we were left, with and interest payments on that have to be included in our budget calculations every year.  

It's worth remembering how the promissory note -- basically an IOU given by the then Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan on behalf of the last government -- came into being in the first place.

In 2009 as the property crisis gathered pace, Lenihan shoved a few billion into the two rogue banks to stop them collapsing.  This was a consequence of the government undertaking given in September 2008 to guarantee the debts of all the Irish banks.  

By the end of 2009, the scale of the black hole in Anglo and Nationwide -- two of the most irresponsible players in the Irish property boom -- was becoming apparent.  They needed another €30 billion to be able to repay their lenders and bondholders.  

Lenihan was nervous about public reaction if he borrowed this amount upfront.  So instead he used promissory notes -- basically IOUs that promise the government will pay the money in the future -- which the two banks then used to raise cash to keep paying back their bondholders as bonds and loans from German and French banks matured.

So the taxpayer here was immediately on the hook for the huge debts of Anglo Irish and Irish Nationwide.   But the bigger picture was much worse than that because the bank guarantee had also made the Irish taxpayer responsible for meeting the debts of the other banks as well, including the two biggest banks, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks.  

All of this effectively made the Irish state bankrupt and forced us into the IMF-EU bailout program. A very large part of the money that we get under that program goes not to bridge the huge budget deficit that emerged after the crash, but to enable us to repay all the money the Irish banks borrowed during the boom to fund the property bubble.    

There are several points that need to be made in relation to this.  First off, when the Irish government ministers gave the state guarantee on all Irish bank debt on that infamous night back in September 2008, the banks either misled them about the depth of the black hole, or just did not know how deep it was themselves.

Which it was does not really mater.  The fact is that the government gave a guarantee based on either false information or seriously inaccurate predictions about the value of property portfolios.  

Read more: Four young Irish men cited on Forbes 30 under 30 list

For that reason alone, the validity of that guarantee is open to question.  It is also doubtful legally whether any government has the to right to issue a guarantee which can bankrupt the state, which is what happened in our case.

And for that reason alone, the blanket state guarantee given on Irish bank debt ought to be repudiated, as well as everything that flowed from it.  

What happened in 2010 was that the Irish government was pressurized by the European Central Bank (ECB) into continuing to pay off all the foreign investors who had put their money into Irish banks to get the higher returns that were on offer here during the boom.   So these investors, who essentially gambled and lost, got everything back.

The reason given was that a failure to pay these international investors -- mainly French and German banks and bondholders -- would have started a banking crisis across Europe.  Europe told Ireland that it had to keep on paying up as the bonds matured to avoid this.   To force us to comply, threats were made to cut off Ireland's funding from the EU.  

Eventually, the load of banking debt became too much, we went bankrupt and were forced into the EU/IMF bailout program.   By now most of the investors who put money into the Irish banks have been paid back, but the money to do so has effectively come from the bailout.   And that has to be paid back.

What was a banking debt problem has been transformed into a sovereign (or state) debt.   And the one left carrying the can for this is the ordinary Irish taxpayer.  

The amounts involved are far greater than a country the size of Ireland can manage.   The overall €90 billion bank debt mountain alone is too much, even without adding in all the rest of the debt due to overspending and budget deficits.

The outcry caused by shaving the deficit by €3.5 billion in December and the huge concern over the €3 billion promissory note payment on Anglo bank debt we are due to make in March shows the scale of the problem. Even if we wanted to, we cannot cope with our total debt, which is probably north of €200 billion.

So what do we do?  First off, we stop pretending that we are "on the road to recovery.”  The government is clutching at straws in the wind as it maintains its brainless positivity.

According to the latest figures, there has been a slight fall in the number out of work here (although it's still above 14.5 percent) and that has been seized on as "good news.”  But there has also been a fall in the number of those at work, which seems impossible if the number out of work is falling.

The contradiction is explained by mass emigration ... that's what our "good news" is based on.

Similarly, tax returns here rose slightly in the last set of figures, but that could go the other way in the next set of figures depending on global trade.  

These "signs of recovery" are uncertain.   The more important point is that they are largely irrelevant in comparison with the scale of our debt problem.  And even if we do achieve a fragile and very gradual recovery here over the next decade or two, the benefits from that will all be consumed by our debt problem.

Is that fair?   Obviously not.  Even if we could pay back our bank debt mountain, we should not do so because it is morally unjust and would condemn the Irish people to misery for decades to come.  

The ECB and the Eurocrats who blackmailed Ireland into repaying all the bondholders -- even including most of those who were unguaranteed -- now have to step up and shoulder responsibility for their actions. We don't know exactly what went on between the ECB and Ireland because the papers have not been released, but we have a pretty good idea.

Across Europe there is now a growing view that the ECB trick of forcing countries to turn bank debt into sovereign debt is not acceptable.   The new financial structure recently put in place in Europe -- the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) -- is partially an acceptance of that view.

Under the ESM, several things need to happen.  The €90 billion bank debt mountain that now overshadows Ireland has to be transferred to the ESM and the ECB.  In return the ESM and the ECB can take ownership of the Irish banks from the Irish state and can then use whatever profits the banks make to work down the debt over a very long time frame, 40 or 50 years.  

That would lift the bank debt burden off the Irish taxpayer, who had nothing to do with it in the first place. It would mean that we could concentrate on paying down the bill for our budget deficits which is a huge challenge in itself.  It would mean that at last there was some real hope for our future.  

So our New Year Resolution for 2013 must be that we will not pay back any more of the bank debt.

Happy New Year, Europe!

Will the Newtown massacre finally force American to tackle its control of guns?

The closest that the vast majority of Irish can get to purchasing 
a gun exists only in replica form, such as the fake 
guns pictured inside a Dublin shop last year.

What is wrong with Americans, my daughter asked, her voice shaking with anger and frustration. She's 21, a third year college student, and she has a low tolerance for bull.

Like everyone else in Ireland, she was both upset and appalled by the slaughter of the innocents in the school near Newtown, Connecticut.  But she was outraged as well, outraged by the failure of Americans to do anything meaningful about the situation that allows this kind of tragedy to happen again and again.  

Why are they surprised that it's happened again?  Are they all stupid?  Don't they realize that gun control is the only way to stop it?   She demanded answers.

Of course I didn't have any answers for her.

The gun situation in the U.S. is so bizarre to people in most other civilized countries that it is almost unbelievable.  Yet so many Americans think it is defensible, necessary, even admirable.

To people on this side of the Atlantic, the fact that ordinary people in the U.S. can possess not only semi-automatic handguns but fully automatic assault rifles is seen as not just highly dangerous, but preposterous.  It cannot be justified under any circumstances in a modern, democratic country.  Yet so many Americans still believe that it is acceptable.

And then they claim they are surprised and shocked when a tragedy like Sandy Hook occurs?  

My daughter and I sat together in Dublin on the day of the shooting watching the late night news from America, first CBS, then Fox News. Bill O'Reilly looked like he had been pole axed from behind.  

There was no explanation possible, he said. There was nothing that could be done.

It wasn't a gun control issue, he said, because controls would not stop evil.  This was evil and evil would find a way.

Other commentators talked about waiting for the full facts about this latest shooter.  Or about tightening up on regulations to stop guns getting into the hands of people who are mentally ill or criminal.  

But they all admitted that such moves might not have stopped Adam Lanza.  It has been suggested that he had social issues, that he may have been borderline autistic.  It was suggested by one or two people who knew him that he was unstable, or heading in that direction.  

But at what point on the instability scale does being a shy, isolated loner, or a nerd, or someone prone to occasional outbursts of anger, register in an official way on public records that would disqualify that person from getting a gun?  How obviously crazy do you have to be?

And suppose you got your assault rifle a year or two before you became visibly unstable? What is there in the present control system in the U.S. to deal with that situation?

All of this, of course, is irrelevant in the case of Lanza because the guns did not belong to him, but to his mother.  This raises the question of what the authorities should be doing to prevent cases like this.

Does it mean that background checks and suitability checks would have to be done not just on someone who wants to buy a gun but on everyone in their family or even everyone who has access to their home?

The absurdity of this exposes the impossibility of making the present system of preventing gun massacres in the U.S. work.  There is simply no alternative to a radical shift in policy which will have the effect of removing all semi-automatic and automatic guns from possession by the general public.  

Indeed, if America was to follow the example of the rest of the civilized world even single shot guns, both handguns and rifles, would be removed as well and confined to very restricted use by legitimate hunters, sports people and gun clubs.

But that would probably involve constitutional change and we are all aware how difficult that is in the U.S., far more difficult than in Ireland, for example.  Without going that far, although I am not a lawyer or a constitutional expert, it seems clear to me that it should be possible to introduce restrictive legislation at federal and/or state level setting out rules and regulations for gun possession in the US that would be constitutional but still would move the U.S. much closer to the norm on guns in Europe and most other developed countries in the world.    

Much has been made out of the number of guns in circulation in the U.S. and the supposed impossibility of retrieving them.   This is nonsense.  A carrot and stick approach, with a buy back program and heavy penalties, including jail, for failure to take part within a time period would achieve results.  

The American people have solved much more complex problems than this.  The case for change is undeniable.

Niall O'Dowd quoted some statistics on IrishCentral a few days ago which tell the story -- murders with a firearm in one year: Great Britain 14; Australia 59; Canada 144; U.S., 9,369.  He left out Ireland, which in the year in question had 12 gun murders.

The numbers tell the truth.  The National Rifle Association and all the rest of the gun lobby can say all they want, but the message is clear -- gun control works.  

Appalling as school shootings are, the bigger tragedy in the U.S. is the everyday body count due to the use of guns in ordinary criminality, drugs and domestic violence.

Last July, after the Aurora, Colorado massacre, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that 34 people were being killed with guns in the U.S. every single day.

"We've killed more than 400,000 Americans since 1968, when RFK and Martin Luther King Junior were assassinated. That is more Americans than died during WWII,” he said.

While this goes on in the U.S., the rest of the world looks on in disgust and disbelief.  As other countries have shown, it's not impossible to change.

In Scotland, for example, there was a school shooting in 1996 in which 16 children aged five to six and their teacher were killed.  One year later the U.K. banned the private ownership of all handguns of any size or type apart from airguns.  There has not been a school shooting anywhere in the U.K. since then.

Writing in the wake of the Aurora cinema shooting, I suggested that the U.S. could do worse than look to the system in Ireland for direction.

As I pointed out at the time, there are young men under severe stress in Ireland and other countries in Europe right now, but we do not see gun massacres happening here.  There are isolated, inadequate, resentful young men here, just as there are in the U.S.  A proportion of them will become delusional and dangerous, just as happens in the US.

The difference is that here it is very difficult to get guns, and almost impossible to get automatic weapons and large amounts of ammunition.

It's not rocket science.  It's simple. You stop gun crime by removing guns from the general population.  Yet that is something that America refuses to do.

The idea that true freedom must allow good people to have almost unrestricted access to weapons so they can protect themselves against the bad guys is flawed, and the figures quoted above prove that.

It ignores the fact that if there are very few guns around, it is much more difficult for the low level bad guy to get his hands on one.

The gun lobby argument that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is also flawed.  The fact is that the more guns there are around, the more people get killed with them.

The reason is simple. Killing someone with a gun is easy; killing someone with a knife is harder, and also, there are no automatic knives that enable you to kill 26 people with a slight pressure of one finger.

There's no point in grieving for the Sandy Hook children if America does not do something about this because it's going to happen again.  America needs gun control.

That's the reality. It's a reality that almost all other developed countries have accepted, even somewhere like Ireland, in spite of our much more recent fight for national freedom and our rebel image as the fighting Irish. As I said, America could do worse than copy what we have done here.

In Ireland, you can't have a gun unless you can convince your local Gardai (police) that you are a farmer who wants to control vermin, or you want to use the gun for hunting in the countryside -- well over 90 percent of guns held here are shotguns and sporting rifles used for hunting or controlling vermin.  These weapons are usually single shot and never automatic.

If your reason for wanting a gun is to do target shooting, you have to belong to a recognized gun club where very strict rules will apply.  This includes where and how the guns are stored.  Almost no handguns (pistols or revolvers) are allowed in private possession outside of gun clubs.

Anyone who wants a gun here has to get a license from the police, which specifies the type of gun, as well as a small quantity of ammunition.  This has to be renewed every three years.

A separate certificate is required for each gun, and police are slow to issue more than one to a person without good reason.  Handguns are severely restricted with very few in private possession, and those are limited to small caliber guns or air guns.

Similar regimes apply in other countries and no one seems to find it a problem.  So why should it be a problem in the U.S.?

This week there are people all over America deciding on Christmas gifts for their children. Well here's an idea -- tell your children that one of your presents to them will be a promise that next year you will campaign for or support major change on gun laws in the U.S. And explain to them why this will be the best Christmas present the children of America will ever get.

A budget of a thousand cuts is the latest austerity measure for the Irish

A young boy joined carers to protest last week’s budget cuts 
outside Leinster House in Dublin on Tuesday morning.

There were no big surprises in the budget in Ireland last week, the sixth so-called austerity budget in a row as the government battles to raise taxes and cut spending to match revenue. 

The reason was that all the bad news had been slowly leaked out over the previous few weeks to lessen the impact on the day.

So we knew all about property tax and increases in payroll "social" tax and cuts in child benefit payments and other adjustments like extra tax on alcohol, tobacco and cars.    

We didn't know about some of the "adjustments,” one of them being the cut in respite payments to carers, something that has proved to be so contentious that it could yet destabilize the government even though the overall amount involved is relatively small in terms of overall state spending. 

Carers are people who look after other people at home on a full-time basis -- like a parent looking after a severely handicapped child or someone looking after an elderly parent with Alzheimer's.

From the state's point of view, these people should be treated like heroes since they keep the loved ones they care for out of hospitals where long term care would cost a fortune.  The amount saved by the state as a result has been estimated at around €4 billion a year. 

Carers here get a basic payment of just over €200 a week from the state, and they also were getting an annual respite payment of €1675, to allow them have some "respite,” a short holiday or break from what is usually a demanding, year round 24/7 commitment. In this budget, that respite payment has been cut by €300. 

A meaner, nastier cut is hard to imagine.  This would be true even if most carers used the money for the respite break they were supposed to take. 

In fact, however, many of them were using the money not for a holiday but to tax or insure the car they need to take the person they care for out of the house occasionally, to medical appointments and so on.  Or they were using it to fill the heating oil tank for the winter, since many immobile people needing care also need higher home heating than healthy people.   

This is just one of numerous small cuts that were made in the budget in areas of state spending that affect the lives of the poorest or the most vulnerable in our society.  Extra payments for medicines for the poor is an example of another.  And there are many, many more.

But it's not just the poor and vulnerable who will have their lives made more vulnerable by this budget.  The lower to middle income families across the country are going to be hard hit as well.  These are the so-called coping class.

The trouble is since the boom and bust many of them are just not coping anymore.   And they now find that they are being squeezed even more.

Many of these would be people who bought properties over the past decade for which they paid boom time prices and which are now in negative equity.  They are struggling to pay their mortgages already and are now being hit with a new property tax.

They paid heavy stamp duty (like a sales tax) when they bought their homes.  It was six percent on an average house and nine percent on expensive properties.

During the boom it was quite normal to pay stamp duty of €20,000 to €50,000 when buying a property. People simply added it to the mortgage, borrowing enough to pay for both the house and the stamp duty.  And this is part of the reason so many people are now struggling to make their mortgage payments.

There was a wide expectation that when the new property tax was introduced in this budget, people who had paid heavy stamp duty in recent years would be allowed to offset that against their tax bill.   Instead they have to pay up the full amount of property tax like anyone else.

It's double taxation and it's clearly unfair.  But the government went ahead with this anyway.

Similarly, the government made no attempt to target child benefit cuts at people who don't really need the payments.  The payments are universal so all families get them, rich and poor. Taxing them would have taken about half of this money back from better-off families, while leaving payments to poor families intact. Instead of doing that, the government did an across the board cut which will hit every family in the country.

The property tax and child benefit cut will have most impact on ordinary middle income families here, with most of them down around €2,000 a year.  That may not sound a lot, but for families who are already living on the margins after a succession of austerity budgets it will make life even more miserable.

On top of the cuts, there are the extra charges and tax that people will have to pay.  The main one is the PRSI social tax (which is supposed to help pay the state's welfare bill) which is being hiked up.

Of course it's really an income tax since it is deducted directly from pay.  The effect will be to bring the marginal rate of tax on income for many ordinary people to well over 50 percent.

The problem for many families is that while they are being squeezed dry by the government, many of the "luxuries" that are in reality essentials for many of them are costing more and more.  The government is increasing annual tax on cars, for example, and petrol (gas) is going up as well. 

Some might say that a car is a luxury, but if you're stuck in a new housing estate miles away from work and schools and there is little or no public transport nearby, what do you do?

This felt like a budget of a thousand small cuts,  many of them hidden.  The cut to the carers respite payment, for example, hardly registered in the media on budget day but is now the hottest issue  facing the government. 

The reason all these small miseries were imposed by the government is that they began the task of making the €3.5 billion adjustment with the three biggest items in the budget off the table.  These were income tax rates, basic welfare rates and the Croke Park agreement on pay and pensions for state workers. 

Fine Gael and Labor made pre-election promises that income tax rates and basic welfare rates would not be touched, rash promises that have now come back to haunt them.

So there was no change in the basic income tax rates (although there was the hike in the PRSI "social" tax on incomes which has the same affect.)  And there were no changes in basic welfare payments like unemployment benefit and old age pensions (although the length of non-means tested jobless benefit was shortened and better off pensioners will now have to pay more of their own medical bills).

A much more imaginative approach to income tax and welfare and the link between the two could have been started in this budget and needs to be done soon if we are to incentivize business creators and workers to help us get out of the slump we are in.

The Irish welfare system pays people not to work and gives them many extra benefits for not having a job.  In Germany more than a decade ago the welfare system was changed so that welfare payments there pay jobless people to work in all kinds of activities like community service programs and so on.  You get very little for free unless you give back to society.

The Croke Park Agreement which guarantees pay levels and pensions in the public service (all state workers) was a major logjam in this budget.   In the big spending departments like health and education up to 80 percent of spending is on pay and pensions for staff, but because pay cuts are ruled out, making any meaningful cuts in their budgets involves hitting frontline services.

So, for example,  although school teacher's pay is not being cut, class sizes are going up (which affects students).

While student grants in universities are being delayed and student fees are going up, university teachers' pay (probably the highest in Europe) remains untouched.   

Then there is the scandal of the pensions for state workers which go on being paid at levels that are twice what many people who spent their working lives in the private sector paying into pension private schemes end up with.   And this is continuing while the state is desperately trying to save small amounts of money by cutting things like the carers respite payment.

This budget was not just unfair; it was incompetent and cowardly.  Instead of some blue sky thinking we got more of the same old ideas, a myriad of minor changes that eat away at the living standards of ordinary people.

And of course here was no mention in the budget of the elephant in the room, the huge burden of the banking debt repayments Irish taxpayers have been lumbered with and which are going to cost us billions in the years ahead, money the government might as well pour down the drain.   If the government had any backbone it would have told the European Central Bank by now that this party is
over.

It all makes a very bleak prospect for Christmas and the New Year.

Ordinary Irish suffer yet again as savage budget cuts will hit poorest

A Santa Claus protester held up a sign at a protest in Dublin last month.

This is budget week in Ireland but the bad news -- and it's going to be very bad news -- won't be revealed until Wednesday afternoon when the Minister for Finance Michael Noonan reads his Budget 2013 speech to the Dail (Parliament).  

So it will be after this column has gone to bed when the gory details of the Budget 2013 nightmare will emerge.  Of course we do know roughly what's going to happen, since we are no longer masters of our own economic sovereignty.  

That privilege belongs to the Troika (the EU, ECB and IMF) who lent us the bailout money to stay afloat three years ago and now lay down the law on our stony pathway back to fiscal balance and sustainability.

To meet the target for 2013 in the Troika's plan for Ireland, we have to reduce our budget deficit in the coming year by another €3.5 billion.  The government has said already that two thirds of this adjustment will be achieved by spending cuts, and one third by tax hikes.  That much is clear.

Also clear is that there will be a property tax, one of the things that the Troika is insisting on as a way of providing a steady revenue source for the state, like in the U.S. and most other countries in Europe.  

Part of the reason Ireland is in this mess is that property taxes here only applied when a property was sold, so when the market collapsed so did state revenue.    

Another change the Troika are keen to see is a targeting of welfare benefits so that only those in genuine need will get them; under our present system some welfare payments, like child benefit payments, are universal, going to all families regardless of income.

So we know the parameters of this budget. We even know some of the likely measures it will contain thanks to leaks to the media in the past few weeks as the coalition partners in the government, Fine Gael and Labor, have struggled to agree on what to do.  

As long as we follow the broad guidelines set down by the Troika and hit the target for next year's reduction in our budget deficit, the government is free to work out the small details of the spending cuts and tax hikes by itself.  

That's what the Troika says.  But, as always, the devil is in the detail.    

One reason this budget is so difficult is that over the last few years each annual budget has cut spending and found new ways of adding extra taxation.  There are no easy options left.

Some of the most obvious waste in spending has been stopped.  Hidden areas that could yield extra revenue have been exposed and taxed.   Most of the low hanging revenue fruit has already been picked as we tried to cut the deficit by a few billion over the past few years.  Now on top of that we have to find another €3.5 billion in cuts.  

Another reason getting the figures in this budget to add up is so difficult is because of the rash promises made in the election two years ago by Fine Gael and Labor. Fine Gael promised no income tax increases, while Labor pledged that core welfare benefits would not be cut.  Clearly, since we are now scraping the bottom of the barrel, something has to give on these promises.  

We have one of the most generous welfare systems in Europe, with benefits paid at very high levels.  Welfare for those out of work is more than one third higher than similar payments in Britain, for example. The basic state pension here is also much higher than in Britain and in most other European countries.  

Other state payments here -- like the aforementioned child benefits – and payments in many other smaller entitlement programs, are extraordinarily high in comparison with other countries.

An example would be statutory maternal leave from work, with an Irish mother entitled to 42 weeks leave from her job after having a baby, 26 weeks of which is paid for by the state at a rate of around €250 to €300 a week and may be topped up more by her employer.

The last time I looked there was no mandated maternity leave with pay in the U.S.  I'm not saying that is a good thing, but the contrast with Ireland is striking.

The bottom line here is that Ireland has become very much a welfare state on European lines in recent decades, and over the recent boom many of these entitlement programs and payments were inflated supposedly for social reasons but in reality to buy votes in elections.  

This has resulted in a situation in which some lower income families here find it as rewarding (and a lot easier) to live off the state than to hold down jobs.

By the time you add up the value of unemployment benefits, rent allowance, fuel allowance, other allowances, free family health care for those out of work and other payments, it is hard for employers to match the value in pay.  Plus staying home saves travels costs and other expenses.  

Saying this here is heresy, of course, because it challenges the orthodox perspective; one economist who was foolhardy enough to do so last year was bitterly criticized.

But the evidence is all around us and the effects on our society are clear.  

The trouble with entitlement programs paid at a high level is that they quickly become the norm for those who receive them. Cutting the level of payments leads to a ferocious backlash and accusations that the vulnerable are being targeted.

We have already seen this here in the “grey power” reaction when the government tried to take free health care away from better off pensioners who could afford to pay for their own medical needs.

Any objective assessment of Ireland's welfare system and other state programs which give people entitlements to services which some could pay for will show that they are very generous by the standards of other countries.

The simple truth is that the country cannot afford this anymore.  And we cannot go on borrowing to pay for it.  So reductions are inevitable.  

If the Labor Party insists that "core" welfare payments cannot be cut, then higher eligibility requirements to reduce the number getting payments will be needed.  

The other big item on the spending side of the budget equation is the pay of state workers here, which is protected under the Croke Park Agreement.   This agreement was supposed to deliver efficiencies that would allow the government to cut costs by reducing numbers while maintaining pay levels.  

It has not worked, no matter what the unions say.  Pay levels here for middle and senior workers on the state payroll (civil servants in government departments, doctors, nurses, teachers, police, and so on) all remain high by European standards and take no account of the state being bust.

It has now emerged, for example, that teachers here are entitled to an extra six weeks paid maternity leave on top of that outlined above, despite the fact that they already get long summer holidays when the schools are closed!    

On the revenue side of the budget equation, there is now widespread acceptance that we are at, or close to, the maximum level at which income tax can be applied here.  Our top rate is 41 percent, but there are two additional "social" taxes applied to income which bring it to well above 50 percent.  

The top rate kicks in at a relatively low level of income, equivalent to around $40,000 for a single person.  As a single person, anything you earn above that level, you lose about half of it in tax.  

As if that was not enough, all the other indirect taxes, like sales taxes, motor vehicle taxes, fuel tax, levies on pensions savings and insurance policy taxes -- there's a tax here on almost everything you do apart from breathing -- have all been ratcheted up over the past three years as the government tries to squeeze more and more revenue out of ordinary people.

And of course the property crash has left a lot of people in negative equity, struggling to pay high mortgages for houses that they cannot sell even if they want to.

What all of this means is that in this budget the government needs to show a new approach and some new thinking.   It's not enough to tinker with the present tax and spend structure anymore.  Radical reform and change is required, particularly on the spending side.

The Irish state -- government, civil service and all the rest of it -- is now much bigger than the country can sustain.  How many non-governmental organizations (quangos) with staff on the state payroll and with guaranteed state pensions can we afford?

There are hundreds of them and, despite promises, only a handful have been wound up. How many embassies do we need?  How big an army?  The population of Ireland is only half the size of London, yet we have to carry the expense of an entire country, one led by politicians with serious delusions of grandeur.
There is no sign of us tackling any of the sacred cows in Irish life.  An example would be the costs associated with the pretence that we are reviving the Irish language.

We go on paying teachers to spend hours every day teaching compulsory Irish in schools even though no European languages (or Chinese, or Russian) are taught in Irish junior schools and companies like Google have to import hundreds of workers here as a result to fill jobs in customer support services.

And we go on paying for not only a full Irish language news service but an Irish TV station, even though research shows that the audience is tiny.

I have nothing against Irish.  It is just one example of the many sacred cows in Irish life which cost a fortune and which we can no longer afford.  Long may Irish continue, but it has to stand on its own legs and so do all the other sacred cows we have here, instead of being supported by the taxpayer.

Any serious examination of Irish public life shows up wide areas of very expensive government activity which really have no place in a country that is broke.

Our Arts Council, for example, had a budget this year of over €60 million to promote the arts.  Close to €1 million was spent on a week of Wagner concerts in Dublin.  

Again, I'm all for the arts, but are the people who stand over this kind of thing living in the real world?

In an effort to save money, while continuing to pay obscene pensions to retired bankers and top civil servants, the government has cut the number of home help hours to families with disabled children, elderly people who need round the clock care and so on. In doing so they are undermining a program designed to keep such people out of hospital by helping families to look after them at home.

But then these vulnerable people -- and the family members who look after them -- are not among the sacred cows of Irish life. That's what is wrong with our attempts to reform our state finances.  

Mean, miserable cuts and extra taxes are loaded on to ordinary people here while the lofty pretensions of the Irish state carry on regardless.  To change this requires a fundamental shift in thinking at the top.  

Bold, radical moves to curtail state spending while protecting the vulnerable are possible.  But they would require the wholesale slaughter of sacred cows.  

That makes it very unlikely that we will see any real change in approach in this week's budget.  What we are likely to see is the status quo in Irish society -- and their pay, often state pay, and guaranteed pensions - being protected as much as possible.

Meanwhile, all the middle income people will be forced to pay even more to keep the circus on the road.  They will be forced to pay more even though research this year showed that, after paying all their essential bills, 1.8 million people here had only €100 a month left over for themselves.

The gigantic elephant in the room in this debate is, of course, the repayments the country is making on the banking debts that were "guaranteed" by the state, which means they were transferred to the taxpayer.   Just to deal with the two worst banks involved, Anglo and Irish Nationwide, is costing us over €50 billion.

The two had €31 billion in debts, mainly to foreign bondholders, and we borrowed the money to pay this back.  The bondholders have now all been paid back and we're scheduled to pay that borrowing back over 20 years or so, at around €3 billion a year (the interest bill is around €19billion).  

The last government was railroaded into this by the ECB, because they feared a collapse of any Irish banks would cause financial contagion across Europe.  There is no moral basis for it whatsoever.  The two banks are now closed.

The bondholders should have been burned. Instead this huge unsustainable debt was loaded on to Irish taxpayers.  

The other banks here, between them, have had another €30 billion pumped in so they could pay their debts, and again the Irish taxpayer ends up carrying the can.  

So all the pain that will be unleashed this week to narrow the budget deficit by €3.5 billion will be unnecessary suffering because we will be sending roughly the same amount out of the country in debt repayments.  And this is set to go on year after year, until 2030 and beyond.

Last week Greece was given another debt forgiveness package by the Troika. But this government has managed to get nothing for Ireland.  

So we go on paying.  Is it any wonder so many young people are leaving?