No “hard” negotiations will take place unless the ordinary people take to the streets in huge numbers, which is highly unlikely, or unless the pay and jobs of our public servants are slashed to levels equivalent to those lending to us. Perhaps they don’t see the logic of lending to us so that we can have far superior salaries and pensions than they themselves have? For that to happen the Croke Park fudge would have to be permanently parked but that cannot happen without the unions obfuscating and trying every stunt in the book to persuade Chopra that black is white. They will tell him that,”transformation” is taking place and that he should give them more and more time to deliver in any event they will put us through the strikes.

Meanwhile unions and government workers know that there is money in the EU/IMF kitty that needs to be used up, before they face stark realities, and it will be used up, until that day arrives there will be nice soothing, hand wringing phrases put about the air waves and MSM.

Paul Sommerville is right in saying that the whole European game is more political than economic. It is being driven by ongoing and impending elections in Germany and France. The strategy is to put as much of what is owed on to the books of Irish tax payers and off the books of the ECB where it will remain, default/restructuring or not, for decades around our children’s necks. So far, the ECB is playing a blinder against a team of dummies that has yet to discover that the rules can be changed unilaterally. After all, that is what we did when we brought in the guarantee and phoned our EU partners next day. Yes, we will be despised, told we are ungrateful bad Europeans, even hated for a time, but so what. If the ECB don’t want bond holders to suffer until 2013 if they don’t want burden sharing thats fine, however they must pay for it and pay for it NOW, upfront and not by way of temporary liquidity arrangements for Ireland’s banks until Irelands day to restructure arrives.

The fact that we have had a recent election and a new government is of little consequence as Ireland is now effectively being run by hard-line economists and bankers in Washington, Brussels and Frankfurt.

Overall, it appears that we cannot depend on Morgan Kelly’s “kindness of strangers” and maybe we should look to sinn féin (lower case s and f) – ourselves alone. To mangle Patrick Pearse’s oration at the grave of O’Donovan Rossa:

They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the EU, the ECB, the IMF! – they have given us our foreign loans, and while Ireland holds these debts, Ireland in recession shall never be solvent.