Fashion accessory of the week
There will be a light service schedule on here for the next week, unless of course NAMA slips out news as it appeared to do over the Christmas holidays last year. There will be some end-of-year reviews and a look forward to the year ahead. There will be some hard news such as the release of the November 2012 house price index from the Central Statistics Office on Friday this week, and speaking of the CSO, the state statistics agency has produced a video showing CSO staff at work, compiling the quarterly national household survey. It’s all very informative but remains unclear why CSO staff need wear high visibility vests when sitting down at a table to discuss a household’s circumstances.
Christmas Single
The Ballyhea/Charleville bank bailout protesters were on the streets of Ballyhea again last Sunday – “through road” might be a better description than “streets” of the thoroughfare through the tiny parish south of Charleville in county Cork. The Ballyhea community joined up with protesters from Charleville earlier this year and have together been marching each of 95 weeks since March 2011 to highlight the colossal sums being paid to bondholders in bust and bailed-out banks. A leading light amongst the protesters is Diarmuid O’Flynn who produced this poignant video about what they do and why they do it – the images have an accompaniment of a song “Dust in the Sky” which is an original work penned and sung by, relatives.
Honest broker of the Week
“Is it getting better, or do you feel the same?” as Bono might have sang on Grafton Street in Dublin yesterday. The IMF last week produced its latest staff report on Ireland and the state of our economy and its outlook, and it offers an objective overview on the first few pages of its report available here. There is good news and bad news, and the IMF is certainly supporting attempts to ease the burden of the bank rescue. There are some interesting tables and assessments here but one which received little attention is the interest rates charged to our small and medium businesses which is significantly out of kilter with our European partners and given the substantial state ownership of the banking system, this looks like an area which might benefit from closer scrutiny in the New Year.
Economic Brightspot of the Week
Economists like Seamus Coffey will say that Ireland doesn’t have an ideal measure of economic growth with both GDP and GNP having significant flaws in terms of teasing asunder fundamentally how well or badly we’re doing and where we’re going. Last Tuesday, the quarterly national accounts for the three months ending 30th September 2012 were issued and although GDP for Q3,2012 grew by just 0.2%, GDP growth for Q2 was revised up by 0.4%.
On here, the figures came as a pleasant surprise because they seem to support the latest forecasts from the Department of Finance which is producing the official forecasts for the country and as the figures show below, we are on target to meet the forecasts of nominal GDP and GNP as set out in the Department’s Medium Term Financial Statement in November 2012. The forecast 2012 GDP and GNP in nominal terms are €163,150m and €130,850m respectively, and the actual nominal GDP and GNP for the first three quarters of 2012 comes to €123,299m and €99,645m respectively meaning that to meet the Department of Finance’s 2012 forecast, we just need quarterly GDP and GNP of €39,851m and €31,205m in Q4,2012, which looks feasible compared to Q4,2011.
World Record bid of the Week
The Guinness Book of Records has a history of attracting the weird and wacky who try to get their feat or feature recognized by all. Take this chap here who says he holds the world record for kicking himself up his own arse with 36 kicks in 20 seconds.
In Ireland this week, we learned that a bid is underway to have the cost per capita of our bank collapse and bailout recognized throughout the world as the most expensive ever and the organizers at Anglo, Not Our Debt and the Debt Justice Action group hope that over the course of the next 4-6 weeks, we can get the people at Guinness World Records to recognize our very own record of kicking ourselves up our own arses. A Happy Christmas to you all!
Thank you for that; particularly apt at this time of year, so many people coming home for Christmas, so many families facing that trip back to the airport in early January.
THANK YOU FOR ALL THE HARD WORK. HAPPY cHRISTMAS TO YOU AND YOURS
I’m all for protesting the bailout, but this “Daddy’s urn shipped home”…, “poor lonely immigrant” shite is so detached from the reality of happy, prosperous Irish in America, who generally feel blessed at having escaped, …well what can I say, absolute shite.
Happy Christmas to all, and, not being one to dwell on my past in either Ireland or SF CA, … I love New York.
Best wishes to NWL …and JG, WSTT, JW, etc, etc.
@I luv NY dust in my eye too…too funny.
In fairness after quite a few I get a bit maudlin….The Pogues get played.But they have done a great job protesting every week peacefully in all weather.The non documented or illegals in NY still find in complicated here,but all best season to you LOL,very amusing comment :)
Remember something called ICC – the Industrial Credit Corporation? So old-school it was abolished just before real indigenous industry really really needed it or something like it?
Hi John
Patriot alert
I noticed that James Connolly lived in collar town “Troy” for a couple of years. He has a statue there. He would be shocked to see all the empty and disused buildings.Victorians and Edwardians replaced by really ugly, now empty, condo’s and shops. He would be more upset at the continued hardship of the working class there.
Mostly what I notice is that if America doesn’t wake up it will regret abandoning the past. I’m a bit further south where there is a home for sale on every street corner, same thing, the old and pretty making way for trophy homes. What is that odd cream color polymer everything is made of…jeez….. After a lifetime in brick houses I realize I will never be satisfied with anything but red brick and wooden window frames. Might find one in renss county though??
Happy holidays.
@i luv ny,out in LA for hols,talk about empty buildings..downtown here is like a scene from 24 Hours….the Knicks stank today too.
Empty condo after condo but apparently it’s better than it was !
Thank you for that I had no idea JC lived in Troy had to look it up.Partial to red brick myself…Santa delivers in Cali and its legal.
sorry NWL off topic,enjoyed the exchange all best I luv ny.
And as they say here, NWL, “A Merry Christmas” to you too and all who post here. They have enriched the debate on NAMA with humour, intelligence and insightful comments – and mostly without rancour. I wish you all a very happy New Year.
I think 2013 will be an interesting one as the banks move to shrink their balance sheets in Ireland and as the NAMA inmates realise that all the boxes they have ticked for NAMA over the past 3 years has merely set them up nicely for packaging and sale.
Their new owners will be the US vulture funds. And as their loans are sold along with their Personal Guarantees, 2013 should see them realise that they have merely been overseeing the preparation for their own destruction. Colloquially know as “digging their own grave.” just as well that the new insolvency regime is arriving – just in time.
But those such as Paddy Shovlin, Bernard McNamara etc will have been seen to have prescient in moving early and not participating in the thinking of NAMA’s “Fool’s Paradise” where everything will be OK if you are seen to be compliant. No it won’t. Loan portfolios will be sold to vultures and Personal Guarantees will be sold along with them.
So next year some of us will say “hello” to the new opponents. But at least they will not be deceitful. We all know what their intentions are from Day One.
Gloves off time.
Apologies NWL- Not the best of grammar in the last post. Too many Jack Daniels (I’ve developed quite a fondness for it since I arrived in the States).
Don’t feel too sorry for the emigrants. Three generations left with me this year. I’m the only one whose head has not yet fully left the island. I suppose that it is hard to transplant an old tree.
But the temperature is 70 degrees (That’s warm for the metric politically correct), Santa arrives by water skis and the banks are open for business, I’m busier than a hooker hustling two beds – and we all go back to work on 26th December. Unlike Ireland, where work is analogous to an endangered species.
Don’t cry for the emigrants. Save it for those who stay.
@WSTT, JG and I luv NY, you’re like a bunch of Bad Santas when it comes to the poignant subject of emigration. I have just finished a 30-minute circuit walk in the country and counted eight ruins, what would have been three-roomed homes 100 or maybe 200 years ago. No roofs, walls and now just sockets for windows, in others just a wall to show that once someone lived there. Now of course, there was urbanization as people moved off the land, and there’s the positive argument for emigration for the freedom and opportunity it provides, but the history of this State shows that emigration is not temporary. Remember the table of
http://namawinelake.wordpress.com/2011/08/07/the-departed-part-2/
And in the present day, you can count more than eight standing homes where a son, daughter or husband and sometimes an entire family has left in search of work – these aren’t free and easy lifestyle choices in the Sex and the City sense; no-one is pointing a gun to peoples’ heads but the degree of compulsion is only a few notches below that.
And the politicians tacitly hope for emigration to act as a safety valve and provide short-term relief to the social welfare budget, but you can be quite sure if it is Michael Noonan’s son or Enda Kenny’s daughter they will emigrate for all the right reasons with the “put a good word in for me” generation of politicians ensuring they always have the choice to come back when they wish.
@NWL, I was born in one of those 3 roomed homes – I almost wrote “hovels”, but it wasn’t a hovel. It was clean, whitewashed with lime every year and had fuchsia growing against its south-west facing facade. Up a narrow lane that cars rarely travelled it was almost idyllic. But the sadness of the Irish plague of emigration hid behind its facade.
A family of twelve was raised in that house in the generation that preceded mine. All of them emigrated. Through the decades that I have lived, three of the past four (exclude the 80s) have offered hope that the era and curse of forced emigration might be over, but it is back with a vengeance. Some of the small mercies are that travel is easier than it used to be at any time in the past; and like many others yesterday, I used Skype to connect with those of my family left on the “graveyard shift” in Ireland. The emigration that we see now is far different from that experienced by the Irish during famine times when we lost one in three of our population.
Yes, emigration is poignant, and if the government continues with its current policies, once again, we will be back to digging ‘praties. Unfortunately, the deep spending cuts on the least able to bear them has not yet brought the country to the brink of revolution. For years, in order to get elected or re-elected, our politicians promised voters that the state would deliver more and more benefits. Those promises were shown to be as sincere as a tart’s kiss. The endless succession of new offices and departments that subsequently came into being took on a life of their own without any democratic control. Not least for that reason, public spending in Ireland soared ‘way beyond our ability to pay for it in any sustainable fashion. Now, when the politicians inevitably find themselves between a rock and a hard place – their electors and the troika – and find it impossible to serve two masters.
The Irish citizens are rightly unwilling to accept cynical reductions in public services that affect the most vulnerable in our society. The surprising thing, to me, is that nobody ever seems to ask whether those services could be funded in some other way.
Meanwhile, those that are regarded as “too big to fail” – the banks and the bankers – those that triggered the present crisis, are heaped with largesse from this and future generations. All this to support “systemically relevant” banks? Our government acting as “lender of last resort” pumped billions into a distressed banking system and ultimately gave scandalous pensions to those who cheer led this bubble. Like hemorrhoids, every asshole got one.
We were led by a government whose only success was failure. Leaders who described the world’s most expensive bank bailout as its “cheapest”. And we are now led by one with as much backbone as an invertebrate (or in the spirit of the season – a Christmas pudding), but with necks that could dent an axe as they sacrifice the citizens of Ireland and our sovereignty to the a “master race” that knows no reason other than domination.
So, yes, I embrace the emigration of today. I have no intention of bequeathing my descendants the bill for the imprudence and reckless stupidity of our political and banking masters. There are options. Generally we don’t consider them until we are forced to do so. The famine was an example of this.
England was one of the choices for me, but as Daniel O’Connell said, “they have all the qualities of a poker without the occasional warmth”. So in order to continue my lifelong quest for near naked, silicone enhanced females in wet T-shirts, I chose America.
Apologies if my comments verged on or were a bit flippant,perhaps a little too much Christmas cheer or spirt,was not my intent to trivialize emigration.
At the same time there is a certain esprit de corps amongst the recent arrivals in NY,no crying in their bad Guinness about “back home”..its what station is Lenister on….where can I watch Love/Hate.
Chilling article in NY times today about Germany preparing for an era of dominance…….in soccer,lessons for the IFA here perhaps.
“That sort of debt aversion would be music to the ears of Germany’s first fan, Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has placed a similar emphasis on parsimony and long-term planning in Berlin.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/26/sports/soccer/as-europe-struggles-germany-invests-heavily-in-soccer.html?ref=sports