Ireland says NO! to BANK DEBT

It started in Ballyhea on March 6^th 2011, was taken up by Charleville and Fermoy some weeks later; now, two years on, it is becoming a national movement – Ireland says NO! to BANK DEBT.
 

In the last couple of weeks we know of protests that have started up in Tralee, Killarney, Ratoath, Clonmel, Ennis and Tulla; we know also that people in Skibereen, Cobh, Midleton, Tipperary, Nenagh, Cahir, Galway, Wicklow, Dublin are in the process of starting their own weekly protests, joining the growing swell of people who refuse to be saddled with this odious debt.

Know the magnitude and yet the simplicity of what has been done to us over the last five years; €69.7bn of what was private bank debt has been foisted on us, the people. Those were bonds, interbank gambles between consenting adults who (we presume) had read the fine print which normally applies to any such financial speculation – warning, your investment may fall as well as rise. While they proved profitable the investing banks and financial institutions were more than happy to take those profits back to the various countries in which they were based; when the bubble inflated by  their tens of billions burst (as was inevitable) they should then have taken their losses.

They didn’t. Thanks to the abuse of its financial muscle by the ECB, thanks to the ineptitude of successive Irish governments, we have now been forced into paying loans we never took out, loans from which this country never benefited, and we’ll be paying for at least 40 years, for even longer when those loans are then ‘rolled over’ again. Debt slavery for generations, for debt that was never ours.

There is no moral justification for this – none. The reasons advanced are spurious – no, we did NOT all party; no, making it legal doesn’t make it legitimate, no more than making apartheid legal makes it legitimate – remember, most of what the Third Reich did was ‘legal’.

This is odious, illegitimate debt. By any objective definition it is an obscenity, the people bailing out not just private industry but the most wealthy, the most greedy, the most voracious, the most murky private industry of all, the new and unregulated banking and finance industry. 

Extending the terms of payment is merely extending the wrong. If you're not saying NO! to this then by your silence you acquiesce, by your silence you are saying YES, yes to all the cuts, yes to all the new taxes (including the Home Tax), yes to the continuing austerity, yes to debt slavery for you and for your kids.

Join the movement, Ireland says NO! Come to us in Ballyhea and Charleville this weekend, to the Charleville Park Hotel on Saturday evening, 8pm (free admission); learn from economists Constantin Gurdgiev and Michael Taft, hear independent TD Luke Ming Flanagan explain how we can get involved politically; come to us in Ballyhea on Sunday morning, 11.30am at the church car-park, and learn how to set up and maintain a regular weekly protest in your own parish/village/town/city. Say NO! to bank debt, say NO! to debt slavery for debt that isn’t ours.

Regards, Diarmuid O'Flynn.