GERALDINE KENNEDY, 2006: GERMANY MUST FOLLOW IRELAND’S LEAD; THE STUDENT HAS NOW BECOME THE MASTER
Aug 17th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
I’m working my way through my notes for the industry and foreign investment chapter at the moment - the consolidation of the Irish industrial comprador class - and came across this typically smug, stupid editorial from Geraldine Kennedy, former TD for the Progressive Democrats and current editor of the Irish Telegraph Times.
It’s entitled GETTING GERMANY BACK ON TRACK and in it Kennedy warns Germany that it needs to ignore the health and welfare of its citizens and slash public services in order to get its economy moving again.
German elections have shown an electorate that continues to be reluctant to abandon the social model of generous welfare provision and extensive public services. The result has been a worsening budgetary position in a country whose pensions burden will approach crisis levels within a few decades.
It needs to follow the Irish economic model if it wants to have ANY chance of surviving in the rough and tumble of the REAL world.
How Ironic it is that we are approaching the tenth anniversary of the formation of the EU Stability Pact. For it was on the insistence of a German finance minister that countries wishing to participate in economic and monetary union agreed to abide by a code of fiscal discipline.At the time, Ireland was one of the countries with which Germany feared to share a currency. Ireland bravely accepted the pact’s terms and adhered to them with flying colours, only to see Germany - under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroder - disregard the pact flagrantly.
The student has now become the master.
If Germany’s economy does indeed relapse into slowdown, its electorate may have to conclude that the time has finally come to accept a strong dose of its medicine.
In doing so, it can draw inspiration from that medicine’s success in reducing unemployment in Ireland to the lowest level in the EU.
Well DAMN! If only Germany had followed Ireland’s economic model.
Irish Times, 24 August 2006.
If we are to believe David McWilliams our boom was caused at least in part by the trade surplus of Germany which lead to the financialisation of profit and subsequent investment of said high finance capital in the peripheral EU economies. So our boom and bust was all their fault really, nothing to do with us at all…
You’re right, the arrogance of that piece is astounding.
Not having read the papers for a few weeks (was lucky enough to be away on holidays), and now being back and having the opportunity again, it is all the more apparent how simplistic and narrow and shallow the commentary and analysis is in our various broadcast media outlets, whether printed or otherwise. I recall you saying that you had given up reading the papers and I am tempted to do the same, having broken the habit during the holidays. Hammers home the point that the internet has changed how people communicate and receive and propagate ideas. If it wasn’t for this blog and others of the ilk the brainwashing would go unnoticed by and large.
It’s so true. Irish journalism. Jesus wept.
Left at the Cross,
I don’t read the papers seriously anymore. Browse the free parts of the IT and maybe buy a copy of Sunday Tribune once in a blue moon.
But I feel its like the Victorian pastime of going to see the patients at Bedlam for amusement. It’s the sort of think that civilised people should try to wean themselves away from.
I mean its painful and pitiful to see, in article after article, the extent to which Irish journalists don’t realise that if you make factual claim ‘X’ the reader can google things and within a couple of minutes be able to verify it. Or that most of them rarely seem to basically contextualise factual claims. Having followed the debates on the minimum wage and social welfare payments over the past two years, the degeneracy of Irish journalism is clear to any rational being.
Do they not realise that the internet and availability of information demands that they raise their game and not think that its enough to belt out golf-club cliches as serious economic and political analysis.
I’m genuinely looking forward to the day when the IT goes under.
CMK, I’m more looking forward to the day that it has a regime change and the editorial pendulum swings leftwards. Won’t be holding my breath all the same.
At the start of the year, I briefly toyed with the idea of doing a monthly ’sibling’ to Garibaldy’s Sunday “Stupid Statement” column on Cedar Lounge Revolution. It would have been a running count of the op-ed pieces on economic issues published by the Irish Times and Irish Independent.
My motivation was the frustration that the likes of Michael Taft (or any of the other speakers at the TASC conference last October, or Paul Sweeney, etc.) is not a regular columnist (at least, in the Times — I don’t check the Independent regularly). A response to an individual article by any of their current stable simply legitimises their overall policy on economic commentary. The Times (at least) likes to think of itself as balanced, and it seemed to me that a regular — persistent, even — analysis showing the imbalance might provide the evidence for some shift.
(I realised that project would not be one I could do: I don’t have enough economics to analyse the articles.)
To Tomboktu’s suggestion on reporting of economics: if no one individual has the time, or the economics background, to do it, why not set up a google doc where people can add the relevant info? You could have a variety of fields: date, title, link, author, focus, section (business, opinion, celebrity etc) summary, economic measurements referenced, statistical sources referenced, sources cited as authorities. You could easily get a wealth of data from that, if you kept it up for a few months….
It’s a good idea.
Then I’ll take a stab at putting together a template with a list of fields to be used, and circulate.
Thanks for this. D. McWilliams is not all wrong on this. Hot money looking for easy profits in the “Tiger economy” was essential to events.
No point in self-flagellation to the exclusion of analysis.
Tomboktu - along similar lines, ang at Political World has started assembling a media links directory on Anglo Irish as a trial. Not on view yet, but will be soon.
Ah, the Irish Times - the same paper that spent an absolute fortune buying up property websites at the height of the bubble (which obviously mens they’ve now lost an absolute fortune). Between that and the fact that 70% of their advertising revenue came from property, it’s no wonder they wanted to believe the bubble had a rational basis.
P.
And on Pat Kenny this morning, why now is a good time to “trade up in the property market”. Yep, great time to go into massive long-term debt, with diminishing job security, rising unemployment, falling wages, rising taxes. As McWilliams points out, the similarities of the money pushers to drug pushers…but the former are respectable of course, that’s one important difference.