Madam, – I urge the patriots within the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party to vote against what Mr Trichet and his friends put into our begging bowl. The present leaders of your party told them what they considered we would put up with. However, that view has made them part of the problem that “future generations of Irish men and women still unborn” will have to solve.
So they need to use their vote, and let us all make an effective start to the recovery work that we all have to engage in. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – It seems that our loan terms represent a convenient realisation of the aspirations expressed in a recent IMF staff position note (November 22nd 2010) entitled “Lifting Euro Area Growth: Priorities for Structural Reforms and Governance”, which counted Ajai Chopra among its contributors. This paper rates the efficiency of national labour market policies against the “success” of the United States, and outlines a number of recommendations for individual EU nations, which would allow them to emulate this “success”.
Consistent themes include renegotiation of wage agreements, restrictions on unemployment benefits, and privatisation of state-owned assets, including transportation infrastructure. The five suggestions made in relation to Ireland include that we “Introduce gradual decrease of benefits over time of unemployment spell and stricter job search requirements”, and “Review the level of minimum wage to make it consistent with the general fall in wages”.
The paper laments that, across the EU, “labour market and social policy reforms, left to national authorities, and subject only to peer pressure, have proceeded gingerly”. Therefore, in order to aid “harmonisation” along these lines, “key structural reforms need to be embedded in a stronger surveillance mechanism over fiscal and structural policies; EU transfer rules revised to better reward reformers and punish laggards; and compliance enforced more decisively than in the past”. Ultimately, the authors would like to “use the EU budget as an incentive scheme”, and they suggest that “EU transfers could be withheld if countries do not comply with the reform agenda”.
However, in the context of the Irish situation, implementation of this strategy would not require a revised EU budget framework, since our national budget has become reliant upon EU and IMF loans.
None of this is news, but the relevance of this kind of strategy to our current situation needs reiterating, since precisely this right-wing “reform agenda” is currently being pressed upon us, from without and within, by force of the threat of insolvency. – Yours, etc,