Wasting good words on a terrible situation

WE CAN’T get rid of all our problems just because it’s a new year. But we can get rid of some of the words we use to describe them, words that distort or conceal their reality. So here are five phrases that should be outlawed in 2012.

Austerity

No, it isn’t. It is not austerity when we have civil servants being paid €214,000 a year. It’s not austerity when TDs can still change their mobile phones at public expense every 18 months; when Ministers can claim a €3,500 tax deduction for “maintenance costs” defined by Michael Noonan as “laundry etc” and political handlers are insulted at the idea that they might have to serve their country on anything less than €127,000 a year.

Above all, it’s not austerity when we are proposing to set fire to about €4.7 billion a year for each of the next 10 years to “save” Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide, neither of which actually exists.

Austerity is a serious and noble word, implying a tough and relentless focus on the things that matter most and a refusal to countenance waste, extravagance or self-indulgence. Austerity is a moral concept whose first demands are upon oneself.

It’s too good a word to waste on our current regime of protection for the strong and savagery for the weak.

Bailout

This is an interesting word because its political meaning was turned inside-out. At first, bailout referred to the fact that Irish citizens were being fleeced in order to shore up the Irish banks and hence the European banking system and the euro. Now, it means the opposite – that Irish citizens are being bailed out by the gracious generosity of our European partners.

Yet these two opposites refer to exactly the same process: that of ensuring that the reckless lenders who were the co-authors of the Irish crisis take no responsibility for the failure of their gambles.

There is no bailout. The intention of the troika deal was never to “save” Ireland. It was to ensure that Irish citizens and the State would continue to assume the liabilities of private banks, whatever the consequences for the economy and society.

The key point of the deal is that the Government should operate two parallel fiscal policies – squeezing the real economy while injecting vast sums into the banks. In relation to about half of the bank bailout (that pertaining to Anglo and Nationwide), the sole beneficiary is the European banking system.

Yet misinformation about the “bailout” is now endemic. For example, the Labour Party’s official briefing, Questions and Answers on Our Economy, tells us that “the troika are lending the State €85 billion”. You’ll find similar phrases in everything from newspaper reports to stockbroker analyses. The figure is patently false: we’re borrowing €67.5 billion from the troika. The rest of the money was taken from the Pension Reserve Fund, most of it put straight into the banks.

Difficult

(or hard or tough) choices, as in the Taoiseach’s address to the nation: “Difficult choices are never easy.” The late historian of modern Europe, Tony Judt, says it best: “When imposing welfare cuts upon the poor, for example, legislators . . . have taken a singular pride in the ‘hard choices’ they have had to make.

“The poor vote in much smaller numbers than anyone else. So there is little political risk in penalising them: just how ‘hard’ are such choices?

“These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others. If an older usage were still in force, whereby being tough consisted of enduring pain rather than imposing it on others, we should perhaps think twice before so callously valuing efficiency over compassion.”

Sacrifice

There’s a hell of a difference between making a sacrifice and being sacrificed. Making a sacrifice is when the Taoiseach lets it be known that he’s thinking of travelling to a European summit on Ryanair but has to settle in the end for Air France.

Being sacrificed is when you’re a kid and you have curable learning difficulties and you’re told that your childhood will be over by the time you get to the top of the waiting list for help.

The devil is in the detail

Apart from being the cliché of choice for all broadcasters, and thus innately annoying, this one’s also untrue. Details matter but Satan resides, not in the small print, but right there on the front page.

Our problem is grasping the bloody obvious, the vast, outrageous scale of what’s being done in our name: the biggest transfer of public resources to private institutions and individuals in the history of the State.

It’s this big stuff that still blinds us. How many people actually know that come March, the first payment on the promissory notes for Anglo and Nationwide will amount, with interest, to significantly more than was cut or raised in extra taxes in the entire budget?

Can we resolve for 2012 not to use these words, except ironically and in inverted commas? And to begin to replace them with others, such as republic, democracy, equality, justice and sanity?