Hope Ð in a week when the IMF come calling to the door

I’m not sure just how we should describe the arrival of those people from the International Monetary Fund who are staying in a flash hotel in Dublin – would they be correctly described as examiners, receivers, or liquidators?

I have a theory that they might fall into some kind of hybrid category that would be a mixture of examiner and receiver – the latter role to see if Ireland Inc can continue to be run as a going concern.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when the difference between the three categories was a matter of theory learnt all those years ago in Business Studies. Maybe my memory is playing tricks, but I do not remember the status of examiner existing then.

There was also a time when ‘bonds’ were something that existed only on the pages of Bonfire Of The Vanities. Now, if I go into the average pub, someone is ringing Joe Duffy on a mobile to talk about ‘yields rising’. The only other impression is that ‘Government stock is falling’. Like a lot of people, I am struggling to understand how it all came to this – it’s a bit like all of us went to a party and now the bill has come in. We appear to have had plenty of rules which should have prevented banks acting like utter idiots, but the implementation of the rules was a total joke.

As the IMF men and women with the briefcases and laptops trawl through our situation, it is difficult to see much hope . . . and certainly not from the politicians, some of whom seemed to be suggesting that, because we are such a ‘basket case’, we are in a stronger position than we might otherwise be the case.

On the basis of that argument, people like Sean Fitzpatrick, Michael Fingleton and their buddies in the banks who lost the run of themselves, should have dished out maybe tens of billions more. Then, we really would have had the Germans and French in the spot where we wanted them!

I am glad to say, however, that I found a haven of solace, a place of some hope in the past week. Iit was in NUI Galway where the former boss of Intel, Dr Craig T. Barrett, was spelling out what we needed to do to ensure our future, and he had a message of hope that, maybe, with a bit of commonsense and the brain-power of young people, we could turn the corner.

I loved his line where he said that, unless we used our brains to outwit, outsmart, out-think and be better than others . . . then it was likely that we would find that someone in China, India, or indeed the US, had ‘eaten our lunch’.

Dr Barrett is a lanky grey-haired man who looks uncannily like the late Dr John Kenneth Galbraith – the economist who wrote a tiny but immensely readable history of the 1929 Great Crash in the US. Maybe we might have learnt something from it – that boom before that bust was built on the basis that everyone could be rich by having a go on the stock market.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.