The lies of Haughey continue to haunt us

After a great deal of research, I have proved conclusively that it does someone no harm to dance on their grave. It is a pointless gesture though. Haughey’s heirs have easily outdone him, and they’re doing it to us right now.

They assure us that extending the bank guarantee is “part of its gradual phasing out”. (I suppose that’s true, in the same sense that starting it was the first step in a gradual process of stopping it.) People are getting more and more reluctant to lend us the money we need just to keep going, and the biggest idea this Government seems to have is to make the poor work for nothing.

Let’s face it, they’re an incompetent shower of bastards.This is an unhappy country. Not because of wealth or because of poverty, but because of injustice. It’s been shown time and again that the countries with the least inequality are the happiest, yet inequality has been allowed to positively flourish here.

Occasionally it’s justified as the “dynamic” that drives the economy, but that’s self-serving nonsense. Just because a little mustard improves a sandwich that doesn’t mean you can make it even better with a canister of pepper spray.

Most of the time though no one even attempts to excuse it - why bother justifying yourself when you’re king? The simple fact of the matter is that inequality increases because the richer you are, the easier it is to become richer. So money has a tendency to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Is it surprising then that the market crashes? Historically this has been a (very crude and damaging) form of self regulation, a reset or “new game”. People are more equal after a crash - for the obvious reason that there’s a lot more nothing to go round, but also because they learn from the experience and for some time afterwards there is more emphasis in politics on equality and fairness.

Shortly before the Wall Street Crash, 18% of America’s wealth had ended up in the hands of just 1% of the population. After it, though, the US was a significantly more equal place, reaching record levels of fairness in the 1940s and maintaining that standard all through the ’50s and ’60s. Things really were better in the America of a few decades ago.

So can we expect a great post-Depression improvement for Irish society? I’m doubtful. In the Wall Street crash, a vast amount of money almost literally vanished because it was found to be largely imaginary, the result of accounting fictions and speculation.

Exactly the same thing happened in our construction boom of course, it was all based on fantasy house prices, but instead of letting the false money evaporate, we seem to be trying desperately to pretend it’s still real. To do so we are throwing good money after bad - and we have to borrow the good money.

People in the future are being robbed to prop up the fake wealth of our ruling 1% today!Right now the best advice you could give your grandchildren is to be born somewhere else.

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