Reply #8: Update on conditions in Ireland…another letter from Ireland

[Demeter]

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2011/01/update-on-conditions-in-irelandanother.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FHzoh+%28Angry+Bear%29

We’re forced to do silly things out of desperation, things that other nations don’t have to resort to. For instance, we’ve the lowest corporate tax rate in Europe at 12.5%. Sarkozy recently excoriated us for this. But we use it as an incentive to bait the multi-nationals. We’ve no other choice. Why else would the big companies bother locating here? If the labour market is cheaper elsewhere then we have to compete somehow, we're told. We lure them in by offering them tax shelters. We even set aside developed estates for them and we build their factories when they come, with the Taoiseach on hand to cut the ribbons. Their overheads remain very low and then we allow them to siphon all their profits out of the country. Talk about being recolonized by self-imposed deference, but Ireland is a dependent economy and does what it must do to survive.

There are other options, of course. There’s the old reliable one of emigration. 100,000 people will leave Ireland this year alone, and the numbers are rising, again. That’s one way of solving unemployment, but it’s not completely or satisfactorily solving our problem. Our crisis. As of this month, the CSO (Central Statistics Office) http://www.cso.ie/statistics/sasunemprates.htm quotes the unemployment rate at 14.1%, that’s over 400,000 people out of work. Those people will be on the dole or getting some version of welfare, which starts at €197 per week and rises according to number of dependents.

The CSO’s figures are frightening. They say that of the over 800,000 mortgages http://www.cso.ie/statistics/sasunemprates.htm in the country, worth €120 billion, 40,000 are in arrears and that figure will rise to 70,000 in the coming year: the banks will be forced to repossess these houses. But the banks don’t want all that property. What good is it to them? They especially don’t want to be shackled with toxic real estate when so many are already in negative equity. Every town and village in the country sports its token ghost estate, the relic of the boom years, a reminder of the savage greed that swiftly plunged us into ruin. More on that in a bit. The ESB http://www.esb.ie/main/home/index.jsp> are shutting off service to 50 homes per month for non-payment of bills.

Health Care in Ireland is totally banjaxed: My father who is 80 spent three nights on a trolley in a hallway last year because there were no beds available. He is no longer able to regulate his body temperature because he suffers from leukemia and other complications, so he nearly shivered to death in the one place he went to for care. My sister is a doctor but she could do nothing. Our Health Care system was dismantled and then rebuilt in order to centralize it, hospitals were closed all over the country and acute services scaled back or abandoned altogether. A moratorium on hiring nurses and doctors was instituted and all administrative staff downsized....