It's our lowest ebb and there's no rising tide in sight
After the great Nama gamble, the only choices we have left are revolution or slavery, says John Drennan
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IN a week where the Cabinet put the country in the pawnshop to save the builders and the bankers, the most realistic measure of where we are now is that the morale of the Irish people is amazingly similar to that of Mussolini's Italy in 1944.
The comparison may appear excessive, for it is 80 years since our Fianna Fail governors gave up their old habits of shooting dissenters and surplus public servants.
In fairness, it should also be noted there were no madcap foreign adventures -- well, outside of the property diaspora -- during the reign of Bertie.
We also retained a form of democracy whilst the courts zealously guarded their freedom for their own purposes and the public sector remained largely independent, in theory.
However, in spite of all these exceptions, the mirthless embrace of failure sweeping across our poor zombie state is eerily like the Italian response to the collapse of the pantomime pretensions of their own glorious leader.
As we gaze at the spectacle of a Government which couldn't organise a drinks party in a brewery attempting to turn a profit on the biggest portfolio of unwanted property in the world, it is hard to blame us for being cynical.
The historians may still be scribbling but, as we struggle through the debris of our ruined Tiger, ultimately any realistic verdict on the amoral age of Bertie will say this was a time where the country was stolen from the people by stealth.
The bad news for those of us who must deal with the great betrayal of the Irish people is that the busting up of a previously prosperous state by Mr Ahern and his retinue of cronies is unique in one respect.
Normally when a country rots away from within, the source of the contagion comes from either the conservative or liberal side of the divide.
Sadly, unlike America under Bush or Britain before Thatcher, Ireland is reaping the whirlwind of a set of excesses that were indulged in by every side.
The reason for this is simple. Ireland may be a democracy but its economy resembled the classic fascist state in more ways than monuments to political vanity, like stadiums whose attendance now consists of wild horses and weeds.
Ultimately the central feature of the classical fascist state is that the survival of the regime is intimately linked to the love of its glorious leader.
However, even the most wonderful leader can only retain his special position by buying the loyalty of the chief vested interests within the state.
Of course, our Bertie was far more subtle than popinjays like Mussolini. Il Duce may have enforced his position by the sword, but Ahern carefully disguised the fist of his insatiable desire for power with the gentle swaddling clothes of social partnership.
They may be talking the talk now but in the gentle era of the Bert, 'I'm all right Jack' O'Connor and the unions gazed once at the social partnership trough, did a quick headcount of all the easily earned public sector union dues, and abandoned the nation's private sector workers without a backwards glance.
Of course, our politicians, civil servants and the state- sponsored wing of the professional classes were equally enthusiastic when it came to the old mafia practice of the dipping of the beak.
However, there was no corruption in the old uncouth sense of the word.
Instead we took the more subtle route where the national till was still looted but in a safe legal fashion known as benchmarking.
Sadly the one great flaw of the fascist economy -- and the chief reason why they went to war so often -- is that an economic system centred on graft is unsustainable.
As we find out the hard way that our own gentler variant was equally unworkable, sadly, when it comes to paying for the self-absorbed greed of the most fiscally illiterate party in Europe, the only war this State has declared has been on its own people.
Even as our builders, consultants, barristers, politicians and bankers squabble over the carcass of our Tiger, there has, however, been one point of unity.
They may be fighting like the 40 thieves in Ali Baba, but any attempt to find a road map which might explain why we are where we are now has been greeted with a unified cry of "move along there now please and leave the past to the historians".
A clever man might think that if we are to ever move forward we need to know why we are where we are now.
However, there may be a reason behind this ongoing unified front, for history shows betrayals on the scale we have experienced are either followed by revolutions or prolonged periods of slavery.
In our case it is becoming increasingly clear the chosen plan of this frightened crew is to hope that if they demoralise us enough we will slide gently into the slavery option.
Like the Weimar Republic, we will be paying reparations for the betrayal of the generals for decades, but gentlemen like the former AIB chief Dermot Gleeson have been busy blurring the lines of accountability with the great old theory of collective guilt where everyone from the SC to the binman shared equally in the prosperity of the Tiger.
Surprisingly amidst all the current amorality and deceit there is one piece of good news for if we do decide to choose revolution over slavery we do not have to wait for a Che Guevara or a Finian Mc Grath to come down from the Cooley Mountains.
After Nama and those cleverly drafted fictions about 'fair value', our busted builders and bankers will never have to pay the full €60bn (and rising) price of their madcap Gatsby-style schemes.
However, the most astonishing indictment of the lost decade of Bertie is that simply running the place properly would represent a real revolution in governance.
Such a transformation would be governed by modest changes like the inevitable recognition that the most bankrupt economy in Europe cannot afford to pay its greedy barristers, politicians, semi-state bosses, judges, council ward bosses, consultants and senior mandarins the highest wages in Europe.
It's time to tell our governors that no public sector worker is worth more than €150,000 a year.
They, after all, busted the place so let them pay the price and if nobody likes it let them take their chances in the private sector so long as they tell us how they got on.
Oh, and a Bill Clinton-style high tax rate of 60pc for super-earners would set a fine example of national sacrifice for all those greedy minimum wage earners.
It might damage the sale of yachts but outside of that we suspect the economic trickle- down effect would be slight.
Sadly even the most gentle of revolutions does need at least one head but in our case this should not be too difficult.
If Mr Cowen is a real rather than a bespoke republican, after a period of summer reflection he will surely hang his head with shame and quit over the damage he has done to the country he says he loves so well.
- John Drennan
