Welcome

After six months of posting to various chatboards about the Irish economy and the state of the nation, I want to bring these thoughts together in a single space and to give more depth and variety to these ideas.

I began blogging to alert people to the gravity of the economic crisis we face. Until this week i.e. the end of March 2009, it was clear that the Government did not have the full measure of the crisis. Most obviously, they were underestimating the calamity that has befallen the public finances. They also failed to grasp the nettle which is Irish banking.

More broadly, the Government have been unable to provide leadership which would give Irish people a sense of direction and hope. Fianna Fail is hopelessly compromised by its links with the construction and property boom which have exacerbated the damage that the global crisis was bound to inflict. There is an even more fundamental difficulty for the Government: FF and the Greens have no shared philosophy which is to say that FF have no philosophy other than hanging onto power and the Greens abandoned theirs as soon as it came into contact with reality.

I hate the notion of economic determinism but the economic crisis will drive politics for the foreseeable future and Irish society will be shaped for generations by the cataclysm which is now unfolding.

So this site is my answer to the age-old question: whither Ireland? It will look for answers outside this island and it will try to offer ideas to build a future where money and credit are not the dominant forces in our lives.