NationalPlatform.Org

The Irish edition of the Sunday Times reported that Edmund Honohan, Master of the Irish High Court, has accused the Irish Parliament of failing to assert Irish legislation over new laws from Brussels and delegating much of the workload involved in scrutinising EU law to civil servants.

‘We must re-assure the bondholders about the economy’. This line is trotted out daily in the Irish media. But who are these bondholders? The strange feature of current debates is that the Irish people never get told to whom we are supposed to pay all these debts […]

Last Saturday the Financial Times published data on bondholders for Irish government debt. The figures relate to July 2010 when European banks were asked to provide information to the Committee of European Banking Supervisors as part of a stress test. Although the data is a few months old, we may reasonably assume that the pattern has not changed when interest rates shot up to 6.5%. It should be noted that the figures below pertain only to Irish state debt. We still do not know who the bondholders of Anglo-Irish or the wider banking system because this is supposed to be ‘commercially secret’ information. Read it carefully and you will get an insight into the shocking skulduggery that is going on here.

TOP 10 BANKS WHO HOLD IRISH GOVERNMENT BONDS

1. Royal bank of Scotland £4.3 billion
2. Allied Irish banks €4.1 billion
3. Bank of Ireland €1.2 billion
4. Credit Agricole €929 million
5. HSBC $816 million
6. Danske Bank €655 million
7. BNP Paribas €571 million
8. Groupe BPCE €491 million
9. Societe Generale €453 million
10. Banco BP1 €408 million

The Royal Bank of Scotland is owned by the British government and Peter Sutherland was one of its directors until 2009. Sutherland often lectures the Irish population on the need for cutbacks – but he never reveals this link. The big surprise, however, is that the two biggest bondholders are Irish Banks. The people of Ireland have already put €7 billion in these two banks – but they then screw us twice by lending back our own money at higher interest rates. Imagine working class taxpayers delivering billions at the front door of the bank and then the directors scurrying around the back door to lend us back our own money and to call for more sacrifices. It is time to end this madness now.

The European Commission has just flown 15 Irish journalists to Brussels for a two-day ‘information visit’. Or as those of us who know Brussels and talk straight would put it, for a two-day, two-night taxpayer-funded propaganda junket at a four-star hotel.

Ireland and the other eurozone countries might be suffering savage spending cuts, but the EU self-publicity budget thrives: in 2008 the Open Europe think-tank calculated that the EU was spending at least €2 billion a year on ‘information’.

Much of it bent, which is to say, propaganda. The commission actually admits that its information is bent. One of its publications declares: ‘Genuine communication by the European Union cannot be reduced to the mere provision of information.’

The EU propaganda machine pumps money into lobby groups that support ‘ever closer union’. They push propaganda into schools. And almost more than anything else, they target the Press. Journalists are offered ‘free’ trips and training (yes, just like Scientology offers training). The EU gives out cash prizes to on-message journalists.

A parliamentary Press official told me this week that a large number of Irish news organisations are given free flights to Strasbourg to cover the parliament, plus €360 in cash for expenses. (The Irish Daily Mail takes none of these taxpayer-funded handouts.)

 

[…]I got myself into the middle of it to hear what it was the commission and parliament propaganda machine would say to these 15 EU-innocents coming from Dublin. I cut the hotel and the other freebies – I live in Brussels – and stuck to the meetings. Meanwhile the journalists piled off their EU taxpayer-funded €377-a-head flight and into their EU taxpayer-funded rooms at the Hotel Manos Stephanie (’the Louis XV furniture, marble lobby and plentiful antiques set a standard of elegance rarely encountered,’ the hotel brags, and so it should since the rate is listed at €295 a night for a single room).

I said ‘No, thanks’ to the swish free lunch (well, not free to the taxpayers: it cost taxpayers €30 for each journo) in the private dining room at the European Parliament on Tuesday. It wasn’t hard to say No. The truth is I get gag-reflex when someone offers me taxpayer-funded food. I can never get that line from Abraham Lincoln out of my head, about the lure of ‘the same old serpent that says you work and I eat’.

I only wanted to be there to see how the propaganda machine would seek to mislead. For example: one theme that turned up in briefings on the economy was that the euro had nothing to do with Ireland’s economic disaster, nor indeed with any economic disaster anywhere in Europe.

Yet it was the low interest rates of the early years of the euro that set fire to our property bubble. It was the illusion of eurozone convergence that allowed our banks to suck in billions from saver-countries such as Germany.

The propaganda orthodoxy in the EU will admit no such damage. What the Irish journalists were given this week was the Bart Simpson excuse for the damage done by the euro: ‘I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me.’ This wasn’t information, it was a propaganda pitch.

[…] One of the meetings the Press officers had arranged was a session with five Irish members of the European Parliament.
[…] I thought I’d try to put the concerns of these politicians about the economy into Brussels-perspective. Remember, we were talking to politicians who will bank a half-million euros just from their salaries over the course of this parliament. Last year I added up some of the perks they get on top, everything from daily allowances to business-class air travel to medical allowances to free disposable contact lenses to reimbursement for 60 sessions a year of mud baths. Being an MEP is a lotto win. How do you stay in sympathy with the unemployed in West Dublin with a life like that?

So I asked the five MEPs to justify the decision last week by the parliament’s budget committee to increase the MEPs’ entertainment budget for 2011 by 85 per cent. How could they justify that, given the suffering of people across Europe?

The five said they’d heard about no such thing. Mr de Rossa even denied there was an entertainment budget for MEPs. He suggested that newspapers had made up the story.

Since I was one of the journalists who had reported the story, I knew it had not been made up. I’d had my information from Marta Andreasen, an MEP who is a professional accountant. More to the point, she is a member of the parliament’s Budget Committee.

Here are the figures, as from this professional accountant: the MEPs’ entertainment budget for next year has jumped from €1,105,200 to €

2,047,450. Yet the five Irish MEPs at this propaganda-fest denied it in front of 15 Dublin journalists plus me. Unless I could identify the exact budget line for them right then, the MEPs said they wouldn’t admit such a thing could have happened.

The other journalists, unused to the ways of the parliament, couldn’t make anything of it. But I will give credit to Mairéad McGuinness, who, despite being indignant about my suggestion, had her staff check it. She came back to me a couple of hours later with a piece of paper showing the figures for a budget line labelled ‘Entertainment and representation expenses’. There it was: the huge jump in the entertainment budget that the Irish MEPs had all earlier denied could exist.

Half the eurozone is bleeding to death, but the MEPs will take a jump next year of 85 per cent for their ‘entertainment’.

[…]When Miss Day brought her comments around to the new so-called European External Action Service (the euphemism for the new EU diplomatic corps which is going to lead to the closing of many Irish embassies around the world), she assured the Dublin journalists that this vast army of diplomats and embassies would in fact be ‘revenue neutral, except for the first year.’

I waited for someone to ask, ‘But what about the first year, then?’ None of them did. I realised that even the sharp ones weren’t used to listening to eurocrats’ slimy-speak. If they’d asked (I didn’t, it was 6 pm and I was losing the will to go on), and if she’d given a straight answer, the Irish journalists would have learned the shocking truth.

What her propaganda pitch didn’t mention about Catherine Ashton’s new empire was that the new service is in raging cost-overrun. It is going to head for at least ¤33 million over its ¤455 million budget this year already – and it hasn’t even been launched yet.

Thirty-three million over budget in one year, and that is just called a failure to be ‘revenue neutral’. As I said, eurocrats’ slimy-speak. It’s the painful torture of a life in Brussels.

The EU-innocents last night boarded their flight back to Dublin. Before they left, I asked three of them if they’d felt their trip was a good use of taxpayers’ money. All three agreed it was.

I may ask them again after they see the tax increases that Finance Minister Brian Lenihan has planned for them in the next Budget. How strange that some journalists haven’t figured it out yet: there really is no such thing as a free lunch. Just like there’s no such thing as EU ‘information’.