Real story of bailout exit is how good crisis was wasted
There is no such thing as a good bailout it is an oxymoron but that has not not stopped us claiming whatever kudos were going over the past three years. To paraphrase the Taoiseach, we have become the best small country in the world in which to do bailouts by 2013.
This is not nearly as pathetic as it seems. Our ability to meet pretty much all the conditions of the bailout has done much to restore international confidence in Ireland and its institutions. Making a virtue out of this necessity was the obvious and cheap jerseys china correct strategy.
Our partners clearly understood this and played their part. First by allowing the Government play down their quarterly visits, which were the physical manifestation of our surrender of control. Undermining the already fragile and battered Irish political establishment was not a smart move if they wanted to get their 45 billion back.
It is this sort of pragmatism presumably which is behind the troika's willingness to let the Government make such a song and dance out of whether or not to take a formal contingent credit line from the troika when the programme ends in a few weeks.
You only have to look at Irish bond yields to conclude that this is very close to much ado about nothing. The people who have lent us money and whom we will need to borrow more money from seem unmoved by the will we won't we? drama playing out in front of them.
This is presumably because they know as does pretty much anyone who has followed the events of the past few years that if things do not go well over the next few years for Ireland an additional funding line can be arranged. The source of the wholesale jerseys china funds and framework to deliver them now exists in the form of the European Stability Mechanism. The markets also know Ireland will be subjected to a very high level of external supervision for as long as it remains in the euro as a result of the fiscal compact and all the other Governance reforms brought in post crisis. There will also be additional surveillance associated with our borrowings from the IMF. Finally, there is pledge of the president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, to do whatever it takes to keep the euro together.
So why all the fuss over the precautionary funding line? It would seem at best to be a marginally important issue as we exit the bailout. But it has been made a central issue if not the central issue and taken on an importance that is hard to justify.
The narrative that has been promulgated over the past few weeks is that the troika are trying to force us to take the precautionary funding line and in the process make us submit wholesale jerseys china to at least another year of intrusion into our affairs. The troika seem prepared to play along or at least not burst our bubble but occasionally the mask slips and their indifference becomes visible.
Asked about it last week, Draghi said the ECB, the European Commission and the IMF "would say that certainly it would be useful to have a precautionary programme in place". You could spend a lot of time pondering what Draghi means by useful or you could take it at face value; they think we should take one but it's really our call.
The closer you look, the more the whole precautionary credit line issue looks like a ball of smoke from which the Government is cleverly mining a political victory. It also serves to divert attention from the fact that, after the best opportunity in a generation to push though reforms, the health service remains in chaos, social welfare continues to disincentivise work; professional fees remain stupidly high; the banks don't work and hundreds of thousands continue to struggle with debts that they can't pay.