The Celtic tiger tanks, as Osborne boggles the mind

Leinster House gives up

It’s bizarre: Ireland uses cheap EU funds to out-compete us for jobs, has a boom and a consequent bust, and now we must bail them out.

EU largesse, ’structural funds’ that the UK paid for in the first place, clearly wasn’t enough to feed the ‘Celtic Tiger’. It turns out that they owe large amounts directly to our own banks too.

The British economy has been staggeringly mismanaged over the last decade or so, but Ireland’s present mess—having had extraordinarily low business tax rates and shedloads of other people’s money, cheap—beggars belief.

So Osborne’s ‘helping hand’ turns out actually to be another UK bank bailout in disguise. Will the money ever touch the inside of an Irish account, or just go straight to RBoS, once it’s electronically ‘printed’?

It’s nice of the Irish to provide a smokescreen for British banks’ hubristic dealings.

There’s an old irony here. Putting ‘a tiger in your tank,’ incidentally, was an Esso advertising gimmic in the 1960s, a furry ‘tiger tail’ you could tie on your car’s back bumper (remember bumpers?).

After they’d survived the grime and slush of February, they looked pretty sorry for themselves.

Well, this tiger has well and truly tanked. Now comes the Celtic winter.

I’ll admit it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for the Irish. They’ve played the underdog for so long and so well in the last century that it’s easy to overlook the institutionalized corruption, the spendthrift economics, the glee in importing British jobs, and the ‘hurrying slowly’ with regard to terrorists.

They thoroughly deserve Gerry Adams, by the way.

But we have short memories to our own detriment. Now they want to pull the rest of the British Isles into the one mess that is not of our making.

As for Osborne, the matter is entirely worse. He seems to be trying to bury ‘moral hazard’ in a manner only slightly quieter than Nietzsche proclaiming God’s demise.

Will Celtic sleaze gum up the works?

You don’t get rid of either so easily. Instead of the feckless few taking responsibility for bad lending, Osborne’s remedy echoes that of Obama across the pond: turn private debt into public. He may “feel your pain” but he’s actually dumping it on the people he ought to be protecting.

Well George, aren’t you forgetting something? As of today, UK sovereign debt is only slightly less than £900,000,000,000. It’s growing at about £4bn per week in compound interest alone The real number, when off-balance-sheet debt is added-in, is so vast it literally stupefies the mind.

Yup. We, the UK, owe nearly eight trillion pounds. That’s roughly £122,000 for every person in the land. It’s an unimaginable number. No comparisons are adequate really: grains of sand on a beach, stacks of paper reaching the moon, whatever.

I just can’t get my head around it, probably why I’ll never be chancellor. And yet George wants to borrow more, not for us even, but to ‘help out friends in need’, he says.