It seems understandable that all of this has revived talk of a return of the ‘Banana Republic of Ireland’ – only, as some wags point out, without the bananas. Yet it might make more sense today to turn those assumptions on their heads. This financial crisis looks less like a symptom of Ireland still being a Third World outpost in Europe, and more like an extreme version of the deep-seated problems now afflicting the UK and other economies of Western capitalism.
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That Ireland is now an extreme manifestation of a far wider financial and economic crisis is clear in the way that the larger economies have rallied round and insisted it accepts more assistance. The IMF and the EU have not done this out of the goodness of their black hearts – indeed, as Brendan O’Neill shows on spiked, the price they are demanding by way of repayment amounts to the effective re-colonisation of Ireland (see The Republic of Ireland: colonised by commissioners, by Brendan O’Neill). No, their fear is that the repercussions of the Irish crisis will spread in the Eurozone, not because of some medical-sounding ‘contagion’, but because of the tangled interdependency of the financial system. Full story...
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