How the IMF are killing the Irish patient -- more austerity cuts are the wrong diagnosis for ailing Irish economy

IMF fail to fix what ails Ireland

When I was about ten, I was diagnosed with asthma. I was given an inhaler, one of those tubes you have to blow into to measure your lung capacity, and an amount of information and fact sheets along the lines of “So, you’ve become dust’s bitch” that would have stunned an ox. There was just one problem: I wasn’t asthmatic.

After the initial diagnosis my health was getting worse if anything, and every time my mother and I protested as much, I was fussed around by confused doctors like I was The Six Million Dollar Technology: “We can rebuild him, we have the technology...we just have to give him more asthma stuff.” Eventually we just decided to unilaterally stop using the inhaler, the lung capacity thingamajig and everything else, and sure enough, I got better.

Turns out I had just a standard level of childhood sickness for a kid with glasses as thick as mine, but after I was diagnosed something weird started happening. Loads of children who I knew from school also started being diagnosed with asthma. Like, loads of them. It seemed if you had a cough, splutter, took a drink and a bit went down the wrong way or got a bruise in the shin, asthma was probably the problem. People started to wonder what the hell was going on.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it feels like some of those childhood diagnosticians have given up medicine for economics, and ditched their MDs in favor of the IMF. Recently it was announced that the International Monetary Fund, Ireland’s economic proctologist, wanted more cuts to social welfare payments, child benefit, raising a property tax and, their most bristly resolution, removing the automatic right for old age pensioners to have a medical card.

The IMF was set up after World War 2 with the intention to help and invest in countries in perilous economic situations. In more recent times, it has become the ultimate arbiter of asymmetric free market policy, the adherents of which believe they are the only show in town. So, when the IMF detail countries to make such structural changes, they do it not entirely out of sheer bean counting necessity, but ideological prerogative and zeal. Ireland is sick alright, but asthma medicine isn’t going to make us better.

What Ireland has needed for years and needs now more than ever is wise investment made in the right areas. The free market notion that if you throw enough money at it things will cascade into their natural positions is simply not viable or practical. Every decision made at government level effects many others and all a cut in the dole payments will do is make it harder for people to live rather than easier for people get a decent job, because the investment simply isn’t there. A wiser use of the government’s time and money would be to make the social welfare system more comprehensible. As it stands, if I was on the dole but got a couple of weeks of stand-alone, temporary work, I wouldn’t have my money deducted for the few weeks, as would be the rational thing to do. Instead, you have to sign off, and then undergo the whole desperate rigmarole again when you’re done as if you’ve never been in the office before. It’s a small example but one that exemplifies the wider logic gaps and inefficiencies of that department, and the government as a whole.

To paraphrase the Hippocratic oath, “first do no harm”. But, in even given the IMF’s best intentions, their fundamental wrong-headedness in dealing with economic crisis is doing just that. Cuts, hikes and universal entitlement revocations is the wrong medicine for the wrong symptoms, at the wrong place at the wrong time. I truly hope the IMF will realize that flinging an inhaler at us will not solve all our ills, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. 

Beauty pageants for children in Ireland - Maybe one Americanism too far

As the old saying goes, when the US sneezes, the other side of Atlantic catches cold. And while we have benefited immensely from certain elements of American culture being introduced over here – rib joints, Dr Pepper, Neil Patrick Harris – there are a few things we could be doing with not traveling over. Child pageants, for example.

This week it emerged that the Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant would be hosting an event in Ireland in November this year. And on a very fundamental level, that really weirds me out.

Case in point: there are, apparently, three rounds to these things. The first is the gown, the second is the talent and the third is freestyle I guess, where in the words of the organizer Annette Hill, “the children can wear whatever they want to wow the judges”.

Furthermore, she also countered the notion these things are hyper-competitive, mini-Barbie fests by saying that everyone gets a trophy and “When you get to a certain age group, four and up, we do like a certain amount of hair and makeup, but just enough to accentuate their natural beauty.”

Annette Hill is, according to her website, available to “teach your child modelling lessons” and offers a photo retouching service that “can add teeth, eyelashes, change backgrounds, remove blemishes, change colors, and lots more. We offer a low price for our retouching services, regardless of how much retouching your photo needs”.

I will now allow about ten minutes for your brain to reset, so you can process the lunacy of that last paragraph.

Welcome back. Apart from wanting me to take out my premise bazooka and blowing all this pageant business to kingdom come, I’m also full of questions. Confused, angry questions. Why should kids of five be actively trying to impress anyone, much less judges? Why does natural beauty need to be accentuated by any make up? Especially when you’re five bloody years of age? Why would you send photos of your child to a stranger to have them retouched? What the hell is wrong with you people?

I normally don’t like saying things like “kids should be kids” because that line has been essentially hijacked by culturally reactionary Ned Flanders types who use it as a means of sheltering young people from pretty much every fact of life beyond “Jesus is a smashing bloke”, but I will say it now: kids should be kids.

Below the age of ten, kids should fundamentally preoccupy themselves with the following:

1) Running for hours in no particular direction, just because you can.
2) Orchestrating a military-style climbing mission to get something from a high press.
3) Asking teachers can you spend the afternoon drawing.
4) Waking up bewildering early at the weekend to watch cartoons featuring unlikely animal friendships
5) Staying away from bloody pageants.

Here's some footage from a 2012 Universal Royalty Beauty Pageant award ceremony -

Healthcare, gay marriage and the right side of history - dealing with our modern pressing social issues

Sometimes, it seems that imagination is a slave of modernity. You can look around you and see the swirl of technological gadgets that assist your living and generally consider the relative ease with which you live and think to yourself: how can we possibly top this? Are there any quantum leaps left? What possible thing could our kids complain in a “back in our day” manner to our grandkids?

Of course, there are plenty. Not just in the technological sphere but in the social, and in fact the intersection between those two will be the ethical battlefield for several generations to come. But in the meantime, we have plenty of pressing social issues to deal with. The first of which is healthcare.

In no sphere of influence is American exceptionalism found more pathetically lacking than with health provision. The notion that a developed country, much less the ostensible greatest in the world, would have such primitive ideals in dealing with their sick and vulnerable is nothing short of macabre. And the fact that so many people kick up such an hysterical fuss at advancing American healthcare so much a mere step in the direction of civilization is just disturbing.

Most of the opposition seems to stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of even the most basic tenets of political theory. Some seem to think that universal health care run, in any form, by the government entitles Vladimir Lenin to emerge from his mausoleum and give you a kick up the arse whenever he feels like it. But they’re not even the worst of it.

The worst are the ones who seem to take “Give me liberty or give me death” a bit too seriously, as if health insurance and freedom are mutually exclusive. More times than I care to admit I’ve heard Americans say “If people can be compelled to buy health insurance, they could be compelled to do anything!” What a terrifying prospect. Imagine a world where a government also compel you to insure your car, force you to apply for a license to drive it and limit the speed at which you travelled in it for fear of sharp punishment? Chilling.

The other hot button issue of the day is of course gay marriage, and curiously a lot of the same people bloviating about liberty when it comes to health care mandates get suddenly prescriptive when it comes to freedom to tie the knot. Thankfully the case for marriage equality is gathering steam, legislative heft and generally large public support, and in the last few weeks alone the US President, UK Prime Minister and Irish Tanaiste and Justice Minister have all stated their support for gay marriage. And yet, the state of North Carolina are digging their tar heels in with a proposed gay marriage ban, the religious right continue their absurd fixation on rounding up/curing gay people, in Africa homosexuality is treated as a real and present bogeyman, and in the Ukraine a new law proposes to clamp down on gay “propaganda”, making discussion of gay rights, talking about homosexuals in general or stating a fondness for Culture Club illegal. In this day and age, it’s just wrong. Hell, it’s wrong for any day and any age.

Thankfully, progress is inexorable, and the line in the sand is being drawn. There will come a time, not all that far away from now, where the notion that a man and another man couldn’t get married, or a first responder to a crisis would have to wait over a decade for rudimentary health coverage, will be preposterous. As preposterous to us as not allowing a black woman to sit anywhere she wants in a diner. Fifty years ago a great many of people would have put up a strenuous fight to stop that black woman sitting there, but those people have been proved to be dogmatically small-minded and stupid. So too will anti-gay bigots and anti-healthcare ideologues. History will prove it.