Joe blogs, 1st May , 2009

Sea-faring, as reflected by Gannetsway, is no escapist affair. On the contrary, I maintain that it breeds foresight and objectivity such that is rarely found in politicians or media pundits. Also of course it provides a wealth of imagery that constantly shows up in the discourse of maritime cultures. Thus when our Taoseach was Finance Minister, while he may indeed be said to have been blowing up a balloon or a bubble, riding a bolting horse or a runaway train, I would rather imagine him at the helm of a ship that was dangerously over-canvassed and running out of control. When the international storm broke she broached to and lost her rig. Now she is drifting, and whether she ends up sinking, going on the rocks or just getting stuck on the mud (if we are lucky) is anyone’s guess.

Was the helmsman asleep, unaware, incompetent or just paralysed by the difficulty of doing anything about this situation? Too busy trying to crowd on yet more sail with tax-breaks and whatnot, carried away by the exhilaration of it all? I’m afraid whatever way you look at it, instead of being made Captain, he should have been keel-hauled, even ahead of the banksters, for whom I have no particular sympathy except that I don’t like to see anyone scape-goated. Blimey, I was actually able to persuade my beloved wife to downsize our house ahead of the crash!

Admittedly, aside from our home-grown problems, this depression was bound to be particularly deep in Ireland for one simple reason; our economy is closely tied to les Anglo-Saxons of Britain and America, while our currency is tied to the Eurozone, where the Germans call the shots. When push comes to shove, les Anglo-Saxons print more money to get out of trouble, which they happen to have the power to do, quantative easing I believe is the term used; while the Germans don’t believe that easing the sheets is a good way to try to beat off a lee shore.

Our Unionist friends no doubt think it’s too good for us, for going and hitching up with them Continentals. Maybe when the dollar founders, taking President Obama with it in his second term, and sterling too, things may look a little different again. Aren’t we all at sea?

But for me Mr Cowan finally lost all credibility as a captain who might get our ship safely under way again when he said to the Nation last Christmastime that ‘if we make the right decisions now we could get back to where we were reasonably quickly’! No notion that we had been on a dangerous course if not totally out of control, that we needed to radically change course and proceed more gently to boot! Evidently such considerations are far from the mind of our brave Taoseach. All he can offer now is to batten down the hatches by cutting expenditure and tighten up the ship by raising taxes, so that we can ‘get back to where we were’! I’m sorry to say that he seems to have all the imagination and charisma of a bucket of bilge water.

Well it ain’t going to work; he’s going to drive the Irish economy even deeper into the mud if not on the rocks. There are three big perils in the background, namely Peak Oil, Climate change, and the financial/employment thing. There is a very obvious way to negociate all three at once, by way of a green recovery, to my mind above all by replacing oil dependency with renewable energy and hydrogen. There are plenty of politicians paying lip service to the idea. When they put as much money into it as they do into banks or arms, the people would no doubt be prepared to take them seriously and we would all be happy to turn to and put our backs in it.

So now, how many maritime images can you find in that lot?