Really..........

In place where? In our laws our constitution? No it is not. Other countries might have these rules, but we don't.


What has the banks being fecked got to do with this? This about placing constraints on deficit spending by governments, to prevent sovereign debt crises in the future. It has nothing to do with fixing the current problems.

Here's a metaphor:

Ireland has really bad sunburn, and the EU has some after-sun. But after-sun only soothes, our skin still has to heal. Worse still, there's too many sunburned countries and non enough after-sun.

The treaty is sunblock, which is fuck all use when your sunburned. The EU rightly wants us to promise to use sunblock in future, before it dishes out the after-sun, because after-sun doesn't grow on trees.

Now there's also lots of individually sunburned people, who are crying that the EU and the banks sold them cheap foreign holidays, and Bertie the Budget Holidays rep didn't force them to use sun-block, but at the end of the day people decided they didn't need sunblock because they didn't get burnt on the first few days of the holiday. They're now paying for their own after-sun, as well as the country's!

Then there's the people who wore sunblock, and still have to pay for after-sun for those who didn't. They also have to share the after-sun they saved up in case the sun-block didn't work!

So, for me, 'Bertie and the EU didn't make me use sun-block, so I shouldn't have to pay for after-sun' is not relevant in whether or not we promise to use sun-block in future.

What I want to know is why we are talking about sunblock when we've already been diagnosed with a serious melanoma. Address the actual problem, not prevention for something that has already happened.

It's not designed to solve the problem. We're not voting for a bailout, or for honouring the bank guarantee, or anything to do with the current bailout? The no camp will try to paint it as such, but this is about getting individual countries to sign into local law, that which exists in European law. It makes nations answerable to their own constitution, instead of Europe, since it's been flouted to date.

This treaty is about countries setting rules to prevent us ending up here again in 20 years. And we need to sow the seeds now to build trust in the eyes of creditors of the future. Europe needs to play this confidence card before it seeks to build the firewall.

fantastic!

Maybe you can submit this to the referendum commission for their literature blast.

But one thing shouldn't it be sunscreen!

I am going to say no and keep saying no - but very well might vote yes in the referendum. reason being is we need to look like we are going to vote no in order to spur a response from europe. something we should always have got i.e the "bailout" funds at 1% or less will do

Ó Cuív has resigned as deputy leader of FF over his inability to support the referendum.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0229/ocuive.html

Thanks for that summation jammyBastard - very pithy and easy-to-follow. I am going to put that one on facebook for my friends.

I second that. Great synopsis.

To not be here in 20 years we have to go somewhere else first. How's that gonna happen? Short answer is: it isn't. If we need a No vote to jar the domestic and foreign politicians back into reality, so be it.

How would the rules have saved us?

I'm in a similar position. It's not so much that I want to be bought, it's that if we agree to this then it will be a tacit acceptance of what's gone before. There's been no riots, little protest, and if we meekly accept a European treaty change now - even if technically unrelated to the banker/bondholder issue - we'll have difficulty in going back in a couple of years time and saying we don't fancy paying for all that banking debt any more. Germany and France can rightly say "what, don't want to pay back the ECB?? But you've signed up to the deal as it stands?? You've never even hinted that your people are unhappy with it!!"

From my limited research, it might have it might not. It comes down to "structural deficit" rule no greater than 0.5% GDP.
As far as I can see there is not actual definition of what a structural deficit is, lots of people use different calculations. So FF would have been using calculations that said we were not in "structural deficit" from 00-06. The EU finance minsters at the time gave out to McCreevy, over our structural deficit there is a rte video of it somewhere. The imf have figures that say we were running a massive structural deficit in those years, but as far as I can tell they only produced those figures after the fact.

If it were an actual law, the opposition of the day would have been using it as a stick to beat the then government. If it worked the government would not have been able to spend all it's windfall tax from property. Possibly meaning less benchmarking, less social welfare increases, less tax decreases, less tax base narrowing, less public sector growth, less chance of FF getting re-elected. End result being that all we'd be faced with is a bank bailout and not the massive gov borrowing for day-day and we'd have more money in a pension reserve to help with bank bailout.

How many will be voting yes on the basis of taking a bit more say away from our gombeen's will be a step in the right direction?

It's one of my reasons. The other reason is to force us to live up to our circumstances now. I am sick of this stupid housing crash going on and on and on. I am sick of being too afraid to plan for retirement because the government will raid my pension. I am sick of all these austerity budgets that have just been a grab-all. Let's take the pain now, get this shit over with and be on the road to recovery in a year. This crisis started in 2006, nearly 6 bloody years ago at this stage, I don't want to be an old man by the time this country gets back to normality.