Hello, and welcome to Tuesday! Today, Musings will be a Political and Current Affairs blog. (Don't worry, this will be more interesting than it sounds.)
There are a lot of things going on in Ireland at the moment. I didn't fully understand this (which is quite an achievement, since this has been happening since 2008) so I asked my dad, and this is what he said...
IN THE BEGINNING (the 2000s) people liked buying lots of houses from property developers. To buy these houses, people took out loans from banks. Everything was OK.
BUT the people who bought the houses can't pay for them and the property developers are losing money which they borrowed from banks as well to build the houses.
SO the property developers can't pay back the money they borrowed from the banks.
SO the banks are losing lots and lots of money.
SO the banks appealed to the government to bail them out and the government guaranteed the bank losses. This means that anything the bank lost, the government (in which I mean the taxpayer) will pay it to them.
BUT this makes the government poor.
SO everyone's poor. Income tax gets the government €32 billion, but their expenditure comes to €50 billion. This is not good.
SO the EU are bailing out Ireland. They're giving us €85 billion to make everything OK. This was agreed on Sunday night.
SO... no one really knows what's going to happen. I mean, the EU and everyone who loaned us money has some control over Ireland, because they can tell us 'No! Don't spend ten million on hospitals and education! Spend it on lollipops!' They probably won't say that, but the important thing is THEY STILL HAVE THAT POWER.
AND lots of people are saying 'OMG Ireland's lost her sovereignity! Pearse and Connolly and Michael Collins are turning in their graves!' and some other people are saying 'Guys! Calm down! This is a really good thing for Ireland! England owe us anyway!' and some other people are saying 'KILL THE BANKERS!' and no one really knows what to do.
There are a million other factors, but this is the gist and will probably get you through a conversation.
And this is why you need to pass your exams, kids!
Tomorrow's Wednesday, which means that tomorrow, I'll be blogging about the business that we call show.
Eleanor Roscuro
2 comments:
The sad thing is that Michael Collins will always be Liam Neeson in my mind.
Anyway, from what the news is suggesting this is a good and bad thing...good because your economy won't go down the proverbial. Bad because part of the conditions of the bailout/loan is probably some sort of austerity policy for you guys...which is bad times.
(England are actually only paying like, a tenth of it anyway. Europe got your back man :D)
LOL. I like your version of politics.
That was in the news last week, way over here in the US.
Your version is still better.
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