No reward for Ireland in doing the IMF's bidding

The Guardian:

Despite 'exceptional' efforts to meet IMF targets, Ireland has a rising deficit, sustained emigration and 15% unemployment

Austerity policies are now widely regarded as having failed, and this failure is increasingly obvious in the country elected to act as Austerity's Child. The banking collapse, and the legacy bequeathed by the Irish state's extraordinary September 2008 bank guarantee, has seen society in Ireland reshaped as a petri dish for IMF, European commission and ECB experimentation. Successive waves of cuts have been stipulated by the Troika in return for its loans, but implemented without resistance, and arguably, a degree of enthusiasm, by the two governments of the "post-sovereign" era.

The fiscal adjustment, according to economist Karl Whelan, is the equivalent of "€4,600 per person… the largest budgetary adjustments seen in the advanced economic world in recent times". With annual "adjustments" of €3-4bn flagged until 2015, the euphemism of "purposeful austerity" cannot long camouflage the concerted assault on the – already minimalist – social contract.

With this havoc in its fourth year, it is difficult to recall that 2008 promised what David Graeber describes as "an actual public conversation about… the financial institutions that have come to hold the fate of nations in their grip". As David McNally documents, this promise was merely a preface to the "neoliberal mutation" that insists on states slashing spending to "ensure that working-class people and the poor will pay the cost of the global bank bailout".

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