Ireland to unveil stimulus package

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Source: Financial Times

Dublin is to unveil a multibillion euro stimulus package later this month in an effort to kickstart its flagging economy and curb unemployment as it presses the eurozone to take over a large chunk of bank-related debts to aid its recovery.

Michael Noonan, Ireland’s finance minister, said on Wednesday that the troika of international lenders – the European Central bank, European Commission and the International Monetary Fund – had approved the stimulus measures as long as Dublin does not breach its spending limits.

“It will be like a parallel capital budget geared towards projects that enhance the capacity of the economy to be more productive, including road and school projects,” Mr Noonan told the Financial Times in an interview.

Figures published a day ahead of schedule by Ireland’s national statistics office and carried by Irish media on Wednesday show the Irish economy contracted by 1.1 per cent in the first three months of the year, compared with the last quarter of 2011. A combination of a slowdown in export growth owing to the eurozone crisis and a depressed domestic economy has caused the unemployment rate to climb steadily to 14.9 per cent.

Read more: http://liveweb.archive.org/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/08f3c34e-cb7a-11e1-911e-00144feabdc0.html

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1. How to hide the devastating affects of austerity

"A combination of a slowdown in export growth owing to the eurozone crisis and a depressed domestic economy has caused the unemployment rate to climb steadily to 14.9 per cent."

But the Irish people are certainly paying off those shady bank loans their government decided to saddle them with, while shredding the safety net for the working class and eliminating necessary government services. Who could have guessed that austerity would plummet them into a never ending great recession?