Defiant villagers lead Irish debt resistance

[xchrom]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/defiant-villagers-lead-irish-debt-resistance/2013/01/11/5aa7bf2a-5c2e-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html

BALLYHEA, Ireland — A few hundred yards of road, a service station and a church are about all there is to see in Ballyhea. But the Irish hamlet in County Cork has become the center of Irish resistance to E.U.-imposed austerity.

Every Sunday, locals gather after mass to stage a lonely yet defiant protest at the way the European Union and Dublin are handling the financial crisis.

“The government is borrowing money to pay back bondholders of our bust banks while making deep cuts to services and hiking taxes,” said Diarmaid O’Flynn, a sports journalist spearheading the protest campaign, which will hold its 100th weekly march later this month. “They are making us all debt slaves and passing a huge financial burden on to our kids.”

Ireland’s banking crisis has cost taxpayers $85 billion and forced the country into a bailout led by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Five years of austerity budgets have carved $38 billion out of the economy, pushed?unemployment to?al­most 15 percent and forced hundreds of thousands of young people to emigrate.

[mbperrin]

1. Good for Ballyhea!

They just need more to join them.

Banking has risks. Bankers need to absorb them, not pass them to the general population.

[truebluegreen]

2. Effing banksters.

They should ALL be in jail, ours too!