An Inconvenient Truth They Don’t Want You To Know
Éirígí has previously highlighted the Twenty-Six County public debt bomb, which has risen from €50bn to a crippling €210bn since the collapse of the Celtic Tiger. Today we highlight the scale of the interest payments that are being paid to service that debt.
The most recent Annual Report from the National Treasury Management Agency revealed that the state paid €5,800,000,000 (€5.8bn) in interest payments in 2018. That’s a huge number that’s difficult for most people to grasp. Breaking it down into smaller figures and timescales may help readers to appreciate just how large it is. €5.8bn per year equates to:
€483,000,000 (€483m) per month
€112,000,000 (€112m) per week
€16,000,000 (€16m) per day
€660,000 per hour
€11,000 per minute
That’s €11,000 per minute for every single minute of 2018. It should be noted that this figure is for interest repayments alone and doesn’t include any capital repayments.
These interest repayments amounted to 10% of all tax revenue that was collected during 2018 - monies that could otherwise have been spent on housing, healthcare, education, childcare and other vital public services.
Spending this amount of public money on debt repayments would be bad enough if it occurred as an exceptional once-off event, but it’s happens annually.
In the ten years between 2008 and 2018 the state paid out €60,000,000,000 (€60bn) in interest repayments alone. That’s three times more than the €20bn that was paid out in the previous decade between 1998 and 2008.
Again, a figure of €60bn is almost impossibly large for most people to appreciate, but it was enough to pay for:
15 Dublin Metros
OR
20 ‘National Broadband Plans’
OR
30 National Children’s Hospitals.
Or
300,000 publicly-owned houses and apartments on public land.
That’s more than the existing housing stock of Counties Cork (143,000), Limerick (45,000), Galway (52,000), Waterford (33,000) and Sligo (13,000) combined.
300,000 publicly owned homes could have been built with the money that has been squandered on interest repayments over the last ten years.
This is the real legacy of the Celtic Tiger and the bank bailout. Crippling levels of debt that are preventing the state from providing enough funding for healthcare, education, housing, childcare and other vital public services.
None of the establishment parties have much to say about the staggering scale of the public debt or the fact that it will take until 2045 to pay back the interest and loans that arose from the post-Celtic Tiger collapse.
Instead they spin the lie that austerity is over and the boom times are back, while knowing full well that the state is the third most heavily indebted in the world. There’s no votes in telling an inconvenient truth.
That truth means that children who are not yet born will be be paying a portion of their first few years of adult wages to pay back the gambling debts of private developers and bankers because of the decisions that were taken by Fine Gael, Fianna Fail, The Green Party and Labour. And all the time, public services will suffer.
No surprise that they have so little to say about the costs of the interest repayments on the monies that they borrowed to save Irish capitalism and their own political skins.
And worse still the establishment parties remain ideologically wedded to the same model of housing, property development and banking that caused the Celtic Tiger bubble and the catastrophic crash that followed. They have learned nothing and care less.
As sure as night follows day the housing bubble that is currently inflating will inevitably be followed by a crash. But unlike in 2008, the state won’t be able to borrow its way out of the next collapse because it’s already drowning in debt.
Only a dramatic break wit the current model of housing, property development and banking can avert catastrophic future recessions. We need a new model that will put the needs of our people at large ahead of the greed of an extremely powerful, but tiny, elite.
Éirigí For A New Republic is up for that dramatic break - for creating a democratic system of housing and banking that is designed to deliver stable, planned, consistent growth, not the boom, bust and chaos of the status quo. If you’re ready to join the fight for a New Republic, get in touch today.