Deutsch
English
FrançaisSub menu: Home
Home / Index of Authors
O'Toole, Fintan
3 articles of this author have been cited in the European Press Review so far.
Irish don't want help
Tens of thousands are demonstrating in Ireland against the austerity package planned by the government after it receives billions in loans from the EU and IMF. The liberal daily The Irish Times also fails to see the point of the package: "Would the Irish people, if asked, vote for any of these measures as decent solutions to our very real dilemmas? That the answer is so obviously 'no' tells us the brutal truth: Irish democracy has been abandoned by a zombie government. A weak, demoralised rump administration, served by the same Department of Finance that oversaw the gestation of the crisis, went into bat against the big powers of global finance. A government that was spooked and stampeded by the small-time bullies of the Irish banks was never going to be able to stand up to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB). The losers, however, are not the Irish governing classes, who have shown themselves so impervious to shame. They are the Irish people, whose sense of democratic citizenship has been rudely stripped away."
» full article (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » International Relations, » EU Policy, » Fiscal Policy, » Economic Policy, » Ireland, » Europe
The Celtic Tiger is well and truly dead
Fintan O'Toole notes the demise of the 'Celtic Tiger', i.e. the Irish economic boom. "Ever since the slump that followed the attacks on the US in September 2001, the classic Irish boom has been a thing of the past. If most of us haven't noticed, it's because the money has been flowing in regardless. The boom in exports was replaced by two related booms - in property prices and construction, and in consumer spending. ... This has created an American-style economy in which people borrow money to buy more stuff and economic growth becomes dependent on the insatiable appetites of consumers. If the real boom of the 1990s and early 2000s was about us importing American capital and exporting American products, the second boom has been, logically enough, about us becoming American consumers. We've replaced the public debt of the 1980s with private debt."
» more information (external link, English)
More from the press review on the subject » Trade, » Ireland
The lessons of Chernobyl
Columnist Fintan O'Toole urges readers to reject nuclear power. "Human incompetence, terrorist attacks, the transport of nuclear materials and natural disasters (the Asian tsunami in December 2004 actually hit India's Kalpakkam nuclear power plant) are all real. So is the astronomical cost of cleaning up the radioactive mess that nuclear power stations leave behind. The British Nuclear Decommissioning Agency estimates the cost of fulfilling its current remit at £62.7 billion. And that waste remains dangerous for, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years - a legacy we have no right to leave to future generations. Sherlock Holmes famously maintained that the way to solve a crime was to start by excluding the impossible. In solving the gathering energy crisis, we have to start by excluding the unacceptable - and that includes nuclear power."
» to the homepage (external link, The Irish Times)
More from the press review on the subject » History, » Global
© 2005-2012