BACK TO THE FUTURE
Jobs. Ireland is fixated on them.
Back several hundred moons ago when I was in high school, my debating team wrestled with the topic of automation. Machines and even robots would soon be doing most of the work, we argued. In the utopian future, a few workers would oversee the mechanical contraptions, and most of us would enjoy increased leisure and time to ourselves.
Freed of the drudgery of mere work, we'd be able to devote our minds to higher things. With our machines doing the heavy lifting, human beings would have time to do as we pleased. This would not be a threat to workers and their unions, but the exact opposite, the final triumph of man over want and need. Work? Who would need to work with everything mechanized.
Well, I'm still waiting. It's true that labor saving devices have changed the way we toil. To take but one example, a single farmer manages herds that would have taken a team to handle a few years ago. But, I have not yet observed any of my hard working farm neighbors lying abed till noon while robots milk the cows. Secretaries still secretary, and teaching machines have not yet displaced classroom pedagogues.
It's all very disappointing. I was expecting that by this stage we'd be spending our afternoons composing sonnets or painting watercolors while sipping tea poured by our household robots. Quite the opposite has happened - contraptions haven't freed us, just made us available 24/7!
Call me old fashioned. I still like the concept: our machines do the work while people skite around in flying cars. So, I call for a radical rethink. It's time to go back to the future when jobs weren't the goal. Once upon a time we aspired to no jobs!
PECUNIARY MECHANISMS
Europe's leaders appear to agree with me about the need to shed jobs. Here's a suitably monetarised sentence that I think nicely describes the official position.
EU leaders agreed this past month to increased fiduciary regulation of member state budgetary processes via systematized pecuniary standards requiring prudential fiscal oversight via assessible financial mechanisms.
Nonsense. But, no more nonsensical than what was agreed in summit by 25 of the 27 EU leaders. Tight targets will restrict the amount of debt allowed in annual budgets. That's a worthy goal, but right now only mighty Luxembourg meets the targets. We are all to aspire to be good Luxembourgeois.
Until the very moment in 2008 when Ireland's impossibly stupid former rulers nationalised all bank debts, Ireland hit the targets as well. In other words, these rules would not have prevented the Irish meltdown. These new rules do not address the central issue - the unsustainable debt overhang from that drastic decision and similar ones throughout the EU.
These rules impose further austerities on European citizens at the very time when it is clear that austerity is driving European economies ever downward. Oh, the leaders made the usual noises about providing jobs and they set aside some money for training. But, this agreement looks very like a jobs robber.
Ireland may, or may not, get to hold a referendum on the agreement. The current government was heartened by the first poll on the matter showing that a majority of citizens will probably vote yes on tighter EU oversight of Irish budgets. This amazes me since every anecdote I've heard or read suggests the exact opposite.
Why would the Irish people vote yes? The EU has made it clear that they'll turn off the money taps and allow Ireland to default on its debts if it doesn't sign up by July. Many noted economists declare that Ireland would be better off to take such a hit, slough off the unsustainable debt that is sinking the country and then come roaring back within a couple of years. A lot of folks apparently regard that as an economic experiment too far.
MERRY GO ROUND
Europe's Catastrophic Blunderers, the ECB, may just have blundered into a temporary solution for Europe's borrowing crunch.
In the last newsletter I reported how the European Central Bank tried to increase bank liquidity by offering 3 year loans at 1pc interest. The ECB was surprised by the response: worried banks drew down half a trillion euro in less than a week. The regional banks had no real use for this money so they immediately deposited it back with the ECB, earning one quarter of one percent.
Well, the banks found a more profitable use for these funds. They've invested in European national bonds. This means that Italian banks are buying Italian government debt with money provided by the ECB. Instead of an anemic one quarter of one percent interest, the banks now making seven and eight percent with the borrowed funds.
Result: bank balance sheets are in healthier shape and so are Italian bonds. It's the same for all the troubled European bond markets. The flood of ECB money is driving down bond prices. For the first time since the Irish bailout, Ireland's bonds are selling for less than 6pc.
While their initial press release expressed surprise at the scale of bank drawdowns, now the ECB intimates, wink wink nod nod, that this was really their plan all along. Whatever, for now it's working. Forbidden by their charter to intervene in primary bond markets, the ECB is letting regional banks do their work for them. The tidal wave of ECB money is, probably to the Central Bank's own surprise, taking the pressure off.
All of which illustrates just how crazy the whole system has gotten. The ECB invents funds backed by bankrupt nations to give to bankrupt banks to prop up the bankrupt nations who stand behind the ECB....
ZINGERS
A 1.2 billion euro house
http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/man-builds-house-out-23-billion-shredded-money.html
The Irish village that said 'no' to austerity
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/05/irish-village-ballyhea
Great Irish writeer John Banville on the emigration of the Irish
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/opinion/sunday/irelands-diaspora-yet-again.html
BELLS
Church bells reverberate across the Irish countryside. The sound we hear these days is mostly generated electronically and requires no bell towers or ropes or sacristans to pull them. No matter. The tolling hours are the product of sixteen centuries of worship and invention.
Early Christians did not ring bells. Nor did they draw attention to their gatherings. There were too many hungry lions in the amphitheatres of the Roman Empire. Only after Constantine's conversion in the fourth century could Christians openly proclaim their religion.
The first use of bells by the Church dates to the fifth century. Saint Paulinus, the Bishop of Nola - a town not far from Naples in Italy - needed some method to call monks from their far flung tasks and summon them to worship. Nola had been a centre of bronze casting for many centuries, so the bishop had at hand the necessary expertise to solve his problem. Some unsung smith must have developed the solution: a hand held bell. Rung rhythmically, the bell pealed a call to prayer.
The use of these bells caught on rapidly. Within decades missionaries bound for Ireland considered bells essential equipment. The first Irish missionary in the records, Saint Declan, forgot to bring his when crossing from Wales to County Waterford. But, his prayers were answered when a large boulder carrying the bell caught up with his ship and then led him to what is now the town of Ardmore. Thus did the first church bell, in Irish a clog, arrive in the island.
Patrick and his disciples constantly used bells. Whenever a new church was formed, the disciple in charge was presented with one. In Connaught alone, it is recorded, Patrick handed out more than fifty bells. Three household smiths had as their primary duty the making of these hand held instruments.
Patrick's own bell survives. This small clog measures 6 and 7/8 inches tall and was made of two iron plates hammered into a rectangular shape. The rounded corners were riveted together before the bell was dipped into melted bronze. Patrick's Clog-an-uudhachta, or the 'Bell of the Testament (so called because it was willed by the saint to one of his disciples), can be viewed along with its more splendid and costly later medieval shrine at the National Museum on Kildare Street in Dublin.
Naturally, so important a relic comes with a tale. One storyteller assures us that "of all sounds in the world, it seems the tinkling of a consecrated bell is the most intolerable to a demon; and the silvery tones of this particular bell... had more terror for our Irish reptiles than all the other bells of the country set ringing together."
These ringing bells kept getting bigger and deeper in tone. The great Gothic cathedrals and enormous stone monasteries of the high middle ages required louder and larger bells. Casting these great bells was a cutting edge technology. Ironically, one reason Europe took an early lead in the development of cannon was that the necessary metallurgic expertise was already in place.
Many ancient churches preserve bell towers. In my own little parish, a church erected during this period boasts a double bellcote. A bellcote is a small framework for hanging one or more bells in churches with no bell tower. So, we can be sure that even in this back-of-beyonds area locals heard church bells pealing over over the countryside for hundreds of years.
Bonnnng. Bonnng. Bonnng...
The bells call. Time is passing. Remember what is important. Come to prayer... Come to prayer.
INDOMITABLE
Most visitors to Ireland come across the final verses of Yeats' last poem. "Under bare Ben Bulben's head, In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid." Midst current predicaments, the less known fifth stanza bears repeating. These lines contain the great writer's admonition to future Irish poets - and to the Irish people.
"Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers' randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into the clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry."
Scott
www.movetoireland.com
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