Today is the day my friends, Monday January 14th, two individual bonds maturing at Irish Life & Permanent, each for $1.75bn; that's a total of $3.5bn from one bank in one day, not a whole lot less than the entire 'adjustment' for Budget 2013, from a bank we own. Michael Noonan has stated in the Dáil (last July) that it's just one $1.75bn bond but my information says otherwise and unless there is written proof otherwise - Parliamentary Question, anyone?
Some will say we have a legal obligation to pay those bonds, that they are now government guaranteed. What's legal isn't always legitimate, is it? Slavery was legal, as was apartheid; the Penal Laws were legal and through the ownership clause, whereby Catholics were prevented from owning any kind of property - including especially the land on which they worked - above a certain minimum value, it led almost directly to the Great Hunger of the 1840s. In more recent times we had the denial of the vote to women, legal, the denial of civil rights to certain groups because of their race/religion - legal. But legitimate?
For as long as mankind has been making law (and it's nearly always been men), we've been making bad law. Good people have a duty to reject that bad law, to fight that bad law.
This bank debt is odious, this bank debt is illegitimate. Through various means - distortion of facts, extortion through bullying - the people of this country have already been robbed of over €70bn (when interest lost and paid is included). We have been saddled with a debt that isn't ours, was never ours, and either morally or justly, will never be ours.
At 1pm today, Monday, some of us will be in Cork, outside the bank offices in Patrick Street, to protest these payments.
Sunday January 27th is week 100 of the BallyheaSaysNo protest, when we will be marching in both Ballyhea and Charleville in protest yet again at the imposition of this odious debt. Join us.
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