Congrats! You now owe €170,000 each!

Thanks to the corruption of banksters and the craven treachery of the current government in the face of bullying gangsterism by the IMF and the EU, every man woman and child in Ireland now owes €170,000 of sovereign debt.

This cannot and will never be repaid in full. Default is inevitable. The longer we wait to default, the more the banksters get paid and the worse state this country will be in.

This came about because grasping banks and billionaires, named correctly as terrorists by the estimable Senator David Norris in the Seanad, lent money to AIB and Anglo Irish who then spunked it on property development loans which are now not being paid back.

In a fit of madness or corruption, the government decided secretly in September 2008 to guarantee those debts. According to cabinet member John Gormley, who revealed it on the Marion Finucane show, they decided this weeks before revealing it, and presented it as an overnight emergency fait-accompli.

That guarantee has since been enacted, and the billionaires want their money back from the Irish people. They have used the EU and the IMF as the guns pointed at our heads to achieve this by way of the infamous bailout.

The bailout works as follows - we, Ireland, borrow tens of billions and pay it back to the creditors of the Irish banks. The billionaires are now paid but we the Irish people now owe the money to the EU and the IMF. That money now totals €170,000 EACH. And it will rise at around 6% annually.

If you don't want to pay this money which you never borrowed, you have only three choices left:

1. Emigrate.
2. Go on the dole and refuse to pay taxes. This will cause you hardship, because that is going to be one of the first things cut to ribbons in tomorrow's banker bailout budget.
3. Protest, loud and long, outside the Dail tomorrow. Call your local government TD, be they Fianna Failure, Green or so-called Independent, and insist that they vote down this treasonous budget. Fight for your right not to be held accountable for the debts of others.

You can, as the saying goes, die on your feet or live on your knees. Your choice. You have less than a day to decide.

Not your debt - don't pay it

Anglo Irish Bank's debt is not your debt.

You didn't borrow billions from Roman Abramovich and European banks. You didn't lend it foolishly to speculative property developers who went belly-up. So why are you expected to pay off the billionaires?

Print this up and stick it in your window. Stick it on your car. Stick it across Bertie Ahern's tax-dodging gob. Stick it all over the place until they get the message.

It's not your debt or mine. Let's refuse to pay it.

(Thanks to Esker Riada for the image.)

The death of the Irish Republic

Well, the traitors have managed to achieve the death of the Irish Republic tonight.

It was done without a shot fired in anger. Perhaps some shots should be fired in anger. After all, so many people have died on this island for so much less.

The world is talking about Ireland being 'bailed out.' I took a call from an elderly relative tonight, joking about tapping me for a loan, since Ireland is obviously now swimming in EU and IMF euros.

The world, and more importantly the Irish victims, clearly have no idea what is really going on. It's quite simple, quite dastardly and quite horrific.

Two Irish banks, run and operated by corrupt bankers, borrowed billions from European banks and billionaires like Roman Abramovich and lent the money out to property developers in Ireland and elsewhere.

Those property developers fuelled a property bubble, assisted by their pet politicians in Fianna Fail, and are now largely going bankrupt, with only unfinished houses to offer in repayment of their loans.

So the Irish banks have no money coming in from the developers. And their big depositors are worried about their viability, so they have taken their money in recent weeks and shifted it elsewhere. Now the Irish banks have next to nothing to pay off the billionaires with.

Except a foolish government guarantee, provided by the Fianna Fail crooks who have long been the developers' proxies in power. That irrational, illegal guarantee holds that the Irish taxpayer will repay any debt owed by these corrupt banks.

The billionaires want their billions back. They gambled and they lost, on a speculative market. But when you're hyperrich, you don't ever lose. You just change the game until you win again. And that's what they have done. The bank's bondholders pressurised Ireland and Europe to ensure that those debts would be repaid.

At the end of the line is the Irish taxpayer, who has received nothing tonight. Rather, the Irish taxpayer now owes 80 billion euro that they didn't owe before. That money will come from Europe to Ireland and be owed by Ireland to Europe. But Ireland won't see a penny of it.

Instead, it will go to the banks who will give it back to the billionaires.

And we will be paying off those debts for the next two decades.

This, in short, is corporate welfare gone mad. It is treason, conducted by the government on the people of Ireland for the benefit of foreign billionaires. A side-effect is that the country will now effectively be run by Brussels. The Euro-state begins here.

So for anyone languishing under the delusion that Ireland received anything tonight, let's be clear, all Ireland got was a debt that it didn't accrue. All Ireland got was the blame for bankers' mistakes. All Ireland got was the removal of its sovereignty.

It's a times like these that I get nostalgic for the paramilitaries that plagued my youth in Northern Ireland. If ever there was need of them, it is now.

Listen to how a nation dies today:

Not my debt

The 35-40 billion euro quoted today as the (current) estimated cost of the Irish banking bailout is not my debt.

So I'm not going to pay it, and I urge everyone else who is not responsible for the debt to behave likewise.

Iceland has demonstrated that the idea that keeping bogey banks afloat is essential to the survival of a state is nonsense. Anglo and the other banks gambled and lost. They should have been let go to the wall, as capitalism suggests. They should still be let go to the wall even now.

This transfer of cash, from the taxpayer to the banksters, the banks and their bondholders is nothing more than corporate welfare. These scum speculated and lost. But when I lose a bet, neither Paddy Power nor the Government intervene to secure my money. So why do the hyperrich get their losses nationalised?

If you weren't in Fianna Fail's Galway tent, if you weren't on Seany Fitzpatrick's dinner party list, if you didn't help run up these spectacular losses, then it's neither morally nor legally your responsibility to pay them.

Brian Lenihan and the pondlife in Fianna Fail want you to pay these debts to bail out their pals. Don't do it. Only a policy of public disobedience in this matter will see this Government removed, the cancer of their corruption excised and the debts transferred to where they belong - to those who ran them up in the first place.

You can't stop them taxing you. But you can do everything possible to minimise your taxes. You can't bring down the banks, but you can hurt them by transferring your savings out of the state. You can't refuse to pay moneys due to the state, but you can delay paying them for as long as possible, and eke out those payments in instalments to create maximum difficulty for the state.

Or you could go further. I don't mean drive a cement truck into Leinster House. I mean get out on the streets and demand change.

There are only two ways to avoid being saddled with 40 billion euro of debt you never ran up - emigrate like hundreds of thousands of people are doing already, or protest. REALLY protest.

It's not my debt and I won't pay it.

Jail the bankers and their politician protectors NOW. Let THEM pay the debts THEY ran up. Or let them rot in prison.

Stop voting like your Grandad did

One of the many problems with the Irish electoral system (whose PR-STV system is pretty excellent) is that too many people vote tribally.

Not tribally like in the headcount that passes for political elections in the North, but tribally nonetheless.

Even stupider is the fact that there is no overriding sovereignty issue dividing the tribes in the South. It's an antique inheritance from the civil war. Why else do people continually vote FF and FG? Primarily because they consider themselves of the respective tribe.

I always find it fascinating when people cut loose from inherited opinion and think for themselves. To this end, the extension of VoteMatch to include Northern Ireland is fascinating.

My results didn't surprise me:
SDLP 51%
Sinn Fein 45%
Alliance 37%
UUP 35%
DUP 28%

What did surprise me what how little I agree with ANY of the parties on major issues. Hence I shouldn't be surprised when half of what the SDLP choose to do infuriates me, and more than half of what the Shinners do.

I'd love to see a version for the Republic. I think probably three-quarters of the electorate might be surprised to find how little they agree with the people they vote for. Perhaps they might even change their voting patterns as a result.

Wouldn't that be revolutionary?

Well, it would beat holding a sit-in with five mates at the Anglo-Irish Bank on a Saturday.

SCAMA

Courtesy of Amhran Nua, I bring you the unofficial guide to NAMA (click for big):

Stop the taxpayer bailout of Anglo-Irish Bank

Are you annoyed that 4 billion euro has just been added to the national debt in order to bail out the big property speculators and Fianna Fail funders who owe around 7.5 billion in bad debt to Anglo-Irish bank?

Do you feel sickened that your grandchildren will still be paying taxes in order to save the asses of a small golden circle of ultra-rich elite?

Well, then it's time to ask the EU to block the deal. Brian Lenihan cannot go ahead with this robbing of the taxpayer to bail out his cronies if Europe blocks it.

So, let the EU know what the Irish people think of this shoddy backroom backscratcher of a deal.

Send an email to this address, SG-PLAINTES@ec.europa.eu , and highlight your feelings about the bailout NOW. Tell Europe you object to this deal and believe it is a betrayal of the Irish people.

Because it is.