Stephen Donnelly – the only TD in Ireland worth his wages! Keep fighting the good fight!

Fair play to the Journal too for putting it in the news.

So glad to see at least one TD not letting this slip under the rug today. Keep up the very good work Stephen.

Thanks for this article Stephen. Wish we had more like you.

Closed my AIB account during the morning…. Happy days

Sickens me to the core to hear this… Why the hell we not protesting about this…. Seriously…. 11 times the HHC I’m officially sick

Well done Stephen on a great article!

What you have just outlined about the payment by AIB to the Bondholders is scandoulous and makes people even more sceptical about how our Government is operating. It was easy for them to make promises to get elected, but when they got into power, they have renaged on their promises…..No wonder people are annoyed, as this Government of ‘change’ is just carrying on where Fianna Fáil left off!

Yet again major questions to ask about RTE bias in particular. Then again it would be hard to spin this in any kind of cheerleading positive light.

Banks changed over the past 10 years to stuffy conservatives into bonus chasing greed merchants. Happy to give out cheap money to fools who needed to be told they couldn’t afford inflated mortgages. The bonus was valued more than honest truth. Fools will always be fools. Mortgaging their lives away for a cheap bonus was unethical and the banks should take some of the hit for stupid investments.

tell u what, its in Germanys interest (to an extent) to keep us bent over. they are borrowing money on the markets at a significantly low rate, and lending it on to Ireland via the ECB,at a higher interest rate (making profit in the process) and what are we using that money for????? to pay senior unsecured bondholders, a lot of whom are German and French. they are doubly screwing us!!

We were duped by the ecb who fed us cheap credit. We were duped by our banks who said they were solvent. We were duped by the church who hid their immoral members to save their brand. We were duped by this government one year ago and their promises. We were duped rte who seek to promote their own bias. How hurt and damaged our society is. Well done Stephen for your persistant articulate focus on this immoral decision.

Bye bye AIB account. I was banking with you for 16 years solid. Every month my wages went in for them
16 years. Not any more it isnt

I hate the way these bondholders are allowed be anonymous,well most of em,whats the bet there’s some interesting scumbags on the list

Brilliant article I believe that the Fine Gael mafia within the media are at work

Stephen there is just no end to the incompetence and lack of leadership not only in this country but in the Western World at large. It is an astounding, mind boggling culture where big business dictates the entire agenda. I am just a simple capitalist that used to believe I lived in a democratic republic. Sadly, 34 years at the coalface of Irish business has thought me that we live in a bastardised democracy run by corporations. We need leadership and it’s not coming from FG. FG’s hypocrisy is second only to our people’s willingness to accept it. Seamus Maye [ Irish Small Business Alliance]

It’s a mad mad world with some very stupid leaders. Well done to yourself Stephen, could you not get like minded people and start a decent party. For the first time give people real choice, no more ex teachers PLEASE.

We can’t stop holding the magnifying glass to this situation when the social, economic and environmental cost far outweighs the billions being spilled at the feet of these faceless captors

Thought the airwaves were strangely silent today , not a mention on drive time .

Where’s is Boss Hogg Hogan Veruca loose lips Creighton and Fr Enda today ?

Burn the Government for not burning the Bonholders, the rot starts at the top. Don’t forget the idiots Cowen and Co who agreed to pay their mates in the Banks.

No wonder we haven’t a bean! Keeping money in the country is like trying to keep water in a bucket with a hole in it. Govt parties will promise you the sun, moon and stars to get in / re elected and once the ballots are counted it all goes down the tube! Grrr

I’d like a FG apologists take on this before I comment further…..

What do you mean their barrel of excuses and propaganda is scraped clean and they’re away hiding with their labour cronies from the hard facts of what their beloved blueshirts and their labour bedfellows are doing to the country and they only comment here when some EU mouthpiece pats Noonan and Kenny on the back as if pats on the back and servile prostration to the EU were the mandate they stood on pre-election?

VOTE NO.

Whats worse? Paying the bondholders or not paying the bondholders. Cause either way it seems we are going down the toilet.

Imagine going in to a bookie and betting on a horse to win. Not only does he not win but the bloody nag had only three legs. You didn’t know he only had three legs but the bookie did but still had him as a favourite. With the help of the owner, trainer, jockey and racing board the bookie managed to keep it quiet. After the race everyone knows that the horse had thrøee legs but the bookie refuses to give you your money back. Wouldn’t you be pissed off? Then why aren’t you now?

I am so tired of hearing this. First Anglo and now AIB. When will it stop? The government will not step in to save any businesses going broke – let these banks go bust. They should have been wound up. If we own 98.8% of AIB, shouldn’t we get a say in what they do? The government does not speak for the ordinary people in this country. They should do, but they don’t. Enda Kenny was elected on a bed of lies. He is not fit to be the leader of this country and he should either resign or be shot for treason. I’m sure that the people of Roscommon would like to see his head on a pike outside the A&E department he promised to protect, then promptly closed.

Stephen Can you ask all TDs and Senators to stop claiming their exspenses till the crisis is over.Maybe you can lead the way.

here are a few ideas to slowly start to change things. withdraw your money from big banks. if you have not paid the hhc do not pay it, its late anyway. vote no on the referendum. next election do not vote for cf or cf or for that matter greens or labour they all have been given a chance and stabbed the people in the back.

Check out politics.ie- discussion on there about this issue with several people saying the same thing stephen donnelly is saying here. Let’s face it, we are not in government, Donnelly is, and it is up to him to energize these issues, which in fairness he makes a fair stab at doing. But I’ve started to notice that he sits on the fence a lot. He should be kicking up more of a fuss to be honest and so he has more to prove if he wants to make an impression. Jury is out.

So between Anglo at the end of March and now this, that’s about 5 billion gone to unsecured bond holders. How is that helping Ireland’s recovery? Oh yes, if we play nice and keep gripping our ankles, our European ‘friends’ will keep loaning us money to pay back more unsecured bondholders.

And we can get the crumbs off that table to try and cover the actual structural sovereign debt that currently exists. All this payment, and others like it, does is to make it harder to address the actual structural economic and political issues in the country.

A no vote in the referendum might be the only way to get our politicians to listen to us.

It’s not news because it makes 890,000
nodding donkeys who just paid the household charge look complete gormless egits. Wake up Ireland. The powers that be are laughing at you and have been for years. All the way to the bank

The reason why this is not news, or rather why people don’t care, is because for the majority of people this economic jargon is impenetrable. And that’s just what FG/Labour want, to keep people in blissful ignorance.

It should be the responsibility of the media to explain to the public in layman’s terms what this payment means. But the biased government cheerleaders in Montrose aren’t going to do something that dumb, if they did, they might incite a revolution.

sorry dang autospell. FF and FG obviously.

Get up stand up. Stand up for your rights!!!

It is news BAD NEWS>

The bondholders, who did the gambling, make no losses. Only the taxpayers, who don’t even know who the bondholders actually are, pay for the losses.

Sickening stuff to say the least to see this payment being made!

This man might be able to help us out of the hole, if he was given the chance:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koY6kXhQDQo

What can we do? Nothing. We can rally and protest but it won’t make any change. We had a chance to send a clear message to Government and boycott the household charge but we folded on that one. The majority paid and the message is the Irish are weak. I didn’t pay but because more than half did, this thing is here to stay. :-(

I hope that the Household Tax boycott is just the start of a mass civil protest movement to force our government to begin to defend the Irish people instead of conspiring with the ECB to break us.
We have started well with a million people refusing to register for the Household in open defiance of the government.

The next step is to Vote No to the Fiscal treaty.

Following this we need to escalate the protest and take the fight to the Banks who are the real enemy here. The Irish people have to find their voice and revolt against the terrible injustice of the bank bailout.
My proposal for a peaceful revolt would be a National Mortgage strike with two demands:
1. No more funding of the Banks from the Peoples’ pockets for any reason.
2. Force the Banks to repay the money they have stolen from People.

Demand 1. Unfortunately a significant proportion of the bondholders have already been paid off at this stage thanks to the abject surrender of the last and present governments in the face of ECB demands and threats. There are however enormous sums still being being paid to bondholders on a daily basis and this haemorrhage needs to stop. Have a look at Bondwatch Blog from Diarmuid O Flynn (Irish Examiner journalist) so see the huge losses we are suffering every day. On top of this there is still the €31billion of promissory notes to be paid and the interest which amounts to €47 billion approximately. We can’t allow any of this money to be paid. Heaped on this again are the billions we have pumped into NAMA which is just another bank bailout under a different mask. All this looting of the nation needs to stop immediately.

Demand 2. The money we paid to date to honour the bank bonds had disappeared back into the global financial casino and is gone for good. But there are ways to recover our losses if the government was brave and radical enough. The figures are not entirely clear but since the banks extorted the blanket bank guarantee from Brian Lenihan in Sept 2008 there has been at least €70 billion stolen from the Irish people and pumped into the banks. This figure does not include NAMA which is just another bank bailout under a different mask.
One way to recover the money robbed from us would be to take ownership of the bank’s Mortgage Book in return for the state aid which the banks extorted from the country. I don’t have the exact numbers but let’s say we have pumped €20billion into AIB/EBS at this point. The government could immediately take ownership of that €20billion figure in performing mortgages and direct the monthly income stream to finance the country and help reduce our deficit. The bond money has disappeared but there is still real wealth in the banks in the form of bricks and mortar which can be leveraged to help the people.
If the loss of some or all of the mortgage book results in the collapse of AIB/EBS then so be it. We will step in and take control of the retail banking network to keep the branches and ATMs open etc. We own the bank almost entirely now so we can take as much of the retail banking system as we need to serve the country.
After the deposits have been moved to the new state retail bank he remainder of the bank can be liquidated and divided up among the creditors or sold to an interested party.
Essentially we would extract our national stake from the bank through the housing/property stock , take the banking infrastructure that we need to support the people and dump the rest.
We need to stop the charade that the Irish banks are functioning financial institutions providing the normal banking services such as credit to the economy. They are not and they may never be again. This is an unprecedented crisis and we need to take complete control of the banks and exploit them to ensure the survival of the nation. What the government have done so far is to nationalise/socialise the debts of the banking system while allowing the banks to retain control of their assets. We need to reverse this position and nationalise the assets of the banks to save our republic.

The beauty of a Mortgage Strike is that it would directly target the Banks who bear the bulk of the responsibility for breaking the country.
The recent property bubble amounted to a enormous theft from Irish people where hundreds of thousands of people have been saddled with huge debt just to put a modest roof over their heads (in most cases) An insider elite of landholders, developers and bankers became obscenely wealthy on the back of this bubble while the political class encouraged the stampede.
This debt is now a millstone around our necks but it could be used as our most effective weapon to drive real change for the better in how this country is governed.
A Mortgage Boycott would force this government to finally begin to meet their responsibility to the Irish people instead of pandering to the infinitely greedy banks. This would involve a large number of people withholding their mortgage repayments until the government meets the 2 demands outlined above. As the Irish state now owns most of the Irish banking system, the impact on the government would be immediate and substantial.

The protest should insist on a mortgage freeze for the duration of the Strike so that people are relieved of the burden of paying their mortgages without any penalty until a satisfactory conclusion is reached.
So for example if a person’s outstanding mortgage total is €200,000 to be paid over a 20 year period then this is the amount and timeframe which will apply when the boycott is over. The withheld monthly payments would not be transferred over to the banks at the end of the strike but would instead be paid at the back end of the mortgage term when people’s finances should hopefully have improved.
The freeze would have the advantage of easing the financial pressure on the people striking while increasing the impact on the financial institutions and the government by depriving them of income for the duration of the strike and with no prospect of receiving the outstanding money until people reach the end of their mortgage terms.
No penalties, additional interest or any financial sanction would be accepted from the Banks or the strike would continue.
Obviously, it would take a significant number of people to commit to the action for this to be effective but it might be possible to kick start the protest through the media, Facebook etc and sign up the necessary number of people for the movement. Momentum for the civil disobedience should be achievable with so many people already under serious financial pressure thanks to the greed and stupidity of our banking and political elite and other vested interests.
A reasonable target might be in the region of 100,000 mortgage holders who are prepared to sign up and commit. When the target figure has been reached the protest would begin the following month and continue until the government undertakes to stop rewarding the failed bondholder gamblers with our money and future.
Our past and present governments have signed up the Irish people to foot the bill for the banking collapse to the tune of €100 Billion and counting. FG and Labour will tear the heart out of this country with vicious cutbacks and tax increases to pay for this robbery while our young people look at an empty future and emigrate in their tens of thousands. This is wrong and has to stop.
It’s time the government realised that they rule the Irish people only through our consent and they do not have our permission to bleed the country dry to provide a transfusion to the parasite financial elite.

I dream of a headline “Irish public no longer bail out banks, all funds used to release personal debt, you’re now free – enjoy life”

im with you on that one coddler all the way…