Irish Try to Wriggle Free of Mother Merkel's Hair Shirt of Debt
Someone has pinched the heart of St. Lawrence O’Toole, and
thereby hangs a typical Irish tale filled with metaphors,
parallels, and some pretty serious weirdness. Who done it? The
suspects are many and varied. Could the heist from Dublin’s
Christ Church Cathedral have been engineered by the infamous
“troika” of the European Commission, the European Bank, and the
International Monetary Fund? Seems like a stretch, but consider
the following: O’Toole—patron saint of Dublin—was, according to
the Catholic Church, famous for practicing “the greatest
austerity.” Lawrence liked to wear a hair shirt underneath his
Episcopal gowns and spent 40 days in a cave each year. That is a
point of view the troika can respect. They have overseen a
massive austerity program in Ireland that has strangled the
economy, cut wages 22 percent, slashed education, health care,
and public transport, raised taxes and fees, and driven the
jobless rate up to 15percent—30% if you