Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [49]
ACROSS EUROPE JUST now men who thought their title was “minister of finance” have woken up to the idea that their job is actually government bond salesman. The Irish bank losses have obviously bankrupted Ireland, but the Irish finance minister does not want to talk about that. Instead he mentions to me, several times, that Ireland is “fully funded” until next summer. That is, the Irish government has enough cash in the bank to pay its bills until next July.
It isn’t until I’m on my way out the door that I realize how trivial this point is. The blunt truth is that since September 2008 Ireland has been every day more at the mercy of her creditors. To remain afloat, Ireland’s banks, which are now owned by the Irish government, have taken short-term loans from the European Central Bank of 85 billion euros. Inside of a week Lenihan will be compelled by the European Union to invite the IMF into Ireland, relinquish control of Irish finances, and accept a bailout package. The Irish public doesn’t yet know it, but, even as the minister of finance and I sit together at his conference table, the European Central Bank has lost interest in lending to Irish banks. And soon Brian Lenihan will stand up in the Irish parliament and offer a fourth explanation for why private investors in Ireland’s banks cannot be allowed to take losses. “There is simply no way that this country, whose banks are so dependent on international investors, can unilaterally renege on senior bondholders against the wishes of the ECB,” he will say.
But there was once a time when the wishes of the ECB didn’t matter so much to Ireland. That time was before the Irish government used ECB money to pay off the foreign bondholders in Irish banks.
ONCE A DECADE I experiment with driving on the wrong side of the road, and wind up destroying dozens of side-view mirrors on cars parked on the left. When I went looking for some Irish person to drive me around, the result was a fellow I will call Ian McRory, who is Irish, and a driver, but pretty clearly a lot of other things, too. He has what appears to be a military-grade navigational system, for instance, and surprising knowledge about abstruse and secretive matters. “I do some personal security, and things of that nature,” he says, when I ask him what else he does other than drive financial-disaster tourists back and forth across Ireland, and leaves it at that. Later, when I mention the name of a formerly rich Irish property developer, he says, casually, as if it were all in a day’s work, that he had “let himself into” the fellow’s vacation house and snapped photographs of the interior “for a man I know who is thinking of buying it.”
Ian turns out to have a good feel for what little I, or anyone else, might find interesting in rural Ireland. He will say, for example, “Over there, that’s a pretty typical fairy ring,” and then explain, interestingly, that these circles of stones or mushrooms that occur seemingly naturally in Irish fields are believed by local farmers to house mythical creatures. “Irish people actually believe in fairies?” I will ask, straining but failing to catch a glimpse of the typical fairy ring to which Ian has just pointed. “I mean if you walked right up and asked him to his face, ‘Do you believe in fairies?’ most guys will deny it,” he will reply. “But if you ask him to dig out the fairy ring on his property, he won’t do it. To my way of thinking that’s believing.” And it is. It’s a tactical belief, a belief that exists because the upside to disbelief is too small, like the former Irish belief that Irish land prices could rise forever.
The highway out of Dublin runs past abandoned building sites and neighborhoods without people in them. “We can stop at ghost estates on the way,” says Ian, as we clear the suburbs of Dublin. “But if we stop at every one of them, we’ll never get out of here.” We pass wet green fields carved