the voices

Across Europe rings the clamour.

In Greece bloated overpaid teachers, nurses, civil servants and cops are threatening violence in the streets if their pay packets are reduced.

Reduced?

In two weeks time there will be nothing left to pay them with.

Nothing.

In Paris, young farmers are blocking the roads with tractors. They still think blocking roads and extorting money from corrupt socialist governments, is the way to make a living.

I admit, that unlike the teachers, nurses, cops and soldiers in Greece and elsewhere, the French farmers actually do some work.

Their protest is necessitated by a malign dynamic whereby the French pay their trade unionised State sector employees ridiculous wages that the rest of the country must then labour in penury to make up for. The dynamic is worsened by the fact that the French government like other European governments has borrowed vast unrepayable fortunes to buy off various voting sectors of the electorate, including the farmers.

Trade unionised entitlement culture has corrupted everything its touched.

Just like in Italy.

Just like in Spain.

Just like in Portugal.

Just like in Ireland.

The international financial ratings agency known as Standard And Poors announced that the credit ratings of Spain and Portugal had declined significantly while at the same time Greek debt achieved a rating level which economists refer to as "junk."

Standard And Poors have arrived a little late at this party.

Standard And Poors, specialist subject: The Bleedin Obvious.

Some commentators have stated that there is a danger Greece's problems will spread to the rest of the Euro zone.

There is no such danger of problems spreading from Greece.

The problems are already here.

Namely, we're spending money we don't have, in order to keep a flatulent collection of aggressively trade unionised teachers, nursies, cops, soldiers, and civil servants in the style to which they've become accustomed while the commerically productive sector of our economy, farmers and small businesses, are taxed and regulated out of existence.

People bought the entitlement lie propapagated by successive atheist governments of right and left: "There's no God. And the world owes you a living."

They were wrong on both scores.

We have been engaged in a misguided political and economic union of countries which are all looking after number one.

That is to say they're all doing the same things wrong and all determined someone else should pay for it.

This union is not going to have a future.

It is falling apart before our eyes.

This afternoon a Greek teacher was shouting into a television camera.

He shouted: "The International Monetary Fund brings poverty wherever it goes."

Presumably he thinks it's a coherent viewpoint to expect the German's to cough up 40 thousand million dollars to pay Greece's wage bill up to the end of May.

And then what?

Gonna live large till the end of May and then go back to the Germans with more demands?

It's over Stavros.

Over.

We need to make friends with each other, ask God to forgive our sins, get used to poverty, and relearn what it means to be human beings gifted with immortal souls.

And in Ireland we need to put the Chief Executives and Board Members of Anglo Irish Bank, Trustees Savings Bank, Irish Life And Permanent, Allied Irish Banks, and Bank Of Ireland, in jail for forty years without parole for the crime of selling our country overnight into the third world.

There was one poignant moment this week when the truth was plainly visible.

The Greek Prime Minister, Mr Papandreou, a lifelong socialist not generally thought to have a Christian bone in his body, went to a small island off the coast of his belaboured country.

There he was photographed in a church lighting a candle.

Tenderly he reached out and touched an icon of the blessed mother.

He knows.

He knows what's coming.