Ireland Calling
by John SpainRSS 
Recent Posts
- Abortion reform Irish style - Women still have no rights over their own bodies, continue to travel to the UK for procedure
- We’re total abortion hypocrites - proposals for new legislation were laughable
- Catch 22 for Irish abortion law - navigating Ireland’s rigid, Catholic influence legal framework and Savita Halappanavar’s case
- The late Baroness Margaret Thatcher had her good points
- Letters from the tax man - the mounting cost of Ireland's property tax and running the country
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There has been an arctic freeze over Ireland for the past week. But despite all the snow, nothing chilled the blood here last week as much as the details of the 85 billion euro bailout that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the EU is giving to the Irish government.
The document containing the full details was published last Wednesday, and reading the conditions that are attached to all that money was a humbling experience.
The deal for the €85 billion euro bailout for Ireland was done last weekend, with €35 billion earmarked for the banks and €50 billion earmarked to keep the state going for the next few years.
We're getting this vast amount of money from a combination of sources, from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the European Union and a few individual countries, including the U.K. We're even being forced into taking some of it out of our own national pension reserve.
