Comparing Iceland with Ireland.

Mary Ellen Sinon, in her blog reproduced in the Daily Mail from the Irish Daily Mail this morning, linked here, compares the hopeful future for Iceland with the growingly ever more desparate plight of the Irish peopl.  The following quote provides a taste:

Last Wednesday the group of independent Deputies in the Dail proposed a motion seeking a referendum on the repayments the last Government and this Government have promised. The motion was swept aside by the big parties.

I find the arrogance of that a punch in the gut, but I don’t really much care that we won’t get a referendum on the debt. I know what any referendum in this country is worth when it goes against the demands of Brussels. The Government would shred the results and just tell us to vote again. Or in the case of a referendum that did not involve a Constitutional issue – which is the kind of referendum a vote on the bank debt would be – the Government would simply ignore a ‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’ result and claim the voters didn’t understand the issues.

Any talk of a No vote in a referendum handing a powerful weapon to our Government for negotiations in Brussels is naïve. That idea depends on the assumption that our Taoiseach and Finance Minister want a powerful negotiating weapon to get this debt off our backs. There is no evidence that they want any such thing. Mr Kenny and Mr Noonan won’t even use the weapons they have already to hand – a default on bank debt, a determination to take a bail-out only from the IMF and not from the EU, an undertaking to leave the euro or even the EU.

After much more of such accurate observation, she concludes as follows:

The only hope Iceland has to defend its independence against this onslaught is the           extraordinarily strong character of its people. The fact is a people can’t live isolated on the edge of the Arctic for 1,000 years without growing tough. I’d say Iceland has what it takes to defeat the EU machine.

However, there is one thing which could destroy the independence of that small island nation: treachery by their own government. For of course that is exactly what has destroyed the independence of this small island nation.