The declaration of dependence

A satire on the 1916 Proclamation of the Republic in response to the arrival in Dublin this week of IMF and ECB officials. From the Examiner.

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God how have we come to this? And in the name of dead generations from which she received her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through our new masters the European Central Bank summons her children to her financial sovereign funeral.

Having disorganised and drained her manhood and treasury through secret organisations such as the Galway Tent Gang and the Golden Circle and through her organised lunacy like the Anglo bailout, having patiently perfected her own demise, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself as fully incompetent the Government now seizes the moment and, watched scornfully by the children she has exiled to America through mass unemployment and looked down on in disbelief by gallant allies in Europe, but relying first on its own weaknesses, the Government strikes a deal in the full confidence of national humiliation.

We declare the right of cowboys on the casino money markets to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefatigable. The turning over of those rights to foreign people and governments has extinguished our rights and brought about the destruction of the Irish people’s hope.

In every generation Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty. Six times during the last 394 years they have asserted it to arms. Standing down that fundamental right and deserting it with arms now tied behind our backs in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign and Independent State is no more, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our children to the cause of serving its new paymasters, outsourcing its freedom, destroying its welfare benefits and of its exaltation among the nations.

The European Central Bank is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman (henceforth to be known as Euro-Drones) The ECB guarantees the religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens - but only as long as Euro-Drones pay for such luxuries with crippling tolls and declares its resolve to auction off the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts, perishing all aspirations of the children of the nation equally and indicative of the differences fostered by a government of aliens which have promoted the interest of a tiny minority of speculators over the vast majority of working people in the pact.

Until our debt payments have brought about the opportune moment for the re-establishment of a permanent National representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrage of all her men and women the Provisional ECB Government, hereby constituted, will administer and savage the civil service and the financial affairs of the Republic in mistrust for the people.

We place the cause of the Republic under the protection of the Most High God - Mammon. Whose blessing we invoke upon our debts, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by casino cowardice, insolvency or economic rapine. In this supreme hour of failure the Irish nation must, by its memories of valour and discipline and in by the readiness of its children to sacrifice their financial futures for the common good of the international money markets, prove itself somehow worthy of the august destiny we have now called time on.

Urgent Appeal