THEY’VE made headlines around the globe because of their weekly protests against government pay-outs to bondholders – now the Ballyea Protest Group is coming to Co Donegal.
Ballyhea is a rural parish in Cork that has been marching every Sunday in protest against the conversion of private bank debt to sovereign debt since March, 2011.
They’ve even taken their protests to Brussels.
Now the group is set to come to Donegal Town next week
Spokesman Diarmuid O’Flynn told Donegal Daily: “What the ECB and the EU are doing to us is oppressive. They are combining their financial and political muscle to blackmail and bully the Irish government into paying a debt that is not ours, a debt of tens of billions of euro.
“Due to the bank bailout every man woman and child owes in the region of €14,000. The people of Ballyhea have been making a stand and I’m calling on the people of Donegal to stand with us.
Donegal Action against Austerity members will meet the Ballyhea group and organise a protest in Donegal Town at 4. 45pm, next Saturday, October 27.
“We would ask all the people in Donegal to come out and support these good people,” said Joe Murphy.
The march commences in the car park of Aldi supermarket, Donegal Town going to the Diamond where the Ballyhea/Charleville group will address the people of Donegal.
Diarmaid O’Flynn has been the main protest organiser from the outset.
The Ballyhea Protest group began with their aim being to encourage other communities to follow their lead. Their efforts have attracted attention from newspapers and TV crews from all over the world including Britain, Australia, France and even China.
Their protest takes the form of a quiet short weekly protest that is “non-ideological and politically neutral’’.
Villagers walk from the church car park to the boundary of the village and back again.
When Ballyhea protest group arrive in Donegal on Saturday 27th October they will have conducted their 87th consecutive protest.
Diarmaid O’Flynn, organiser and journalist writes this:
“In the decade of the so-called Celtic Tiger Irish banks borrowed billions, poured them into the property market, created a bubble of such enormity that when it burst, it destroyed the entire Irish economy, including the banks themselves. When those who had been foolish enough and reckless enough to lend those billions to those banks came looking to cash in their bonds there was precious little left, at which point the normal rules of economics should have kicked in the bondholders cut and run, negotiate their losses and move on to the next likely investment. In September 2008 came the first intervention, a weak and ill-advised government panicked into a blanket bank guarantee; on November 28th 2010 the second intervention, that guarantee copper-fastened in a deal which will go down in history as one of the most dastardly deeds ever done in the name of the Irish people – under duress from the ECB, the then Irish Government signed a deal under which the private debts between the Irish banks and their various bondholders were transferred, in full, to the Irish people. Immoral, unjust, unconscionable this was all of that and more. It was an unprecedented interference with the normal workings of the money markets, a decision that smacked more of empire than of community, a decision mandated by the ECB to protect the bondholders at the expense of the already seriously impacted Irish people. Threatened with withdrawal of all support, the then Irish government was basically blackmailed into signing the deal; the Irish people were never consulted, were simply saddled with a debt they had never themselves accrued. We now ask for this deal to be undone; we ask for those bondholders to be treated now as they should have been treated then, with whatever consequences they have to suffer; at the very least, we ask for a referendum on this deal, that the Irish people may themselves decide whether or not it’s acceptable that they should now be saddled with this debt.”