20/11 The Front Pages

The Front Pages

‘Fianna Fail meltdown fears over IMF arrival’ reads this morning’s cheery headline in the Irish Independent, as the paper also reports that our embattled Taoiseach Brian Cowen is rejecting opposition calls to quit. Cowen’s ‘bizarre’ denials of any bailout have now apparently convinced party figures that Fianna Fail can’t move forward “with him as leader.” Inside the broadsheet, writer Bruce Arnold says ‘Europe does not care about us. Europe is here for Europe’s sake: to save a crumbling empire, a shaky currency and a smug bureaucracy. We are mere chaff.’ Sobering words indeed.

The Irish Times, meanwhile, runs with the headline ‘EU warns of ‘thorough assessment’ of four-year €15bn plan’, with some high-level commission figures apparently already questioning whether the plan, to be published next week, is unsustainable due to poor growth figures. Inside the paper’s Weekend Review, Fintan O’Toole writes that ‘Fear, rage, despair and distrust have been in the pot for two years. The new ingredient is shame.’ Fintan does however see the IMF’s arrival an opportunity for Ireland to reinvent our sovereignty.

Finally, the Irish Examiner stays on the same subject, naturally enough, reporting ‘Cabinet wins tax battle but faces bank war’, as the Government has won it’s battle to retain our low corporation tax for now, but the fate of our banks is in the balance as talks with the EU-IMF team intensify. An EU source told the Examiner that they had “realised the corporation tax issue was a casus belli [incident of war] for the Irish. We had something similar with the Greeks who did not want to touch their military spend, so it was not touched.”