#ballyhea

RT @fb_fitz: Delighted 2 rep #ballyhea y’day@ SC,2support @JoanCollinsTD + @davidhall75 in #promnotes challenge.The debt fight goes on @yan…

RT @fb_fitz: Delighted 2 rep #ballyhea y’day@ SC,2support @JoanCollinsTD + @davidhall75 in #promnotes challenge.The debt fight goes on @yan…

By Jamie Smyth, Financial Times, January 11, 2013 BALLYHEA, Ireland--A few hundred yards of road, a service station and a church are about all there is to see in Ballyhea. But the Irish hamlet in County Cork has become the center of Irish resistance to E.U.-imposed austerity.

Every Sunday, locals gather after mass to stage a lonely yet defiant protest at the way the European Union and Dublin are handling the financial crisis.

"The government is borrowing money to pay back bondholders of our bust banks while making deep cuts to services and hiking taxes," said Diarmaid O'Flynn, a sports journalist spearheading the protest campaign, which will hold its 100th weekly march later this month. "They are making us all debt slaves and passing a huge financial burden on to our kids."

Ireland's banking crisis has cost taxpayers $85 billion and forced the country into a bailout led by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Five years of austerity budgets have carved $38 billion out of the economy, pushed unemployment to almost 15 percent and forced hundreds of thousands of young people to emigrate.

Public support for the European Union has fallen sharply during this period and the Fine Gael-Labor coalition, elected two years ago, has begun to see its popularity wane. But, to the amazement of many people in Ireland and abroad, there has been little of the social protest and strikes that have afflicted other bailout countries, particularly Greece.

"We are inclined to be apathetic as a people. We are certainly not the rebellious Irish that many people think us to be," said Geraldine Nolan, who travels 31 miles to attend the Ballyhea march and its sister protest in the nearby town of Charleville every Sunday.

Over the past two years, each weekly march has attracted only about 30 protesters. But as the deadline for the next payment of $4.1 billion in banking debt falls due in Dublin on March 31, there are fears the debt issue could yet destabilize the coalition and galvanize the public to revolt at the ballot box--if not on the streets.

The Ballyhea protesters have already made their case in Frankfurt.