Austerity has failed everywhere it’s been tried, not least in Northern Ireland. Budget cuts at home have hit domestic demand just as budget cuts to the south have hit foreign demand. (Whether it was 2010 or 2011 or 2012 or 2013, Very Serious People were convinced, just convinced that the Celtic tiger had reinvented itself as the austerity tiger—just give it a few more months!—and every time they have been wrong). On either side of the Emerald Isle, deficit-cutting hasn’t been a path to prosperity, except of the Potemkin variety.
It's the new Potemkin Village. The town of Eniskillen in Northern Ireland is preparing for the G8 Summit by putting photorgaphs of previously occupied storefronts into the vacant ones to make it look as if the town (and country) is not suffering in the grips of the first
recession since the 1980's.
But officials have been accused of going too far after they plastered large stickers across boarded up shops in order to give them the appearance of still-thriving businesses.
Locals in the area have criticised the move, which they say masks the effects of the economic downturn and is a waste of resources.
The large stickers have been fixed to closed down stores near to the Lough Erne resort, in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, which will host next month’s meeting of the leaders of eight of the world’s richest countries, among them Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and François Hollande.
There is a butcher shop that has been vacant for well over a year which has pictures of meat, sausages, etc. in the front window. It even has a photograph of an open door to make it appear as if it is occupied.
From an interview in today's The World with Irish Times reporter Dan Keenan:
Dan Keenan: These are basically empty shops that are being now made to look as if they are thriving businesses, and they’ve done that in a very clever fashion indeed.
Werman: How do they do it?
Keenan: What they’ve done is they have filled the shop front window with a picture of what was the business before it went bankrupt or closed. In other words, grocery shops, butcher shops, pharmacies, you name it, they have placed large photographs in the windows that if you were driving past and glanced out the window, it would look as if this was a thriving business. It’s an attempt really by the local authority to make the place look as positive as possible for the visiting G8 leaders and their entourages, and it’s really tried to put a mask on a recession that has really hit this part of Ireland really very badly indeed.
Keenan: Yeah, it looks as if the door is open and inside you can see a well-stocked shop. It’s nothing of the sort. That door has been locked shut for well over a year because that particular business went bust this time last year, and that is an image to make it look as if everything is normal in the town and in the county, but unfortunately it’s not. The County of Fermanagh has suffered terribly as a result of the credit crisis and the resulting recession.
In total, more than 100 properties near the Lough Erne five star hotel and golf resort have been tidied up or redecorated, including Enniskillen’s Clinton Centre, opened by the former US president on the site of the 1987 IRA bombing of a Remembrance Sunday service, which has been given a cream makeover.
The initiative to spruce up the town for the G8 is coming from David Cameron and the Foreign Affairs Office and is costing citizens about half a million dollars. Additional funding is also coming from the province.
Yes, it's genuinely ironic. Local painters and builders were brought in for the project and will benefit from some short-term stimulus, to show that austerity works.
The news of the story is taking on a viral nature on Twitter, social media and so forth, so it's hardly possible that officials will be fooled by these fake storefronts - if it's even possible that they weren't already aware of economic problems in the UK and the Eurozone.