Northern Ireland Builds Fake Town To Make It Look Like Austerity Works
Did they think they would fool people?
"Northern Ireland Is Building a Fake Town (With Government Money) to Make It Look Like Austerity Works If at first you don't succeed, just pretend you did"
"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.
Just look at Fermanagh. That's the Northern Irish county where the G8 is set to meet in June -- and where the economy isn't quite up to the image of "austerity success story". You see, there are shuttered storefronts all over the place, and that's no good. After all, you wouldn't want British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to talk up fiscal rectitude against a backdrop of bankrupt businesses. (Not that things are any better in the rest of the United Kingdom). But what is to be done? Well, how about just pretending everything is fine? That's basically what policymakers have been doing since 2010 anyways -- and it's what the Northern Irish government decided to do too. It's put up sham businesses across Fermanagh, because, hey, that worked for the Russians, right? From the Irish Times:
The butcher's business has been replaced by a picture of a butcher's business. Across the road is a similar tale. A small business premises has been made to look like an office supplies store. It used to be a pharmacy, now relocated on the village main street. Elsewhere in Fermanagh, billboard-sized pictures of the gorgeous scenery have been located to mask the occasional stark and abandoned building site or other eyesore.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/northern-ireland-is-building-a-fake-town-with-government-money-to-make-it-look-like-austerity-works/276401/
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Where the shops are fake and the slums look pretty...
