Standing on Dublin's Merrion Street on Thursday, I could just as well have been in Buenos Aires in 2003, Ankara in 2000, Lagos in 1989 or Kingston in 1979. The people were more pallid and generally better fed, but the anger and the slogans were identical. So was the graffito someone had spray-painted on the side of the building, as they do all over the world: “IMF go home.”
When that three-letter abbreviation becomes known and understood by people who take the bus to work, your country is in trouble. The International Monetary Fund was designed, in the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, to be part of the subfloor plumbing of the world's economy, to keep money flowing between countries and prevent the sort of inflationary debt-default disasters that put Germany in Hitler's hands. But it came to take on a more infamous role as the archangel of international finance. An IMF bailout is a dark punctuation in any nation's history, a humiliation that is never forgotten.
Ireland's experience this week was much like what people saw in Nigeria in 1989 or Britain in 1976: First, the country discovers that international bond markets, frightened by its unstable economy, will no longer lend it money at a price it can afford. So the IMF team from Washington checks into the expensive hotel across from the finance ministry, pores over the books and then delivers a Structural Adjustment Program – drastic reform that turns the country's whole economy into a debt-repayment machine.
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