[caption id="attachment_69568" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Taoiseach Enda Kenny. "]
On the even of his U.S. visit, Taoiseach Enda Kenny has caused a storm after claiming the Irish financial crisis was caused by people's "mad borrowing," this only weeks after he stated that people were "not responsible" for it.
Speaking to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr. Kenny said the cause of the country's worst recession on record was "easy credit" which had spawned greed.
"What happened in our country was that people simply went mad borrowing," he said.
"The extent of personal credit, personal wealth created on credit, was done between people and banks, a system that spawned greed to a point where it just went out of control completely with a spectacular crash. The country borrowed over 60 billion Euro at excessive rates and the IMF eventually came in with the Troika," he said.
However, the taoiseach's words were at odds with the his pre-budget address to the Irish people in December during which he said: "Let me say this to you all - you are not responsible for the crisis."
Mr. Kenny later said his comments had been taken out of context.
"We had very poor regulation, we had incompetent government, and we had a system in the banking regime that paid big bonuses on volume lending that meant that developers, in the sense of buying and proposing schemes that could never be paid for by people, brought our country over the edge. And I set that in context very clearly," he said.
But opposition TDs railed against the taoiseach, saying he had failed to recognize generous bank guarantees and subsequent socializing of the debt lay at the root of Ireland's problems.
Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness said Mr. Kenny's credibility had been damaged.
"When you are delivering a message like that, whether it is in Dublin or Davos, if you are sincere about the message it will be the same," McGuinness said.
"I think the message being delivered by the taoiseach in terms of what he said in Davos has damaged his credibility and his message. You can't deliver two different messages to the same audience."
