Sustainability, accountability and democracy: Ireland's Troika experience

Sustainability in the public finances. This was the mantra of the IMF-ECB-EC Troika bailout. How was sustainability achieved? Mainly by changing aspects of the budgetary process. Ireland was required to submit the entirety of its budgetary framework for external scrutiny by the Troika and Eurozone member state governments. We briefly explore how the economic constitution of the European Union in the context of the Irish bailout turned macroeconomic sustainability into an instrument to redirect the majority of Irish policy decision-making out of the hands of democratically accountable parliamentarians and into the arms of unaccountable technocrats.