UK Prime Minister David Cameron is hosting the latest G8 summit this June in County Fermanagh Northern Ireland. As part of the UK, this region of Northern Ireland is suffering 24% youth unemployment and other “benefits” of Cameron’s strict austerity policies.
The G8 meets regularly to cooperate and coordinate policies for their mutual benefit. Together the G8 nations are the world’s wealthiest and compromise 50.1% of 2012 global nominal GDP (market value of all final goods and services from a nation in a given year).
However this area of Northern Ireland is looking a little too run down for the G8 leaders sensibilities. So close to $500,000 is being spent on propping up the scenery as if it were a movie set.
Gum is being scraped off sidewalks. Roads will be freshly paved to ensure a smooth ride for convoys of world leaders. Virtual Potemkin villages are springing up on the road to the Lough Erne Resort, where heads of state will gather to discuss tax evasion and reforms, food security, trade deals and the crisis in Syria.
The fluff-up will include pasting life-sized photographs of well stocked stores over closed shops and storefronts. Irish Times reporter Dan Keenan told PRI’s the World:
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 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 G8 leaders will huddle together in a freshly painted town with false storefronts to plan trade deals, discuss tax evasion and reforms. The leaders of the World’s wealthiest nations may not realize it but they are getting a grand bargain on this latest attempt at reality evasion. In 2010 at a G8 summit in Canada the price tag for a false lake made especially for the event was $2 million dollars. However the security to protect the leaders and staff from real world threats in 2013 will reportedly cost $78 million.