Billions, Bunglers & Village Idiots

‘…the government is determined to give this €7 billion to these bankers at all costs.  That no matter how difficult the negotiations, no matter how tough a bargain the banks drive, the government has no other strategy but to recapitalise.  That the government has a default position that AIB and Bank of Ireland will be part of the solution no matter what the price.  Why would this be so?  Is it a kind of loyalty to fellow members of the golden circle?  Is it to prevent the banks from calling in their tabs with Fianna Fáil’s best mates in the building industry?  Why does this Fianna Fáil led government seem so determined to roll over and have their bellies tickled by AIB and Bank of Ireland?  Are they completely incompetent or completely corrupt?’

 

The quote above is from piece I posted on February 11th 2009.  It is hard to fathom how in just 21 months we have gone from a €7 billion bank recapitalisation to where we are today.  This evening our government signed up to saddle the country with a €67 billion debt.  That is over €16,000 for every man woman and child in the state.  On top of this they have all but cleaned out the National Pension Reserve Fund and paid out another €5 billion from our cash reserves. This all comes on top of the €20 billion plus we have ploughed into Anglo Irish bank, €7 billion to AIB and Bank of Ireland and €55 billion of bank debts which was quietly repaid to the ECB in August 2010.

What has all this been for? 

The government and the EU would have us believe that Ireland’s financial woes exist in a vacuum.  That all of this is being done to save the Irish economy from total meltdown.  The EU and the IMF are shining knights, riding in to save us from ourselves.

Forget the white knuckle terror in Frankfurt and Paris and London that major financial institutions in those cities would be washed away in a tide of bad debt if Irish banks were left to sort out their own mess.  Forget the real fear in Brussels  that somewhere down the line the EU could find itself having to bail out a major European economy in Spain or Italy if this thing is not nipped in the bud.  The ‘rescue’ of Ireland’s economy is the first salvo in a fierce battle to save German, French and British banks from a major default by AIB, Bank of Ireland, Anglo Irish and, on a much smaller scale, Irish Nationwide, on massive loans which under usual, sane banking rules they would never have received.  It is, we are told, going to prevent contagion from spreading, first to Portugal, which is even now teetering on the brink of collapse, and from there to the remaining members of the PIIGS club, Spain and Italy.  It is, apparently, going to save the Euro currency itself from collapse and may, incredibly, secure the future of the fifty year old European Union project.  It’s fantastic really.  Plucky little Ireland, without a thought for its own safety (or its elderly, its sick, its poor and its future generations),  is going to hurl itself into the raging river of recession to haul the whole of Europe to terra firma.  Do we want any thanks for this unique act of bravery and self-sacrifice?  Will we sit by the phone awaiting news of the Queen’s New Year’s honours list?  Will Lady Hibernia order a new frock in anticipation of an evening at a Legion d’honneur ceremony in Paris?  Will she, fuck.  Not only do we refuse any thanks or gratitude for sacrificing our future generations, we are actually willing to pay handsomely for the privilege of being the hero of Europe.  We have pledged to pay up to €3.8 billion in annual interest payments for this wonderful honour.

If I remove my tongue from my cheek for a moment I must confess to being extremely puzzled. If this bailout is of such huge benefit to over 500 million people across Europe, why are just 4 million people in Ireland being asked to foot the bill for the entire deal?  Why are our ‘friends’ in the EU asking us to enrich them to the tune of over €2.5 billion each year in punitive interest payments? 

Suppose for a moment that you are in a spot of bother with the building society.  You’re three months behind on the mortgage, having lost your jobs nine months ago.  You have, however, just secured new employment and your new wage allows you to easily meet your monthly outgoings.  The building society is not playing fair though.  They want all of the arrears repaid immediately or they are going to take your house.  What can you do.  Well you could approach your best friend in the whole world, whom you know to be quite solvent, incredibly flush with ready funds, in fact, and ask him if he could see his way to digging you out (interesting phrase) to the tune of five grand, which you will easily repay within the year.  Isn’t that what best friends in the whole world do for each other?  Imagine your chagrin if your supposed best friend were to insist that the five grand be repaid with an extra 5.8% on top.

‘Yeah, I love you mate.  I know I’m godfather to your eldest kid but, you know, business is business.  Five grand cash now, 5,290 next year.  Sweet as a nut.’

For our supreme act of heroism, stupidity or just plain folly (take your pick) in saving the entire European Union from implosion we are willing to pay an almost unimaginable price.

Alan Ginsberg said, ‘America, this is serious’  Well Europe, this is serious.  People are going to die because of what Brian Cowen and Brian Lenihan did today.  People will die who would not have died if this money was available to provide proper public healthcare.  Children with special needs will sit unrecognised and unfulfilled at the back of Irish classrooms because the special needs assistant is not there.  Women will stay in violent abusive homes because the shelter to which they could have escaped will not be there.  The list of those who will suffer because of this is long, very long,  and it will touch every person, every home in the nation. 

Brian Cowen’s press conference performance tonight was abysmal.  I listened live as I drove along the M4 towards home and was seriously dismayed by his offhand, dismissive tone.  His refusal to outline to a reporter from Sky News any details of the bilateral loan from the British exchequer was incredibly arrogant.  It’s not as if borrowing €67 billion is something we do every other week.  The least he could do is spend thirty seconds explaining to the British taxpayer just what they are getting for their billions.

Cowen came across as a man who now feels that his job is done.  His demeanour speaks of a man who now just wants to wash his hands of the entire affair and hand the whole sorry mess over to the next poor schmuck.  Be that Enda or Gilmore I don’t have any warm fuzzy feelings when I consider the future governance of this ‘great little country’, as one former Fianna Fáil leader called it.  The next administration, whether it is Fine Gael-Labour or Labour-Fine Gael will simply throw its hands in the air, declare that Fianna Fáil and the Green Party have landed us in a right pile of shit and implore us to wrap ourselves in the green flag, put our collective shoulders to the wheel and make the best of it.

We have a serious problem with the standard and calibre of public representatives whom we elect and install in high office in this country.  We do, however, elect them.  My brother recently put quite succinctly.  The problem, he said, is that we keep electing the village idiot.  The guy with half a brain and lots to say who in a sane society would be barred from every pub in the village because nobody wants to sit beside him.  This, certainly, is part of the problem. A larger part of the problem, however, is an electoral system which allows the village idiot to collect the paltry five or six thousand votes required to get their arse on the plush leather seats in Dáil Eireann.  One notable village idiot, Ivor the Driver, got himself into our national parliament in 2002 with just 900 first preference votes!

The required changes to this system will not come through any electoral reform emanating from the current incumbents of Leinster House.  It is absolutely opposed to the self interests of our sitting TDs to do anything about the crazy over-representation in our national parliament.  One TD for every 25,000 citizens equates to 2,400 MPs at Westminster.  The bloated salaries and unvouched, gravy train expenses only ensure that politics becomes a lucrative career rather than a public service.  ‘If you pay peanuts you get monkeys’, they will tell us.  If you pay superstar wages you get greedy, self-serving snouts in a trough.  No, these changes will not come through normal, peaceful parliamentary channels.  Those turkeys will not vote for Christmas and the supine electorate will continue to elect the same village idiots, will continue to know that they are idiots and yet, will cling to them, slap them on the back and hope that they can do something for them, bend a rule somewhere to get them a benefit to which they are not strictly entitled, make that awkward speeding fine go away or maybe, if they can grease their way into ministerial Merc, pour a waterfall of inappropriate funding into the constituency.

You may think that I am advocating violent revolution.  I can see how you might assume that.  Well, the sight of Aengus O’Snodaigh storming the gates of Government Buildings last week is enough to entrench one permanently in the field of parliamentary democracy.  These changes can only come about through the emergence of a new political class.  A class of citizens who feel a vocation to serve their society honestly and honourably and who seek no reward but a decent living salary and maybe the support of their communities.  Unfortunately, while these fantasy unicorn politicians are promising a new honesty in public life the village idiot will be promising a modern sports centre in every village, lower taxes and all your dreams come true.  You guessed it.  The village idiot romps home and celebrates by singing drunkenly from the back of a truck in his home village, his power base, to where, in his county council days, he moved the public library, the local courthouse and a decent sized county council office.   Game, set and match to the village idiot.

Worryingly, I am in full agreement with the view of Bertie’s former squeeze, Celia Larkin in the Sindo when it comes to Aengus O’Sneerigh’s prime time, sound bite assault on our democratic institutions.  Now there’s a thought to make me go to bed and cover my head…

 

Suffer the little children.

Religion, we are told, is a deeply personal matter.  People’s religious beliefs are assumed to be the business of nobody but themselves, their fellow members of their particular religious community and whichever god they chose to worship.  We who rail against the influence of deeply ingrained religious beliefs on many aspects of civil soiety, in areas as diverse as education and legislation, are asked, not always politely, to mind our own business.  What happens, however, when a society finds itself so much in awe of priests and religious leaders that to challenge them in any way is simply unthinkable?  What happens when democratically elected law-makers will not make a decision without first considering how it will be received by the unelected theocracy of the majority religion of the state.  Click here, and set aside a coupled of days to find out.  The report of the Commission to Inquiry into Child Abuse runs to five volumes and is comprised of page after page of unrelenting horror.  If antyhing tells us of the dangers of religion and unchecked religious devotion it is this report.  The evidence of over 1,000 witnesses details a seventy year reign of terror perpetrated aginst innocent, defenceless children by members of 18 religious orders in Ireland.  The shocking abuses, which included beatings, mental and physical torture and repeated and violent rape and buggery, were not wholly unknown at the time.  Many people, including doctors who would have treated the most seriously injured children, members of health boards, whose job it was to inspect the facilities, and members of religious orders who were not involved in abuse, knew of the crimes which were being commited against Irish children, but failed to act to prevent it.  One victim wrote to a government minister in the 1950s detailing the abuse he had suffered and nothing was done.  The litany of abuse continued for a further 40 years.  None of these people felt that they could challenge the enormous power of the Catholic church.  If questions were asked the church simply denied the allegations and they were believed.

Stand up to religion.  Do not allow inane, unproven fairytale beliefs ever again to gain such a position of influence in civil society.  Let the next generation be the first in human history to grow up free from the brain-washing of  force fed religious doctrine.  If, as i do, you live in Ireland you have little choice but to send your children to a Catholic ethos primary school.  However, you can educate your children that what they hear in school about religion is only an opinion.  You can open their minds to many different opinions and help them to find the established and tested facts that science has given us over the last five hundred years.   Facts that reveal the big lie behind all organised religions.

 

The OUT Campaign

 

Just tonight I happened across the site of  The OUT Campaign.  This is an organisation which encourages and supports those atheists who wish to come out of the closet and publicly display their atheism.  The scarlet letter A is their symbol and it is now proudly displayed here at Talking Straight and has been incorporated into the new mast head.  Interestingly, when I tried to link through to the campaign’s home page my ISP’s parental control denied me access.  The reason for this according to my ISP?  The site promotes hate speech!  We have a long way to go it seems.  Check them out.

 

Queueing For A Living (Non Irish Style)

Much has been made this week of the sight of hundreds of people queueing along St Stephen’s Green North in the hope of securing one of 150 supermarket jobs on offer from the Griffin-Londis group.  Anne Marie Hourihane does a good piece about it in today’s Irish Times, and she is the first journalist I have seen putting a positive slant on the story.  It would seem obvious that a story about the creation of 150 new jobs in the depths of a recession is a good news story.  All of the media coverage I have seen (except from Ms Hourihane) has used this story to tell us how awful things really are.  It’s all doom and gloom with thousands of people out of work and desperate for any job they can get, even a basic supermarket job.  Many have said that it was a throwback to the eighties, except I don’t remember people queueing around the block for jobs in the eighties.  I do, however, remember people queueing down Pembroke Road in an attempt to get out of the country.

150 new jobs is a good news story.  The fact that so many of our young people are willing to queue for up to two hours in the hope of an interview for even the most basic of jobs is also a good news story – or is it.  Séamus Griffin, managing director of the Griffin-Londis group had an interesting statistic  for Ann Marie Hourihan.  Only 2.5% of those in the queue were Irish nationals.  This is a stunning, if not surprising, figure. 

According to the CSO, non-Irish nationals made up 20.4% of the live register for March 2009.  In the same month it was estimated that non-Irish nationals made up 16% of the available workforce.  This could tell us that foreign nationals are over represented in the ranks of the unemployed by about 4%.  However, if foreign nationals, as Séamus Griffin tells us, make up 97.5% of a queue for a job in a supermarket, we must question, as Ann Marie Hourihan did, where all the potential Irish supermarket workers are.  Irish people acount for 80% of the unemployed in the state and yet they seem uninterested in taking a job which, I assume, they feel is beneath them.

To continue to claim unemployment benefit one must satisfy the authorities that one is actively seeking employment.  Given the massive imbalance in Mr Griffin’s queue last Wednesday I would wonder how assiduosly this is checked before the dole money is shoved accross the counter each week.

Ms. Horihane concludes her article with the following question, ‘When the day comes that the Irish are the dominant nationality working in the Londis stores will that mean that our economy has hit rock bottom? Or will it mean that it has returned, at last, to normality ?’  A good question indeed.

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Inidcently, looking at census figures, as I did for this post, can throw up the most extraordinarily quirky figures.  For instance, on census night in April 2006 there were 63,276 Poles living in Ireland.  On the same night there were 10,126 poles who were visiting but not living in Ireland.  That means that about one in six Polish people living here in 2006 had family or friends visiting on census night.  Amazing!

 

What have the Government Chief Whip and a Heroin Dealer got in Common?

On Saturday morning last I was driving to Loughrea from Claregalway when, on Ruth Buchanan’s Playback programme, I heard a piece from Thurday’s Liveline.  A guy called John was talking to Damien O’Reilly about being a small time heroin dealer in Dublin.  John’s main defence of his part time occupation was as follows. It is simply impossible to live on the €204  job seekers allowance that he is given by the state every week, so he is forced to supplement his income by selling heroin.

Fast forward to Monday morning and Government chief whip, Pat Carey, is being interviewed by Áine Lawlor on  Morning Ireland.  Carey had come out to defend the fact that, contrary to what was announced in the budget speech by Brian Lenihan, sitting TDs could, after all, continue to receive ministerial pensions.  During the course of the discussion Carey alluded to the recent tribunals and suggested that we did not want to return to those bad old days.  This is a shocking and disgraceful statement from any TD, but from one charged with keeping  back-benchers on side with the government message, it is all the more so.  To suggest that if our esteemed public representatives are not paid enough, or even what they would deem to be sufficient, that they would inevitably resort to corruption and bribery to supplement their incomes is an incredible position for a chief whip to take.

When John the heroin dealer declared that he must turn to law breaking to supplement his €10,608 annual income, another caller to Liveline was moved to call him ‘the scum of the earth.’

When a government TD suggests that TDs and former ministers might do the same if their wages of between €100,000 and €150,000 plus are cut by a few grand it raises barely a whimper.

Does anything tell us more about this government’s contempt for and their detachment from the electorate.  How much longer are we going to allow this powerful, wealthy, detached elite to treat us and our democracy like a private country club.  How long will we continue to be a veritable ATM for these leaches.

This ‘L’Oreal’ cabinet see nothing wrong with a Taoiseach who earns more than the President of The United States.  They see nothing wrong with TDs getting compensatory payments of over €50,000 when they lose their junior ministers’ positions and then having to eke out a living on the basic €100,000 backbencher’s salary.

Why?

Because they’re worth it.

You will not find one among the current 164 TDs and 60 Senators who genuinely does not believe that  they are worth every cent.

Many callers to Liveline today agreed that we need to pay our politicians well if we are to get the best people for the job.  In recent years, as the wages of our elected representatives have soared, this has become accepted wisdom.  If you pay peanuts, we are told, you get monkeys.  I don’t agree with this.  I think that it is just possible that the higher the remuneration the lower the standard of politician you are likely to get.

The skills and the attitude required to run profit driven, private companies and PLCs are quite different to those required to run public institutions.  Every day of every year there are tens of thousands of people, the length and breadth of this country, who engage in volunteerism.  These people selflessly give their time and energy to run GAA clubs, soccer clubs, boxing clubs.  They take care of elderly neighbours and relatives and never ask a cent for their service.  These are decent, civic minded people who give because it helps their communities and probably because it makes them feel good too.

Conversely, the more we pay our politicians the more likely it is that we will get people who are only in it for the money.  These are absolutely the wrong people to run the country.  These are the wrong people to take care of the sick, the elderly and the disadvantaged.  These are the wrong people to be charged with the sharing out of the wealth of the nation.

We, however, are the idiots who keep electing them.

 

A Shameful and Savage Act

 

Once again this Fianna Fáil / Green Party government shows us how completely out of touch it is with the country.  In a truly astonishing move education minister, Batt O’Keefe, today announced that funding for special teacher support for children with mild general learning disabilities in 119 primary schools throughout the country is to be withdrawn.  How this move could be seen as anything other than an attack on the most vulnerable children in our school system is beyond me.  The Irish Constitution demands of the state that it provide an education to all children.  The right of an Irish child to be educated is enshrined in the most solemn document of this republic.  Nowhere in article 42 of the constitution is there any reference to how children might qualify for different standards of primary education.  One would have to accept that, based on the rights enshrined in article 42, children with mental handicap, emotional problems or any other kind of educationally disadvantageous condition are as much entitled to primary education as any other children.  Nowhere in the constitution is there a reference to the state’s ability to provide financially for the education of any child.  The withdrawal of this necessary teaching aid to an estimated 534 children would appear to be a dereliction of the state’s constitutional obligation to children’s education.

This is not, of course, how Minister Batt O’Keefe will see it.  “There isn’t any massive change.  There are hundreds of similar kids right around that have been integrated into mainstream classes,” he said today.

It would seem that the minister believes that the provision of special teacher support for special needs children up to now has been an unnecessary luxury.  A luxury which, in times of serious financial hardship, such as the country now finds itself in, is a profligate waste of taxpayers’ money which is among the first of the unnecessary luxuries to be axed as the government seeks to cut €2 billion off the budget spend for 2009. 

Since Brian Cowen told us last week that serious cuts in public spending were needed we have seen a pension levy imposed on the salaries of public sector workers and a freezing of previously agreed public sector wage increases.  This savage cut in funding for special needs teachers is so far the only other announced budget cut.  The department of education estimates that this measure will save in the region of €7 million.  As I write this the following budget provisions are still in place.

Local Authority Swimming Pool Programme: – €18 million, Irish Sports Council: – €53.026 million, National Sports Campus: – €4.403 million, Lansdowne Road: – €1.5 million, Horse & Grey Hound Racing Fund: – €69.719, Grants to support sport in disadvantaged areas: – €1.35 million.

Yes, you did read that correctly, €69.715 million in grants to horse & greyhound racing for 2009.

We still have 20 junior ministers earning in excess of €140, 000 per annum. We still provide a car costing over €100,000, each one equipped with two full time Garda drivers, to each of our 15 ministers. We have just given a €1,000,000 severance package to a financial regulator who had to resign because of his incompetence. Each of 165 TDs ‘earns’ a basic salary of over €100,000, which rises, when membership of committees and various unvouched expenses are added on, to over €250,000.  Tonight we spent €7,000,000,000 to recapitalise two of the largest private institutions in the state and most analysts reckon that a further €13,000,000,000 will be required to do the job properly.

The list of places where cuts could have been made before attacking vulnerable, defenceless children who, through no fault of their own, face serious challenges in accessing primary education is almost endless.  The proposal to end the universal medical card for over seventies could be justified on grounds of ability to pay.  A proposal to introduce university fees could be defended on the same grounds.  One was reversed when the political heat got too much and the other will see massive student demonstrations if it is introduced.  The public sector pension levy can be justified when compared to the required contributions to attain a comparable pension in the private sector.  It remains to be seen if this government has the stomach for a fight when the students and the unions take to the streets as the pensioners did last autumn.  Will they stand up to these groups or simply turn tail and put the boot in to another vulnerable but less vocal section of our society?

This government shames me and shames my country.  That I did not vote for them is no consolation to me whatsoever.

 

Recapitalisation, Big Bank Style.

 

Last autumn representatives of the main financial institutions went cap in hand to Merrion Street and announced that they were in some serious trouble and something really must be done.  From the outset the government would seem to have been in an incredibly strong negotiating position.  So what did they do?  They pledged to guarantee the deposits and the assets of these institutions.  They then rushed legislation through the Dáil to effect this guarantee and then they sat down to negotiate the terms of a guarantee which they were legally obliged to provide.  Wouldn’t you just love to play poker with these guys?  I can just see Biffo announcing to the guys sitting around the green baize, ‘I’ve got four aces here, lads.  So I’m putting everything I have on the table.  Anyone going to see me, then?’

Tomorrow Brian Lenihan will announce details of how €7 billion of Irish state money is to be applied to save the two largest financial institutions in Ireland, AIB and Bank of Ireland.  The negotiation of the terms of this cash injection have been going on for quite some time and it would seem, from reports which have been filtering out, and from the general demeanor of Lenihan and co, that the government has been on the back foot for most of the engagement.

Now, I’ve said before that I am not an economist, but the situation would seem to be pretty straightforward.  One scenario is that the two banks are in serious trouble and are desperately in need of a massive injection of new capital to allow them to stay in business.  In this case the banks don’t have a leg to stand on and have to accept whatever terms the government cares to dictate.  Another scenario is that the banks are actually reasonably healthy and are not, in fact, in any danger of collapse.  In this case the government can then simply take our €7 billion and do something useful with it.  The recapitalisation of AIB and Bank of Ireland is supposed to encourage the banks to start lending money to small business again, therefore safeguarding jobs in smaller firms which are experiencing cash flow problems.  If the banks don’t want to do things our way then there is another bank which could be used to channel this cash to the SMEs.  Anglo Irish Bank is wholly owned by the state and could be transformed into a kind of latter day ACC to offer credit to businesses which are otherwise sound but are suffering through a lack of cash at certain times.  As I said, I’m not an economist, so I can’t say with certainty that this transformation of Anglo Irish Bank is possible.  However, if it is not, why not just build a new ACC type vehicle to restart the flow of credit to small business.

Now, as you can see, the government has held all the aces from the very start in this sorry mess.  The fact that doing a deal with the banks has been so difficult can only lead me to one of two conclusions.  The first is that the government and those negotiating on their behalf are complete idiots who are being led a merry dance by Messrs Goggins and Sheehy and their doubtless large and expensive team of financial and legal eagles. This is a rather worrying thought since Cowen and Lenihan and Coughlan and their mates are actually supposed to be running the country.

The second conclusion is that the government is determined to give this €7 billion to these bankers at all costs.  That no matter how difficult the negotiations, no matter how tough a bargain the banks drive, the government has no other strategy but to recapitalise.  That the government has a default position that AIB and Bank of Ireland will be part of the solution no matter what the price.  Why would this be so?  Is it a kind of loyalty to fellow members of the golden circle?  Is it to prevent the banks from calling in their tabs with Fianna Fáil’s best mates in the building industry?  Why does this Fianna Fáil led government seem so determined to roll over and have their bellies tickled by AIB and Bank of Ireland?  Are they completely incompetent or completely corrupt?

 

Iraqi Freedom Enduring

Democracy is a wonderful thing and America is a wonderful democracy.  This is demonstrated every four years when America goes to the polls and the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue knows and accepts that they may have to relinquish the most powerful political position on the planet.  Recently America has had a desire to export this wonderful democracy to certain, but not all, countries in the Middle East.  Their greatest democracy exporting experiment is currently taking place in Iraq where President George W Bush travelled this week in the dying days of his final term.   As we know an Iraqi journalist who takes a certain umbrage at America’s actions in Iraq attacked Bush with a pair of size ten shoes while he was giving a press conference alongside Iraqi president Nouri al-Maliki.  The journalist, Muntadar al-Zeidi, was promptly arrested and according to reports is to be charged with ‘insulting the Iraqi nation.’  Had al-Zeidi carried out his actions in the United States he would certainly have been arrested, but one can only assume that any charges which followed would be related to the attempted assault on the president.  I don’t know of any serious democratic nation where it is a crime to insult the country.  This however is the new ‘democracy’ which America is promoting and supporting in Iraq.  The idea that insulting the Iraqi nation is a punishable crime has a certain resonance when one thinks of the literally hundreds, if not thousands, of Iranians who were executed in Iran following the 1979 revolution who were acussed of ‘crimes against Islam.’  I wait anxiously to see what will happen when Iraq is finally cut loose from America’s apron strings and elects itself a strict Islamic government.  I can only guess that when that happens America will be just about as keen on Iraqi democracy as they were on Palestinian democracy when Hamas were elected.

BTW.  Having observed Bush’s fantastic, evasive body swerve I can only assume that he has at some time been on a duck shoot with Dick Cheney!

 

Obama, change you can believe in. Not.

In The Irish Times this week an interesting story about US president elect, Barack Obama turned up as an eight line story under the headline ‘Obama to offer Israel nuclear umbrella.’  It seems that, according to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, Barack Obama has given assurances to the jewish state that in the event of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel, the United States will respond with a nuclear strike against Iran.

Now, there’s change you can believe in.

I have said privately for quite some time that Barack Obama’s election will make very little difference to American foreign policy, particularly American Middle East policy.

Still, it must be comforting if you are living in or around Tel Aviv to know that if Iran, a country which does not possess nuclear weapons, was to launch a nuclear attack on your country, Israel, which does have nuclear weapons, then the country which gave you those nuclear weapons, in flagrant breach of nuclear non-proliferation treaties, will save you the bother of wasting a couple of warheads by taking out several hundred thousand citizens of  Tehran on your behalf.

Change you can believe in.

No mention, however, of America’s intended reaction to an Israeli first strike, with American nuclear weapons, on Iran.

Change..?

No.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

 

And so, farewell to all that.

And so the waiting begins.  Bertie has bid farewell to Mr. Justice Alan Mahon and his esteemed colleagues down at Dublin Castle, and when Owen O’Callaghan has given his tuppence worth the three judges can get on with writing their final report.

I must say that I will miss the tribunal.  In entertainment terms it has been the best show in town for quite some years now and had come to feel almost like an old, reliable friend.  The sort of old friend who could always be relied upon to cheer me up and give me a giggle on a dreary, wet Monday in Dublin traffic.  After a 12 year run the end of it will seem a bit like the last episode of The Riordans.

The tribunal even outlived the Vincent Browne Show.  The re-enactments pioneered on the show were always fantastic entertainment.  Way back in the dim and distant past, before pod-casting had been heard of, I used to set my cassette recorder on a timer to record the show before I went to bed at night.  Driving out the N4 at 3 or 4am the next morning I was often convulsed with laughter while listening to Tom Gilmartin of Liam Lawlor giving evidence.  Gilmartin’s recounting of the occasion when Lawlor gate crashed a meeting in London nearly put me in a ditch west of Enfield one dark morning.

You see, there were one or two consummate entertainers at the tribunal a few years before Bertie came on the scene.  Imagine how disappointing it would have been if Bertie had completely flopped in the comedy stakes.

Good old reliable Bertie, though, he really didn’t let us down.  Bertie’s run had many highlights.  Everything from how as minister for finance he didn’t engage with the banking system to Michael Wall not eating the dinner and many more fabulous anecdotes in between proved his status as a raconteur without peer.  However, the day he told us that he won the money on a horse has got to be the pinnacle of a performance with more peaks than the Himalayas.

I look forward eagerly to the publication of the final report.  It is sure to be a bestseller and should easily outstrip Justice Floods interim report from a couple of years ago.  Perhaps it will enliven the blogosphere, which quite frankly has been a little quiet of late.

Over in Dublin 4 work on the new Lansdowne Road stadium continues apace.  When the newly built venue opens to the public in 2010 rugby and soccer fans can expect a much enhanced day out for their sports viewing.  What they won’t be expecting, however, is the crowds of spectators urging them on as they go to spend a penny in the stadium’s many toilet facilities.

“The other big thing is the toilet facilities, something that the old stadium was lacking in, to put it mildly. It’ll be a much better spectator experience.”  So said Martin Murphy, Lansdowne Road Stadium Director

 

Bank of Ireland on the ball

On June 24th last I was passing through Kilbeggan in Co. Westmeath and I snapped this photo of a rather shabby looking former Bank of Ireland branch.  Later that evening I used the photo to illustrate a post about the impending recession.  Just yesterday I was again passing through Kilbeggan and was pleasantly surprised to seee that the building has had a facelift.  Do you supppose someone at BOI head office came across the photo on the web? (Although, how a search for Californian escort agencies could lead one to my site is a bit of a mystery!) 

 

 

 Anyway, the denizens of Kilbeggan are, I’m sure, delighted that this eyesore in the heart of their village has benn rectified.

 

Now, on the count of 3. Deep breath, and tighten those belts, you nasty, profligate consumers, you!

So, the country is in recession for the first time in twenty five years.  Batten down the hatches, as they say, this could be a rough ride.

By my reckoning the Celtic Tiger boom finished about August or September last year.  We had ten years of unprecedented economic growth.  Economists around the globe stood and stared, their jaws residing somewhere below the knees, unable to believe the fantastic gains being made year on year in the Irish economy.  Now, a mere ten months after the tiger stopped roaring, we are facing our first recession in a quarter of a century.  Already the minister for education has told us that the school building fund is bereft of resources.  Dermot Ahern recently silenced the unseemly row in the north-east over where the new regional hospital should be built by glibly informing those involved that there would be no money available to build the hospital after all.  Over the coming months we will see project after public project being cancelled or massively scaled back as the government tightens the public purse strings.  Almost every economist I heard on radio today said the the national development plan should continue.  Many said that with the excess capacity now available in the building industry and construction and engineering firms desperate to secure new contracts in an ever shrinking market that the time was ripe to secure good value for money on large infrastructure projects.

Will the government do this?

Not a chance.

The priority of this government will now be to curtail public spending as much as possible over the next thirty months.  We will then see a sudden, massive increase in spending in the 18 months leading up to the 2012 general election as Fianna Fáil tries, once again, to buy its way back into power.  The most depressing thing is that this same strategy has worked twice before and, if the recession doesn’t get too deep, it will probably work again.

Fool, me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  Fool me three times?

Some better prospects on the economic horizon, however, with the news that the government is soon to give us a casino on every corner. Every cloud has a silver lining, I suppose.

 

Democracy at the Heart of Europe.

Much has been made recently of the apparent democratic defecit at the heart of the European Union.  Euro-sceptics will tell you that we are being ruled by a faceless, unelected bureaucracy.  It would be instructive, then, to look at the make up of the legislative of the EU.

The European Parliament consists of 785 members, all directly elected by the citizens of the member states.

The European Commission consists of 27 commissioners, one from each member state.  The commissioners are nominated by their national governments and the entire commission must be accepted by the Paliament.

The Council of the European Union, more commonly referred to as the council of ministers, consists of one representative of each member state.  Usually the relevant minister for the topic being discussed will represent his or her nation at Council meetings.

The European Council is made up of the heads of government of the 27 member states.

That would seem to be an awful lot of elected representatives for an apparently undemocratic institution.  The only people above who are not directly elected by the prople are the commissioners, but they are appointed by those whom we elect, in much the same way as an Taoiseach can appoint 11 members to Seanad Éireann and can also appoint any member of Seanad Éireann, elected or not, as a minister in the government.

Whatever fears the European Union my hold for Ireland, a lack of democracy should not be one of them.

 

Lisbon Defeated

‘…and they so loved their country that they used its flag as a tablecloth.’

Lisbon ‘NO’ supporters honour the Irish tri-colour at a victory celebration in Brussels.

 

 

 

Meanwhile back in Ireland, Chicken Licken was reaching some alarming conclusions.

 

 

Lisbon Treaty in balance – Ben Dunne in Stockholm

Today’s Lisbon treaty discussion on Liveline was interesting.  Had it been informative it might have been worthwhile.  The main contributors were DJ Carey, Ben Dunne, Sinead O’Connor and Meabh Binchey.  Apparently these were some of the names that came up when Liveline asked its listeners who they would like to hear give their views on the treaty.  So, when the good people of Ireland, the wonderfully erudite and informed fans of Joe Duffy want some advice on a vital change to our hallowed constitution to whom do they turn.  A former hurler, a former grocer, a pop star priestess and an internationally best selling novelist.

According to O’Connor most of us are too busy trying to feed ourselves or raise our kids to figure out what the treaty is all about.  She thinks that we should postpone the vote until the dullards who make up the electorate can get up to speed on this thing.  That could take years.  She tells us later in the discussion that ‘…the devil is your best friend.’  So vote no, then.

DJ, believed by many to have political ambitions, nicely toes the party line and calls for a yes vote, saying that while he doesn’t really understand the treaty he trusts the politicians to steer him on the right path.  Blah, blah, blah.

Meabh takes a very europhile view of the debate, saying that Europe has been great for us and we should stay on the great big euro bus. So vote yes.

Dunne, as usual, is just hilarious.  Having told us that he does not understand the treaty he then tells us of his great intelligence.  So if Ben ‘Einstien’ Dunne can’t understand it, what chance do the rest of us have?

The most interesting part of the discussion was the apparent revelation that Ben Dunne is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.  Twice today he leapt to the defence of Sinn Fein.  Yes, the same Sinn Fein whose private army, the IRA, kidnapped Dunne back in 1981.

Later, over dinner, the subject of Dunne’s kidnap came up and the idea was put forward that it was Charlie Haughey who secured his release.  This resulted in great mirth as we imagined the scene out at Kinsealy when Charlie learned that his greatest benefactor was in a spot of bother.

Within minutes Charlies, in a panic, has the IRA Chief of Staff on the phone.

‘Any chance you’d let Ben go?’

‘No f**cking way.’

‘Ah, go on.  I’ve spoken to Don Tidey.  He says you can have Maurice Pratt instead.’

The Questions & Answers Lisbon Special was great fun too.  One thing that was clear was that Enda won’t be leader of Fine Gael at  the next election.  Everybody, including Declan Ganley, wiped the floor with him.  He had to be rescued so many times by John Bowman that it was laughable.

Having watched Mary Lou McDonald tonight, it is clear that if she had joined Fianna Fail instead of Sinn Fein she would be snapping at Mary Coughlan’s heels.  Whatever about her politics, she is a shrewd operator who can hold her own with the best of them.

 A nice point from a member of the audience, who were all invited, interested parties, about the no side of the panel.  One of them (Sinn Fein) terribly concerned about US war planes passing through Shannon and the other (Declan Ganley) trying to get his gear onto them.

Micháel Martin batted well for the government while the Cóir representative accused the yes camp of being an ignorant shower who shouted and booed every time a no campaigner tried to make a point, before going on herself to try to shout down Enda when he attempted to answer her question.

So plenty of accusations of lying, plenty of booing and hissing and a complete disaster for Enda, especially when he revived his cringe inducing, wounded Catholic persona in response to a question about abortion.

Anyway, this correspondent has now made up his mind about how he will cast his vote.

(Note: Must stop referring to myself in the third person.  Far too remeniscent of Liam Lawlor!)

I have consumed the debate voraciously over the last couple of weeks and have done my best to be as informed as possible, (unlike Sinead and Ben), and unless Sarkozy and Merkel run naked down O’Connell Street in the next 48 hours screaming ‘You fools, you fools.  We have you now.  You will sell your soul to a war-mongering, baby-murdering, tax-plundering, European cesspit of pure evil!!,’ I will, like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, be screaming…….

YES, YES, YES! OH GOD, YES!

 

Shocking rip off exposed by RTÉ. Stores overcharging for sun-glasses!

On its late news program this evening RTÉ have a piece about the price of goods in certain shops in Ireland.  Some stores, such as M&S or Dunnes Stores, who operate both here and in the UK have dual Euro/Sterling price tags on their goods.  As we know, the value of Sterling versus the Euro has been falling recently and consumer groups, and RTÉ it would seem, fully expected that these stores would reduce the euro price of their goods as a result.  This has not happened and now Eamonn Gilmore and Consumer’s Association head Dermot Jewell are up in arms and the government is springing into action.  It seems that the Tánaiste is to meet with the head of The National Consumer Agency to discuss the matter.  Mr. Gilmore is demanding that the government do something to end these ‘rip-offs’.  RTÉ, in its report tonight, helpfully tells us by how much certain items in Dunnes and M&S are overpriced.

Overpriced according to whom?

As we all know, there is no statutory price control on sun-glasses and blouses in Ireland.  As there is an enormous amount of competition in the sun-glasses and blouses supply sector (a vital part of the economy, if RTÉ are to be taken seriously) I do not forsee any price controls being introduced any time soon.  Does Eamonn Gilmore really belive that, at a time when clothing has never been cheaper, the government will impose price controls?

I have no problem with the prices being charged by these stores.  They are in business to make money and if people are willing to pay the prices on the tags then they will continue to charge them.  When the prices of blouses and sunglasses reach an as yet unknown critical level people will stop buying them.

We can live without sun-glasses and we can live without an excess of blouses and jeans and t-shirts.  What we would find very difficult would be to live without gas and electricity.

The ESB is state owned and has a virtual monopoly on the supply of domestic electrical power in Ireland.  Domestic electricity prices have risen sharply in recent years, this despite the fact that the bulk of our power is produced in oil powered generating stations, oil which is purchased in US Dollars, a currency which has nose-dived against the Euro in the last twelve months.  The ESB also returns masive profits to the government every year.

Bord Gáis has a monopoly on domestic gas supply in Ireland.  Gas prices are rising sharply and Bord Gáis profits are rising just as sharply.  Bord Gáis is owned by the state.

If Eamonn Gilmore wants a ‘rip-off’ story to get his teeth into maybe he could look at the massive profits being generated by state companies charged with suppyling some of the basics of modern living – heat and light.

As Brian Cowen might say,  ‘We need to get a handle on this, will you ring those fuckers.’

 

The Lisbon Treaty

I’ve just had a quick run through the Lisbon Treaty. The full text of the proposed treaty can be downloaded here but, to be honest, unless you are a constitutional lawyer or an expert in contract law I wouldn’t bother. It only takes a brief perusal of the document to realise that it is utterly impenetrable to the ordinary layman.Try this for size… 

 

292) Article 310 shall become Article 188 M.

293) Article 311 shall be repealed. A new Article 311a shall be inserted, with the wording of

Article 299(2), first subparagraph, and Article 299(3) to (6); the text shall be amended as follows:

(a) the first subparagraph of paragraph 2 and paragraphs 3 to 6 shall be renumbered 1 to 5

and the following new introductory wording shall be inserted at the beginning of the

Article:

“In addition to the provisions of Article 49 C of the Treaty on European Union relating to the territorial scope of the Treaties, the following provisions shall apply:”

Or this…

8. Articles 3, 4, 6, 7, 9.2, 10.1, 10.3, 11.2, 12.1, 14, 16, 18 to 20, 22, 23, 26, 27, 30 to 34, 50 and 52 of the Protocol on the Statute of the European System of Central Banks and of the European Central Bank (‘the Statute’) shall not apply to the United Kingdom. In those Articles, references to the Community or the Member States shall not include the United Kingdom and references to national central banks or shareholders shall not include the Bank of England. References in Articles 10.3 and 30.2 of the Statute to ‘subscribed capital of the ECB’ shall not include capital subscribed by the Bank of England.

That doesn’t trip easily off the tongue either.

The second passage, however, is not from the Lisbon Treaty. It is taken from the treaty of Rome, originally enacted in 1957 and subsequently amended by Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice among others. On the 10^th May 1972 the Irish electorate voted to join the EEC and I would doubt very much if many of the one million plus who voted yes read any part of the Treaty of Rome.

The argument that we should reject the Lisbon treaty because it cannot be easily read is a bit of a red herring. How many of those who say ‘I wouldn’t sign a legal document if I couldn’t understand it,’ ever read the terms and conditions when they take out a bank loan or buy a concert ticket on Ticketmaster or sign up for a Gmail account?

Joining the EEC in 1973 was undoubtedly the greatest thing that ever happened to this country. From that one act (eventually) flowed the economic success we have seen in recent years and the modernising of our nation. The establishment of many basic human rights, which we now take for granted, such as equal pay for women, have stemmed from our membership of the EU. In 1972 we did not need to know the intricate details of the Treaty of Rome to know that joining would be good for Ireland. Instead we listened to an informed debate on the pros and cons and made our choices accordingly.

Similarly, we do not need to read every word of the Lisbon treaty to make a decision on how we should vote this time. There is an overload of information in the public sphere about this treaty and what it will mean to Ireland and to Europe. Here’s just a small, random selection.

 

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/86857 http://www.joanburton.ie/?postid=823 http://www.lisbontreaty.ie/ http://www.voteno.ie/

(Incidentally, if you were paying any attention to Libertas and their campaign against the treaty I would strongly recommend that you should read this excellent article by Chekov Feeny over at

Indymedia.)

I am leaning towards a yes vote but I have three weeks to listen to the arguments from both sides before I finally make up my mind. I do feel, however, that if the government parties do not make a serious change to their campaign that he treaty will be rejected. The government’s tactics so far have been extremely negative and bear all the hallmarks of a scare-mongering campaign, which I believe will not go down well with the electorate. Day after day we hear ministers predicting dire consequences for Ireland if we reject the treaty. The utter lack of specifics as to the nature of these consequences will only lead the electorate to believe that they are being bullied into voting yes, which will result in a backlash no vote. If the treaty is as good as the yes campaign says it is then let them tell us exactly how it will benefit us. Let them outline in detail what effect the treaty will have on our lives. More importantly, tell us what the treaty will not do.  The referendum Commision’s website is particularly disappointing and very short on real information.

 

I do believe that Europe has been extremely good for Ireland and if this treaty does, as we are told, make the EU more effective and more efficient then I will be voting yes.

So my challenge to both sides is simply this…

…convince me.

 

God Debate

Quite a stirring God debate over at GUBU today.  Follow the comment thread down for the real sparks!

As always Sarah’s excellent site is well worth a visit.

http://www.sarahcarey.ie/2008/04/21/greetings-from-the-pope/

 

Unborn Twins’ Lives Threatened By Idiots

In the news this evening is a story about a couple, believed to be members of the Jehovah Witness Congregation, who wish to refuse what doctors say is a life-saving blood transfusion for their as yet unborn twin babies.  This, for me, is at the sharp end of the debate that humanity should be having about religion. 

The fact that the HSE has to go to the High Court this Thursday to seek the courts permission to administer vital medical attention to these children is an utter nonsense.

Let us suppose that these parents simply decided that, as an exercise in character building, the children should be left out of doors unattended on the first night of their lives.  No sane person would defend their right to do so.  However, take a similarly irresponsible act and shroud it in the respectability of religious belief and the entire mechanism of our justice system must leap into action to test the veracity of their lunatic ideas.

Surely, with the stroke of a legislative pen, the state can bring about a situation where parents who needlessly endanger their children in  this way can simply be pushed aside, while dedicated medical professionals get on with the job of saving lives.  Our creaking, understaffed health service has enough work to do every day without trotting off to the High Court to beg the courts leave to save the lives of these children.  I would think, too, that our overcrowded courts service could probably make better use of its time this Thursday.

Recently, in the context of the unfolding clerical abuse scandals, we saw evidence of religious officials who were conflicted by canon law versus civil law.  Thankfully we did not see a situation where there was any possibility of canon law taking precedence.  What we also did not see or hear, however, was a resounding declaration from our political leaders, who are charged with framing, enacting and overseeing the enforcement of our civil law, that the very idea of a conflict is a non-starter.  In the real world canon law should have all the significance and importance of the dress code at your local golf club bar.  The latter is often seen as hugely important inside the gates of the golf club, but drive out those gates and nobody does or should care.

The belief that they should not receive blood transfusion is hugely important to members of the Jehovah Witness Congregation.  However, outside of that community, when the lives of two children are at stake, we should treat this ideology with the contempt it deserves.

If I had my way these idiot parents would be charged with recklessly endangering the lives of their unborn children.

Update – Thursday 24th April 2008

The High Court today, as expected, granted the HSE an order allowing them to administer the life saving blood transfusion that these unborn twins will need.  There was never any doubt that this would be the case.  That the state had to bow to idiotic religious practice and waste valuable court time to assert the blatantly obvious is utter nonsense.  Isn’t democracy just fabulous?

 

Ireland’s Disappearing Rail Network

Here’s a interesting little map I came across at Wikipedia. 

The dismantling of a once extensive rail network in just 50 years is an absolute shame.  How much will we and future generations pay to put this vital national asset back in place?

 

Rogues Gallery

  

When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

PJ O’Rourke.                                                                                    

  

 

Please, Enough of this Madness – Update

Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has announced that he is to step down as leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach on Tuesday 6th May 2008 when he returns from Washington, where he will address the joint houses of congress.

Now the process of rehabilitating Ahern’s reputation will begin in earnest.  As I write Eamonn Ryan is saying on RTE 1 television that he does not believe that Bertie ever took a corrupt payment.  This can only conclude with roads all over north Dublin being closed for the dozens of people who will turn out for his state funeral in twenty or thirty years time a la Haughey.

Eoghan Harris is now on RTE comparing the hounding of Ahern to the treatment of Charles Stewart Parnell.  God help us.

Update – According to Michael Kennedy Bertie Ahern is responsible for the creation 4 million jobs in Ireland. When he came to office we had 2 million unemployed, now we have two million jobs, according to Mr. Kennedy.  Get your face on the telly and say something.  Say anything. Just be seen to be first out of the blocks to support the great leader.

 

Please, Enough of this Madness

What can you buy with eighty grand these days?  A decent 4×4, maybe.  Time was that you could buy a half decent house.  In 1993 eighty grand would buy two half decent houses on the North Circular Road!

I was thinking tonight about the Dunnes Stores t-shirt.  The one with the logo on the front – ‘I spent £2,000,000 and all I got was this lousy Taoiseach!’

Or, my own personal favourite, when one of the Baileys was boasting at the tribunal how he once paid £120,000 for a ram (male sheep variety, not hydraulic), and a wag in the audience was heard to comment, ‘Jaysus, he only paid thirty grand for Ray Burke!’

 So, eighty grand.

I have tried, unsuccessfully, to find out the exact remuneration for a glorious senator in our upper house.  (Okay, so I didn’t try that hard.)  It is I believe somewhere in the region of eighty grand a year.

Nice work if you can get it.

 It is remarkable, in a country which prides itself on its democracy, that it is in the gift of the country’s leader to bestow upon 11 individuals, positions in an essentially powerless legislative house along with all of the status and privilege that goes with it, plus a wage of eighty grand.  That’s over €1500 a week.

Nice work if you can get it.

So how do you decide who wins the coveted prize in An Taoiseach’s little Seanad lottery?  Well, it’s not exactly rocket science.  You need some help forming a government, so two each to the Greens and the PDs.  Then six Fianna Fáil lackeys makes ten.  There sits Bertie, one last eighty grand chip twirling between his grubby little fingers.  He allows himself a quiet smile, knowing that he has an ace up his sleeve that nobody suspects.  He tosses the eighty grand sop to his new best friend, Eoghan Harris.

I’ve just watched Harris, Eamonn Dunphy and John Waters debating Bertie on the Late Late Show.  I know that Harris is not a fool.  The man possesses a sharpe intellect and, having been at the heart of Irish political and historical debate for a couple of decades, he has an appreciation of where the land lies.

But how can we explain his blind, unflinching loyalty to Bertie Ahern?  Harris is a recent convert to the Fianna Fáil fold, so it’s not the blind loyalty to ‘the party’ that you see in other, more seasoned soldiers of destiny.  Many FF adherents are only in it for personal gain.  Fianna Fáil is the natural party of government and so is the most likely choice for those who believe in power for power’s sake.  The trappings of power are a powerful drug and a career of mouthing platitudes,which you no more believe in than you believe in the man in the moon, is a small price to pay for the power and the privilege and the wealth that goes with high political office.

Where does this leave Harris, then?

The day after his anointment he told me that he had considered turning it down.  I didn’t believe him then and I wouldn’t believe him now.  He said he asked for some time to think about it and was told that the Taoiseach wanted to announce it that day, (Friday, 3rd August, 2007), so he accepted.

Harris is no fool.  However, he and many others in Bertie’s camp seem to want to take the rest of us for fools.  Mary Coughlan, speaking on ‘The Week in Politics’, passed up five opportunities to say that she believed the evidence that Bertie has given to the Mahon Tribunal.  She then expects us to believe that she has full confidence in him.  One after the other they have lined up, senior and junior minister alike, to express full confidence in their leader without actually saying straight out that they believe him.

Harris told us on Friday night that Bertie was telling ‘the truth as he sees it.’ That one got a laugh from the audience.  It got a bellyful of laughs from me.  Pressed by an on form Dunphy on the meaning of ‘the truth as he sees it’, Harris goes on to explain that it simply means that Bertie does not believe that he has done anything wrong.

Perhaps the good senator could enlighten me further.  If Bertie does not believe that he has done anything wrong, if he genuinely believes that he has nothing to hide, why is he trotting off to the High Court tomorrow to launch a challenge to the Mahon Tribunal which could only be designed to frustrate and delay the work of the tribunal?  Why has the tribunal had to spend nearly three years dragging information out of him, like a dentist, kneeling on his patient’s chest, pulling at a reluctant eye tooth?

Dunphy tells us that the £138,000 that Ahern lodged to his bank account in 1994 was more than twice his salary.  I’m open to correction, but I believe that £138,000 was more than four times his salary.  Harris goes on to mention the hundreds of thousands he earned during the years in question, as if this easily explains it all.  Did he not eat for seven years or what?  Did he not support an estranged wife and two daughters?  Nothing that the Paymaster General could produce in terms of payslips and documentation could explain the vast sums of cash passing through Bertie’s hands during this time.

Gene Kerrigan’s recent article puts forward a strong case that Ahern has perjured himself at the tribunal.  Vincent Browne recently put forward strong argument that Ahern had perjured himself either at the tribunal or during the legal proceedings associated with his marriage seperation.

All of this, it seems, is of no consequence when it comes to judging the calibre of our elected leader.

While Senator Harris looks on adoringly my own head will hang in shame as this man represents my nation on Capitol Hill.

Bertie Ahern is not fit for the office of Taoiseach.  He is not fit even for the office of leader of Fianna Fáil, and recently the bar in that department has not been set too high.  How long more must this farce go on?  John Waters thinks he will be gone within weeks while Harris believes he will lead Fianna Fáil and the country for as long as he wants to.  Let us hope that it is the former.

 

Ahern up Shit Creek, expect resignation any year now.

Many commentators have this week spoken of how Bertie Ahern’s former secretary, Grainne Carruth, has been hung out to dry at the Mahon Tribunal. How a lowly, low paid minion has been abandoned before the howling, snarling hound that is Tribunal counsel.

However, if we look at the evidence she has given this week a different story becomes clear. A story of someone still mired in the Drumcondra Mafia, someone who, perhaps out of a misplaced sense of loyalty, is prepared to take the most extraordinary risks to remain loyal to her former boss. This is not Frank Dunlop cracking under Mr. Justice Flood’s steely glare and coming in next day singing like a canary.

On Wednesday Ms. Carruth told the tribunal that she had never handled Sterling when making lodgements to Ahern’s accounts at the Permanent TSB branch in Drumcondra. She also said that she only ever handled two passbooks when making these lodgements, those passbooks being for accounts in the names of Ahern’s two daughters.

On Thursday, having been presented with contradictory evidence by Tribunal counsel, Ms. Carruth then accepted that ‘on the balance of probability’ that she had indeed handled Sterling cash for Mr. Ahern and that she had indeed lodged money on his behalf to three PTSB accounts. Now, having been presented with this incontrovertible evidence, Ms. Carruth still refuses to admit to the obvious truth of how things actually happened. She simply says that because it is there in black and white that she must then accept it. This is far from being the same as giving straight, honest evidence under oath.

Grainne Carruth consulted with one of Bertie Ahern’s legal representatives in St. Luke’s before giving initial evidence to the tribunal in private. This smacks of a previous Team Ahern tactic of asking the AIB what they had told the tribunal before Bertie was to give evidence

Also this morning I hear one of Bertie’s champions whining that ‘…it’s only about money, nobody has died here, it’s not China we’re dealing with…’ Well if the whiter than white knights in Fianna Fáil don’t mind I’ll set my standards a little higher than those of China, thank you very much.

 

An Easter Message.

e·van·ge·lise

1. to preach the gospel to.

2. to convert to Christianity.

Gerry Thornley observed, after Ireland’s defeat by Wales recently, that Eddie O’Sullivan seemed offended that the Welsh had the cheek to score tries off Irish turnover ball, ‘as if this was somehow cheating’. This despite the fact that Ireland had scored a good couple of tries against Scotland a fortnight earlier from Scottish turnover ball.

John Gray, writing in the Irish Times yesterday, rails against what he terms ‘evangelical atheists’ and their campaigns against organised religion. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Philip Pullman appear to be Gray’s least favourite of these campaigners with their hundreds of thousands selling books, The God Delusion, God is Not Great and Northern Lights, the latter made as a movie titled The Golden Compass.

Gray finds great offence in the fact that these and others are engaged in proletising for atheism as if this was somehow a bit of an underhand tactic. Organised churches would never resort to these black arts, surely.

We learned this week that the Archbishop of Dublin has decided that every home in the Archdiocese will receive a visit from representatives of the Catholic Church sometime next year as part of a programme of evangelisation.

(I’m thinking of those sneaky Welsh again.)

I suppose I should lay my own cards on the table.

I don’t believe in God. In fact, I am more certain that God does not exist than I am of anything else that I believe. God is a fiction, Santa Claus for grown-ups. God and Gods were invented in human ignorance to explain that which we did not and could not understand. The leaders of organised churches then usurped God as a source of fantastic power, a power which they have maintained to this day.

So, no misunderstandings there, then.

This week we also learned that weekly attendance at religious services in Ireland has dropped from a high of 91% in 1981 to less than 50% today. You might think that this would reflect a similar fall in levels of religious belief, however the same nine yearly survey shows that over 80% of Irish people do still believe in God and do still believe in heaven.

Why?

Why, when we live in such an enlightened age, an age in which we are now, slowly learning the secrets of the origins of the universe in which we live, do so many otherwise rational and intelligent people put such faith in something which so completely defies the known physical laws of the universe? Something for which they can see no proof of any kind. Something which they must surely know that they believe simply because it is what they have been told by people in authority since childhood. As I say in my bio page on this site, this is something that completely baffles me. I can fully understand how children can be inculcated into religious belief and how that belief will stay with them into and through their teenage years. If one pays even the slightest of attention to modern scientific thought then one can only conclude that the basis for most organised religions is completely preposterous.

People will say that Christianity is a wonderful way to live ones life, and they are quite correct. I have two small children, one of whom is making first holy communion next month, and they are being raised to know and respect what most of us would consider to be Christian values. Christian values are essentially very decent, human values. However, I will ensure that my children are also exposed to the truth that lies outside of religion, the truth which science has been revealing to us ever since Gallileo and Newton and Einstein and Hubble, the truth of Darwinian evolution, which reveals the unbelievable arrogance of mankind in believing ourselves to be special, the arrogance of believing in our status as the chosen ones. I said recently that socialism was a wonderful way to order human society but it didn’t and couldn’t work. I doubt that many readers of this page are clamouring for the establishment of a socialist republic along the lines of the USSR or the Peoples Republic of China. Similarly, while Christian values are a valuable tool in the ordering of society those of a zealous religious mind are I find often very intolerant of any opposing view and are therefore wholly unsuited to positions of authority and influence.

Yes there are many, many good and decent people within organised churches and they do many wonderful things, but the doing of good acts is not confined to those with faith, and without faith good people would still be good people and would still act for the betterment of human society. Human goodness does not stem from religious faith.

Islam, we are constantly told is a religion of peace, a religion where everyone is treated with decency and respect and yet wherever Islam is practised we find the most despicable intolerance and inequality and discrimination. The treatment of women within most Islamic societies is nothing short of barbaric. Being gay in most western societies is difficult enough but is a picnic compared to homosexuality in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia. When do the leaders of Islam ever deafen us with their condemnation and their disowning of those who commit unspeakable acts in the name of Islam? How deafening was the silence here in Ireland when Catholic priest were raping and buggering children in their care? The good and decent people in the church who knew of these acts were shamefully silent because of the power invested in the institution of the church by ordinary lay people. Even now the disgust at what was done by Michael Woods in protecting the assets of the church before considering the rights of victims is unseen and unheard.

So, my Easter message to you this weekend is this. If you live in Dublin, when the man from the church calls to your door in 2009, take him gently by the hand, offer him a cup of tea and do some evangelising of your own. Give him a copy of Professor Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale or The Blind Watchmaker; read him a few passages from The Fabric Of The Cosmos, by Brian Greene; tell him about the reaction of the church authorities in medieval Italy when Copernicus presented his helio-centric view of the world, probably the most significant scientific discovery in human history, and then ask him to come back in 2010 so you can see if he is still a Christian. If he is then he is an idiot.

Happy Easter.

PS. None of the above precludes me from believing that a large bunny rabbit is going to leave a delicious chocolate egg at the end of my bed tonight. In our house he comes down the chimney, just like Santa Claus.