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.

 

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.

 

 

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?

 

‘The accumulation of excessive wealth is a deadly sin’, said Pope Benedict XVI from his gilded palace.

 

Corruption Matters.

A Saturday evening in February.

Drimnagh, Dublin 12.

At about 6.30pm two men are returning home from a day’s work.  They stop at the local take-away, get some food and then pop into the off-licence to purchase a few beers to enjoy with their burgers and chips.  Just two ordinary working guys.  They could be Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian or even Irish.  These guys happened to be Polish.  Twenty nine year old, Pawel Kalite and his friend Marius Szwajkos, just 27, were two decent, hard working young men.  They were described on radio by their landlord this week as ‘dream tenants’.  For Pawel and Marius this was a pretty ordinary Saturday evening in their new life here in Ireland.  Pretty ordinary, that is, until they bumped into the vicious, savage thugs who killed them. 

Maybe they did physically bump into them.  Maybe they had words with their killers, having refused to give them the beers they had just bought with their hard earned Euros.  We don’t yet know exactly what happened last Saturday evening.  We may never know, but what we do know is that two innocent men were savagely beaten and killed in broad daylight outside a busy shopping parade in Dublin 12.

 Bertie Ahern, coincidentally, was in Poland this week.  Yesterday he told Polish Prime Minister, Donald Tusk, that Irish people were shocked and saddened by the killings.  He also said that, thankfully, this was an isolated incident.

Hmmm…..

I suppose if he means that it doesn’t often happen that two Polish friends are murdered on Benbulbin Road on an other wise unremarkable Saturday evening in February, well yes, it is an isolated incident.  We know, though, that he doesn’t mean that.  He is spinning.  Take a piece of spin (this particular piece of spin tells us that there is not a problem with violent crime among young men) and wrap it carefully in an expression of sympathy on the death of two innocent young men and it slides down like Ben & Jerry’s.

Bertie Ahern, evidently, doesn’t read the newspapers.  He doesn’t listen to the radio or watch the TV news.  There is no problem with violent crime against the person among young, alcohol and/or drug fuelled men.

 Get it?

We know different, however.

What we don’t  know is why.

The reasons why are many and complex.  Irish society has undergone a radical change in the last ten years.  Perenting has become much less hands on as couples work two jobs to pay for our new decadent lifestyle.  We have seen a certain Americanisation of youth culture, taking them closer to Boston than Berlin.  As the wealth of the nation has increased hugely those left behind feel a great sense of injustice and disconnection.

But let me add another possible cause – Bertie.

Not just Bertie on his own, mind you.  We can, and do, blame Bertie for many things, but fingering him alone for the breakdown in the fabric of society might be just a bit too much.  So let’s throw in Biffo Cowen with him, and Micháel Martin and Martin ‘Anti-Midas’ Cullen and Dermot Ahearne and the Green Party and Eoghan ‘What’s the fucking point of power if it’s not used’ Harris, and don’t forget the mighty midget himself, Willie O’Dea.  God almighty, the list is endless, so I’ll end it there. (Charlie, Ray, Liam, George, Baileys, Lowry etc, ad nauseum….)

When I was a kid the sight of authority when I was up to no good put the fear of God into me.  Gardai, teachers, football coaches and parents.  Basically all grown ups.  Even older brothers.  These were all authority figures in my young life.  For society as a whole politicians are authority figures.  They make the rules that the rest of us have to live by.  They occupy positions of extreme privilege. The higher they soar the more extraordinary the privilege.  When did you last glance to one side in the M50 chaos and see the Minister for Transport fuming in a murderous rage behind the wheel of the family Toyota.  Never.  These people don’t do traffic jams.  I can handle that.  Ministers and Taoisigh are very important people.  If they get whisked around in the rear of a Merc I’ll still sleep at night.  If they get paid ridiculous amounts of money I’m fine with that, too.

However, if they preach about probity and honesty, if they make pious, sanctimonious speeches condemning the wrongdoings of their predecessors and are then revealed to have their porcine snouts in the same filthy trough, then I have a problem.  Over the last ten years or so we have seen a litany of politicians, from lowly county councillors to Taoisigh revealed as being corrupt.  We saw the great and the good queueing up to defend Charles Haughey as the layers of veneer were being slowly stripped from his carefully constructed public servant persona.  Only when it became blindingly obvious, only when the allegations acquired the status of fact, did his fellow Fianna Fail travellers desert Haughey and  cluck their tongues and stroke their beards and determine that it must never happen again.  They watched Ray Burke draw his line in the sand and howled about a  good man being hounded out of office, only to scurry for cover when Burke was jailed for corruption.  Now they stand ‘four square’ behind Bertie, as we heard this week.  The Mahon tribunal is only a witch hunt.  The tribunal, its counsel, Fine Gael, Labour and the Irish Times are all involved in an orchestrated campaign to do down the greatest Taoiseagh this great little nation has ever seen. 

Bertie’s corruption will be proven, eventually.  Fianna Fail will distance themselves from him and then will rewrite history and re-proclaim him a great patriot.

Our young generations will look on as all of this happens, as they watched the revelations about Burke and Lawlor and Haughey and Bailey and Lowry.  As they watched the unveiling of the unpunished, massive dirt tax fraud at AIB. As they watched the extraordinary behaviour of senior Gardai in Donegal.  They will  not feel the acid drip of cynicism slowly wearing away their respect for authority.  If you are 16 years old and confused and vulnerable you look to authority to give you guidance.  If your parents don’t provide it you look further afield.

The cops are all bent.

The politicians are all on the make.

The church is full of pervs.

And amid all of this no one is being punished for any wrongdoing.  The only ones in prison are the poor and the addicted.

So when an innocent young Polish man bumps into your friend, you run home, get a screwdriver and drive it into his skull.

 

Show me your friends…..and I will tell you who you are.

Crewser, Patron of the Farce.

 

Fundamentals, what fun.

Noun

1.

fundamentals – principles from which other truths can be derived

 We have been hearing a lot about fundamentals recently from Brian Cowen.  It seems that our minister for finance is unable to pass comment on the Irish economy without telling us how important it is to get the fundamentals right, before going on to tell us that the fundamentals of the Irish economy are sound.

Financial markets throughout the world are in turmoil, none more so than our own stock exchange. The sub-prime lending crisis is shaking the very foundations of some of the worlds largest financial institutions.  Across the Atlantic the US economy teeters on the brink of recession, and yet, Cowen tells us that we have nothing to fear as our fundamentals are sound.  The old truism that when America sneezes the rest of the world catches cold is no longer true.

The housing market in Ireland has been in steady decline for 12 months, the numbers employed in house-building, one of the largest employment sectors in the state, are about to fall significantly, and yet, we need not worry, the fundamentals are sound.

 I am not an economist (like you hadn’t guessed!), therefore I take a rather simplistic view of the Irish economy.  I remember the 1980s.  Things were drastic.  Unemployment was huge.  Emigration drained over 300,000 of our finest  people, most of them in the prime of their lives, away to America, Australia, Britain and elsewhere.  That was about 8.5% of the total population.  In Britain that equates to over 5 million people! Drastic times indeed.  In the last 15 years or so things have turned around dramatically.  Things have never been better for most of the population.  Anyone who is working has more money in their pocket than they had 15 years ago.  This gives us choices we never had before and we have taken to it with absolute glee.

I grew up in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, and so it seems to me that the Celtic Tiger’s arrival coincided with the arrival of Intel as the IDA’s poster boy for overseas investment (a position it recently seems to have ceded to Google).  Suddenly we were all working in IT or electronics of computer chip manufacture.  Massive campuses sprung up hither and yon housing Microsoft, Dell, Symantec et al, churning out graduate level jobs by the thousand.  Unemployment tumbled.  Tax revenues rocketed.  Fianna Fail got into power three times by returning the stringent, belt tightening taxes of the 80s to the workers of the 90s.  These workers went out and spent this money in unprecedented fits of consumerism.  This caused inflation and the unions screamed for more and bigger pay rises to keep pace with that inflation.  The pay rises duly arrived (benchmarking anyone?), and were splurged in more fits of consumerism.  This self propelled cycle continued for  more than a decade with everyone believing that the good times would never, could never, end.

2008.  Here we are.  What about those fundamentals. 

We are a country with almost no indigenous industry.  We import almost every consumer good imaginable.  Ireland, ‘the food island,’ imports massive amounts of food every year.  Our full employment level sits at the mercy of huge multi-national corporations who, understandably, have no sense of place in relation to Ireland, no emotional, national ties to this island.  As soon as the Poles or the Hungarians or the Indians or Malaysians can offer an equally qualified workforce and a suitable tax environment these companies will be off ‘like a rat out of an aqueduct,’ as Brian of Nazareth’s mother once said. Who could blame them.  Intel very nearly went to Scotland all those years ago and they would go there tomorrow if the price was right.

Maybe I’m naive.  Maybe I’m just uneducated in economics, but I don’t see any sound fundamentals in subcontracting the future of the country to the Intels and Googles of this world.  I don’t feel comfortable about our economy being so vulnerable to something as simple as a reduction in corporation tax in Latvia or Romania or wherever.  those of you more erudite in these matters might explain it to me.

 

Maaamee, how I love ya!! My dear auld Mammy

Average life expectancy in Ireland is currently about 78 years. This is not as good as Japan where an infant born in 2005 can expect, all things being equal, to live to the ripe old age of 81. However, a child born in Ireland in 2005 can expect to live over twice as long as a child born in Zimbabwe, where life expectancy has now dropped to just 33. Swaziland ranks lowest of all at just over 31 years.

All of this information came to light when I was thinking about what to write today. I was going to do a tongue in cheek piece about all of the dead bodies around Dublin Castle this last 10 years or so. Isn’t it odd that every time the trbunal or a witness unearths the identity of someone who could clear up his whole sorry mess……you guessed it.

They turn up dead.

(Has Jessica Fletcher been hanging around the Castle recently?)

This was supposed to be a post about Bertie and the wonderful gift he recieved from his dear old mammy, But after reading about the decimation of Zimbabwe in life expectancy terms by that animal, Mugabe, I don’t really have the heart for it.

I’m sick of Bertie and his lies. I’m sick of his grubby money. I’m sick of the explanations which rank lower than ‘the dog ate my homework…’ I’m sick of the guy who can explain everything being, unfortunately, inconveniently dead. I’m sick of banks that don’t keep records or even count the wads of cash handed to them by finance ministers. I’m sick of the Green Party saying in May that Fianna Fáil are the devil incarnate before entering government with them in June. I’m sick of hearing that Bertie doesn’t care about money when all of the evidence says that there is no level to which he will not stoop if the price is right.

You might think that I’m sick of being taken for a fool, but you would be wrong.

I’m not all that sure that the Irish public has been taken for fools. We know that these leaches have been pilfering and lying and cheating for years. If we gave a shit about this then we would have been taken for a ride. However, if we gave a shit about any of this they would not still be there, most likely still pilfering and lying and cheating.

As I have said many times before, the beauty of democracy is that you actually do get the government you deserve.

 

I’ve moved in

Any posts  below this point were transfered from www.andrewlawlor.blogspot.com so the dates on the blogs may not correspond to the date of publication.