Hey Lord, don’t ask me questions…

Vincent Browne in cracking form, taking on Klaus Masuch of the ECB.

Notice Masuch’s reaction, it starts with a sort of sneer as if he could just ignore the irritating insect in front of him but then he gets more and more uncomfortable as Browne presses his point. Its just a shame that not one of the other journalists pushed any member of the Troika over Browne’s claims that we don’t owe need to pay unsecured bond holders and that the reason for paying them back is just to keep other European banks from getting into financial difficulties. Not to mention the fact that we shouldn’t be shoring up a now defunct bank.

The telling point from the past couple of years is the lack of any serious investigative journalism into what happened to our financial institutions and into why we have to accept what the Troika tell us to do. We have been told that we have to pay back a debt, most of which the Irish public did not incur, without any good reason. Our major media organisations have fallen in behind our political leaders in telling us that we have pay back money that we don’t have. Our journalists have been silenced, apart from Browne and Fintan O’Toole, and they have been marginalised as being eccentric or too left-wing to be listened to. There is a major story to be written about the ties that bind journalism with politics in this country, unfortunately that story will not be written by any of our journalists. If it is written at all, it will be written by the historians looking back at this gombeen nation.

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Home is where the expenses are

So a High Court Judge has ruled that Ivor should be awarded €17,000 in lost earnings. I wonder is that based on his Cork or Dublin homes? And how did the protesters who delivered a snake to his house know which one to go to?

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Bogey Men

So, we have an ex-Finance Minister and current Taoiseach (that’s Irish for incompetent buffoon) who claims that in accompanying Sean Fitzpatrick in 18 holes of golf and an 18 course dinner he never once discussed the malaise at Anglo-Irish bank. If you accept that barely believable premise then the question is – why the fuck didn’t he discuss the situation? Or more importantly, why didn’t he wrap a five-iron round Fitzy’s neck for breaking our whole economy? And nice to see Fitzy’s old friend Drumm backing him up.

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Get Up, Stand Up

Watching the hubris coming from the Peter Griffin press conference this evening has made me angrier than an All Black hooker accused of a headbutt. Its bad enough that he, Bertie and the previous inept idiots as Ministers for Finance ran a coach and four through our economy but now he has the audacity to say that his budget and his four-year plan must be passed before he will even think about seeking a mandate from the people.We should be the ones to decide what sort of budget we are going to suffer. Nothing that Griffin has done or said has been in the “national interest”, it’s all just to keep him and his party of nepotistic crooks in office.

Fianna Fail have treated us like dirt for too long now and its time we stood up and gave them a good kicking. They should be forced to go if they won’t do it voluntarily. As we seem to be heading back to the bad old days of the 80s, lets at least bring back the anger and energy that was evident in Toxteth and Notting Hill when Thatcher was destroying her country. For too long the citizens of this state have been passive victims of a Progressive Democrat/Fianna Fail philosophy that has just about destroyed everything good about our society. We need new political thinking in this country but that means we, as citizens, have to play an active part. Its time to reclaim what we’ve lost and if they won’t go gently into the good night maybe its time for an old fashioned riot…

If anyone can be bothered, Morgan Jones, is having a silent and peaceful protest outside the Dail at 12 noon on Thursday 25th. Personally, I would be inclined to bring a big stick and a bag of rocks but maybe we start silent and build up to something a bit stronger. As Shane Hegarty put it: Brian Cowen appears to be playing a political game of chicken. And we’re all passengers in the car.

Time to get moving folks…

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Banana Republic

Separated at birth?

Did Fianna Fail evolve from the Sinn Fein party of 1905? Are the Lenihan family an example of Survival of the Fittest at play in the political world or just some sort of horrific genetic mutation? Is Charles Haughey a Missing Link? These questions could have been answered this evening by Conor Lenihan, Minister for Pseudoscience, Irrationality and Superstition at the book launch of The Origin of Specious Nonsense, by his good friend and constituent, John J. May.

Alas, it emerged late last night that Lenihan has pulled out of the launch. Perhaps he’d had enough of dealing with the unevolved at the Fianna Fail “think”-in down in Galway at the weekend. This is a pity as I’m sure the intellectual heavyweight that is Lenihan would have had all the facts at hand (or opposable thumb) to destroy the non-scientific arguments put forward by May.

And in a startling attempt to show that the Neanderthals didn’t actually become extinct, our glorious leader might have turned up pissed on Morning Ireland today.  Of course, its our fault that we elect these primates. Maybe we’re not as evolved as we’d like to think.

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Slackbladder

Copyright Irish Examiner

General Melchett is at it again. The braying minister for Flooding, Inappropriate Building Schemes (FIBS) and taking Willie O’Dea’s place as government lackey doesn’t think we need an independent inquiry into last November’s floods that decimated large parts of Cork, Carlow and Kilkenny. He’s not convinced that “pointing the finger” is the best way to go even though an Oireachtas Committee report found a complete lack of leadership when it came to reacting to the floods.

Here’s a finger that can be pointed at the pretentious prat and the rest of his World War I type generals -

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Your Cheatin’ Heart

If you were in hospital, really sick, maybe terminal who would you trust to comfort you, perhaps help cure you or at least make things more bearable? How about these fine people, carrying round a 500 year old, desiccated heart?

Although I’m not sure if they’re coming to help or to hurry you on your way.

Now ordinarily the daily goings on of the superstitious would not bother me or cause me too much concern unless they were breaking the law or waking me up early on a Sunday. However, these scary looking oddbods have been getting getting a police escort since the non-beating heart arrived in Ireland.

Why is the state paying good money to guard a piece of Catholic mythology? Surely the church has enough funds to pay for a couple of bouncers for a few weeks? I’m assuming that the police were just guarding the relic and not affording it full blown diplomatic status cos that would be just plain silly. After all, its not as if the ex-organ can actually do anything, what with its previous owner being dead for half a millenium. For those of you who, however misguidedly, think that there is something to this mumbo-jumbo you can do a google search to find where the lifeless, bloodless husk will be making its next appearance. For those of you with a more realistic view of the world you might want to check this out tomorrow – Atheist Ireland AGM.

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The Brady Bunch

The increasingly irrelevant Catholic church still refuses to face up to its obligations and responsibilities for the litany of child sex abuse cases in Ireland. The putative head of the church in this country, Cardinal Sean Brady, has invoked the Nuremberg Defense in order to excuse his inaction in the case of Fr. Brendan Smyth in 1975.

However, the increasingly loud calls for Brady’s resignation miss the point. At the very least, Brady knew of criminal acts committed by Smyth and did not inform the police. This itself is a criminal offence. At the other end of the scale, there could even be a case made for conspiracy as Brady’s inaction may have facilitated Smyth in continuing to abuse children for almost twenty years up to 1994.

Brady should be in custody. The celice wearing Minister for Injustice, Xenophobia and Jail-for-all should be demanding that the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) take some action. We need justice. The children need justice.

The sooner we remove this cancerous church from any sort of control in our society the better. We should start with Brady and continue by removing control of our primary schools from this malevolent and pernicious organisation. Patrick supposedly removed the snakes from Ireland, unfortunately what he left in their place is a lot more slippery and dangerous.

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