Mary Harney: Help the rich; attack the poor

The sentiments expressed in this letter are strong but very true.

Let Harney loose on Seanie Fitz

The news that former Anglo boss Sean FitzPatrick gets to ‘rub by’ on €3.6m of his wife’s money is sickening (Irish Independent, July 13), but not as sickening as what we are doing to our disabled people.

Even the process of bankruptcy in Ireland is rigged to suit the connected.

In normal, non-corrupt countries, people who borrow vast sums of money and then setting aside some of it in the wife’s or their children’s name, cannot expect to get away with it.

Here, they are celebrated as heroes who ‘beat’ the system.

The fact that the ‘system’ is in reality people with Down Syndrome depending on respite care so that their parents can receive much-needed time to recharge their batteries is, of course, an inconvenient fact in the land of sleeveens.

Health Minister Mary Harney’s reaction to the news that the disabled don’t want to go voluntarily and quietly into a corner and suffer in silence, has been greeted with the age-old trick of the tyrant — bully the victim by remote control.

This technique has been perfected by the crime gangs of Limerick who are well known for getting small-time associates to kill on their behalf, and thereby claim that their hands are clean of blood.

In Ms Harney’s case, she is threatening the managers of disability services that if they don’t dump on the people to whom they have a care obligation, they they will suffer her wrath.

It’s a real pity that we don’t have the macho Ms Harney presiding over the Commercial Courts.

If the ever-so-tough (when dealing with the vulnerable) Ms Harney were to tell the judges they must strip every cent from all members of miscreants’ families, there would be no need to make the old, the sick and the disabled pay for her stupidity, and that of her friend Sean FitzPatrick during the Celtic bubble.

Declan Doyle
Lisdowney, Co Kilkenny
Irish Independent