Interested in maladministration. Estd. 2005
Anyone unfamiliar with the horrors done to women by Michael Neary at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda should read this article by Marie O’Connor in yesterday’s Sunday Independent.
The article exposes the rotten underbelly of how this country is ‘managed’. And don’t for a moment think that things are any different today, they’re not – Nothing has changed.
It was only a matter of time before the Irish banking sector was forced to make a move on the growing sub prime crisis.
The headline in this morning’s Irish Independent “Banking chiefs seek ‘dig-out’ from taxpayers” leaves us in no doubt as to who they think should pay to get them out of the mess.
Richie Boucher, the chief executive of Research Financial Services Ireland wants long term funding to the banks to be “provided domestically” by taxpayer’s.
Why domestically? Well, Boucher explains that it wouldn’t be prudent to be ‘overly reliant’ on the European Central Bank for borrowings.
What he really means, I suspect, is that the ECB would impose strict conditions and demand accountability for any rescue package whereas Irish politicians can be pressurised into handing over taxpayer’s money without the need for all that awkward repayment and accountability stuff.
This afternoon I received a return call from one of the members of the Passport Review Committee at the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The Committee recently decided to retain the special passport facility for Oireachtas members. This is an exclusive service provided by the Passport Office for politicians who are anxious to do favours for their constituents.
My question is simple: If the Committee, the Department, the Minister, every TD, every Senator and every political party is happy with this facility, if it is seen as adding to the efficiency of the passport office as stated in the Committee’s report – why isn’t the facility advertised in the department’s literature and posted on its website?
The Committee member said she would consult with her colleagues and get back to me within a few days.
If the politicians and civil servants genuinely believe that this service is needed then there should be no problem in telling every citizen of its existence.
If, as I believe, it is part of a huge network of ‘facilities’ provided to politicians to do favours for their constituents then the State will be anxious to minimise publicity.
The Department’s answer to my question will tell the tale.
A caller to Today with Pat Kenny asked if Dr. Neary was ever prosecuted for the horrors he committed on women in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital.
Of course Dr. Neary was never prosecuted, that sort of thing doesn’t happen in Ireland. Instead, he was given a €70,000 pension and sent on his way.
What do those women expect in a corrupt state – accountability, justice?
For a brief moment I was fooled by the headline – “Taoiseach to scrap his ‘Big Brother’ media monitoring unit.”
This is the special unit set up by Fianna Fail in 1997 to monitor the media and report back to ministers about what was being written and said about them on the airwaves. Pat Rabbitte got it about right:
“A Fianna Fail espionage unit funded by the taxpayer to monitor what its political opponents are saying about Fianna Fail.”
It’s the sort of operation that’s common in all corrupt states. Up until now I thought that there was only one such unit but apparently there’s one in every department – One for everyone in the audience as it were.
Now, as part of a cost-cutting exercise, the unit is to be privatised and not scrapped as the headlines suggests. Let’s try to figure out how this will save taxpayer’s money.
No civil servant will lose his job or be demoted in any manner whatsoever so no cost saving there. And if we are to judge from countless instances in the past the setting up and running costs of the new office will be enormous.
So, yet another layer of (very expensive) bureaucracy is being created in order to save money??
For about two weeks now I’ve been ringing the Department of Foreign Affairs to ask questions about the special passport facility for members of the Oireachtas.
So far I’ve received no answers. This morning I rang the General Secretary of the Department, Dermot Gallagher, but as usual he was at a meeting. Here’s a flavour of my conversation with one of his ‘protectors’.
Could you tell me when the meeting is due to end?
Early afternoon
Could you be more specific?
Early afternoon
Before one O’Clock?
Early afternoon
Will he be going to lunch?
I can only say early afternoon
I informed the ‘protector’ that I would continue to ring until contact was made and asked what time Mr. Gallagher started work in the morning.
What time does Mr. Gallagher start work in the morning?
That depends on his first meeting
He doesn’t have a set time for beginning work?
I didn’t say that
But you said it depends on his first meeting
It does
So he doesn’t have a set time for beginning work
I didn’t say that
Time for a cup of tea, I think
I see Vincent Browne’s magazine, Village, is to cease production. It was an excellent magazine with some very good analysis covering a wide range of areas.
I was surprised to learn that it hadn’t broken a single notable story since its launch in 2004. I was even more surprised to learn that businessman Michael Smith was a big investor in the project.
Smith did the country some great service in 1995 when his offer of a substantial reward for anyone coming forward with evidence of planning corruption led to the setting up of the Planning Tribunal. He is also a board member of Transparency International Ireland.
See here for Smith’s very interesting views on Browne and Village.
Only last Tuesday I wrote that the assurances given by Hugh Creegan of the National Roads Authority that motorists would not be charged extra by retailers for their toll cards had about as much credibility as a politician’s promise. Here’s what Creegan said;
“No, there won’t be any surcharging; they’ll just be paying the statuary toll charge and nothing else. While it may be technically possible it won’t happen in practice.”
Already, the vultures are circling. Vincent Jennings of the Convenience Stores and Newsagents Association provided the following pathetic excuse for the latest rip off of Irish consumers (The Last Word, Monday).
“We’re receiving less than 2.5 cents for the €3 transaction and you have to key it through, even or eight digits per registration, you have to be very sure that you hear the person correctly; that you transpose it correctly into the machine. All of that takes in excess of 30 seconds and it’s just not economic at 2.5 cents.”
We can take it that retailers are not being tortured into providing this service; we can take it that they sat down and did some hard bargaining with the operators before satisfying themselves that they were getting a good price for their services. We can, in other words, take it that the retailers were more than happy with the 2.5 cents they finally agreed to for every 30 second transaction.
What they are now doing is applying the Irish rip off charge. They can do this with impunity because there is no consumer protection in Ireland; the National Consumer Authority is a joke. They can do this because Irish people are submissive, they do not have the ability to get angry en masse.
It is fascinating to watch motorists smiling happily for the cameras as they enthusiastically endorse this latest government scam that will see motorists buy this stretch of road for the third or fourth time.
It is depressing to realise that Irish people have no idea of their political power. All motorists have to do is block the M50 until such time as the toll is abolished. I’d give it two or three days at most before our cowardly politicians submitted to the wishes of the people.
Copy to:
NRA
NCA
Convenience Stores and Newsagents Association
Every once in a while the Catholic Church comes out of hiding especially when it thinks it’s on a winner. The defeat of the Lisbon Treaty referendum is one such instance. For some time now the church has been whining about the downgrading of the Christian god by the EU. The Irish wing of the church is now suggesting that the referendum was rejected because good Irish Catholic’s are worried about this development.
I disagree, it’s more likely the referendum was rejected because people simply don’t trust either EU or domestic politician; neither do they like being treated as fools.
Cardinal Brady was preaching on the subject recently at the Humber School and Emer O’Kelly, as always, was quick to respond. Her article is worth reproducing in full.
Secularists have a right to maintain their ethos
Cardinal Brady is demanding the right to control the way of life of every citizen of Europe, says Emer O’Kelly
Sunday August 31 2008
SO CARDINAL Sean Brady still expects us to believe that the Catholic Church has no desire to interfere in the political process. The Church’s often-repeated mantra to that effect is about as objective and accurate as the mendacious and misleading statement that secularism is hostile to religion.
It can be argued that secularism and relativism, the Cardinal told the Humbert School last Sunday, “enjoy an uncritical acceptance which would never be accorded religious faith”.
First, the Cardinal is wrong about hostility. The only hostility in the relationship between religion and secularism is religion’s hostility to the demand for rational proof that is the basis of atheism. Religion is also hostile to liberal humanism, because its own doctrinaire authoritarianism won’t accept that people can be trusted to live by the tenets of their religion unless the civil code imposes them by law. The Cardinal spoke of “shared humanism”: that does not mean one religion imposing its beliefs on those unwilling to accept them.
Far from being hostile to religion, secularists are supremely indifferent to it. Their objection is to religious-based doctrines, laws, and customs being forced on the entire community in order to appease strident religious authorities who do not trust their adherents to live within the code of the faithful unless it is enforced by civil law.
Secularists have no objection to every Roman Catholic in Ireland, for example, spending each Sunday sprinkling broken glass on the sides of Croagh Patrick and then climbing the mountain on their knees.
Secularists have no objection to Roman Catholics burning condoms and packets of contraceptive pills in a merry bonfire to defend the Church’s loathing of artificial contraception and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. They just don’t want to subject themselves to the danger of STDs or to people the earth with unwanted children.Secularists have no objection to Roman Catholic homosexuals living celibate lives, their natural instincts held in abeyance by prayer and fasting according to the Church’s teaching. But they object strongly to laws being passed by their parliaments which force secular gay men and women to live by those teachings.
Second, the Cardinal was impertinent to Irish and other European citizens when he asked if the debate in the European Union was fair or representative of the views and convictions of the majority of the people here in Ireland. And he blamed the media for being dominated by a secular view hostile to or disposed to relegate the value of religion.
Secularists never deny the value of religion to those who believe in it; they merely do not want its teachings to dominate their own lives. And the Cardinal is in dangerous territory because he implies that only religious values can ensure an ethical society. In this, of course, he is at one with President George W Bush, who is on record as saying that atheists are “not citizens”, because to be a citizen you have be at one with god.
“Is it possible,” the Cardinal asked, “to agree that there are objective values for which we should have serious regard because of their implications for the good of society?”
Objective by whose standards, in what era?Half a century ago, the objective values for which the Irish hierarchy had serious regard included obstructing a health service designed to protect the lives of mothers and their children: communism by another name, the Church howled. And the poor and their babies died in droves. Objectivity can be a very subjective matter.
“Successive decisions (in Europe) which have undermined the family based on marriage, the right to life from the moment of conception to natural death, the sacredness of the Sabbath, the right of Christian institutions to maintain and promote their ethos, including schools, these and other decisions have made it more difficult for committed Christians to maintain their instinctive commitment to the European project,” Cardinal Brady said.
That doesn’t sound like a man and an organisation that does not wish to control a legislature, national or international. Cardinal Brady is comprehensively demanding the right to control the way of life of every citizen in every European country, whether Christian or not, much less Roman Catholic.
It does not seem to have occurred to the Cardinal before he made his sweepingly arrogant demand that those of no religion also have a right to maintain their ethos.
But there are no secular State schools in Ireland, not one, and Dr Brady and his cohorts are determined to keep it that way. And the Church (despite what some people believe) is so dominant that it has managed to brainwash the public (even some secularists) into believing that a multi-denominational or inter-denominational school is a secular school and should be quite acceptable to those who wish their children to be raised with a secular humanist ethos.
Without respect for “Christian memory and soul”, the Cardinal claimed, difficulties will emerge not only in economic terms but in terms of social cohesion and the continued growth of a “dangerous individualism” that does not care about God … with continuing difficulties for the European project. So much for “instinctive commitment” to the project, which was another of his phrases.
Instinct is vague, just like religious faith: an irrational comfort zone. The European project, as Dr Brady calls it, is a very defined political entity, and it is based on political reality, not on instinct. It’s not a woolly feelgood factor which can be abandoned if the going becomes intellectually or politically rigorous. It involves a defined common core of political values in which all citizens can share, not just those of a given faith, or all religious faiths.
The kind of “instinctive commitment” the Cardinal seems to be talking about is a blithe membership club where each member can make their own rules, the devil (if you’ll forgive the phrase) taking the hindmost. Except clubs don’t work that way; certainly the Roman Catholic Church club does not. You’re in and you keep the rules, or you get out. The Cardinal should understand that.
You can’t keep only the rules that suit you.It was what Wolfe Tone meant when he spoke of Republicanism: it could unite Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter, he said. He didn’t mean that it would incorporate all of their beliefs; what it would do was separate itself entirely from religious belief, so that clashing doctrines of transubstantiation, Eucharist, biblical interpretations and the other elements of Christianity which had given people the excuse to murder each other for generations in the name of various denominational gods, could move forward in political brotherhood.
And they could still go to church, chapel, or meeting house on Sunday, each in their own way.
Two hundred-odd years later, nothing has changed. Nobody is asking the Cardinal’s flock, or the Archbishop of Canterbury’s flock, or anybody else’s flock, to deny their beliefs or abandon a way of life which reflects them.They are just asked to respect the beliefs of others, and accept the existence of an ethical code which may not include Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus Christ.
Secularists, even atheistic secularists, are not the anti-Christ. Most of them live their lives as well or as badly as fervent Christians. They pay their taxes, they don’t kill other people, and they don’t molest children. They probably don’t even spit on the street, much less on each other. They keep the law and behave decently because they believe that humanity is the highest form of life. And they object very strongly to being told that they are slavering monsters of depravity because they don’t believe in a supernatural being.
Michael O’Regan, parliamentary correspondent with the Irish Times, had some very odd things to say about the result of the (First) Lisbon Treaty Referendum (Today with Pat Kenny, Friday).
“The No vote was a rather peculiar vote…essentially, it wasn’t a vote against the detail of the Lisbon Treaty, it was a No vote of a slightly schizophrenic nature and it was also very marginal, a very, very narrow victory.”
A 53 to 47 per cent No vote is a ‘very, very narrow victory’?
Anyway, being described as ‘slightly schizophrenic’ prompted me to look up the medical meaning of the condition.
“A psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental disorder characterized by abnormalities in the perception or expression of reality. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganized speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction.”
Seems to me like a very accurate description of your typical Irish politician and judging from his remarks it looks like O’Regan has been infected.