Comments

Fifty and counting — 11 Comments

  1. I will indeed [early and often].  I can’t say yet who I will be voting for, but I can say with absolute certainty who I will not be voting for.

  2. Read your headline and assumed you were on about the printing of Irish Euro’s which is pissing the krauts off big time and is being widely reported in Greece and Portugal. In 50 days we might just see the collapse of the Euro and possibly the EU itself, fingers crossed.

  3. Is there noone in government that you can believe in?  Is there noone who is going to be running that you trust to do a good job?  It seems a sad state of affairs that there is no one person that you believe can help get Ireland out of its troubles.  Over here I’m glad to say there are some  people in our government who I’m happy to have there.  I believe that the current regime running our country will be run out of office one day soon and I’m happy to have that opposition to vote for.  Where is your opposition party?  All I hear is how bad Biffo is and how bad Bertie was.  Who is it that needs to replace them?  Where are the good guys?

  4. I wish you (and many others) would vote for my old friend Gearoid but I guess that ain’t going to happen. Hows about giving Labour a shot at it ?

  5. Bill – Printing currency is about the only option we have left.  I’m all for it if it pisses off Europe.  In fact I’ll back anything that pisses off Europe.

    Brianf – My cynicism is born of years of experience of our political parties.  They are all pretty much the same flavour behind the rhetoric.  Fine Gael are almost indistinguishable from Fianna Fail and Labour aren’t far behind.  Where the difference really lies is in the levels of corruption and cronyism.  Fianna Fail are head and shoulders above the others with their nudge-and-a-wink style of operating.My party of preference [purely by elimination] would be Labour, but they need to do a lot of hard work on their manifesto.  At the end of the day, I can see most of my votes going to the independents.  What is really wrong with Irish politics is not so much the parties as the whole electoral system.  It just DOES NOT WORK.

    TT – Gearoid?  As in McAdams?  I can see his party doing extremely well out of this mess, though they will never come anywhere near the others.  As for Labour – see above.

    Ranty – I see us more as just victims of similar highly corrupt political systems.  You seem to have your finger rightly on the Irish pulse anyway!

     

  6. Grandad,

    For you American visitors, I offer an economics lesson they won’t believe. In the nineties, our exports were booming thanks mostly to large American Corporations (mostly IT and Pharmaceutical), that had made Ireland their European headquarters. So, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Pfizer Corp, and a load of others, took jobs from the States and put them here because they had 10-12% corporation tax, a young educated , english speaking population to choose from and it gave them ready access into the EU market without levies or import taxes.

    We were flying, and then Fianna Fail, began it’s 13 year rampage. Land and housing were cheap back then and coupled with the European Market offering our banks easy credit at 1%, the borrowing and development began. The banks borrowed cheap, gave out to any hair brained scheme that signed on the dotted line, the Gov. cheer-led it all, what with huge taxes coming in, inflation went out through the roof as Dublin became the joint most expensive Capital in Europe, and the “Laughing Hyena” took off. But the money fueling it came from Euro Banks, speculating German, French and British deposited savings money with a view to turning a profit for their investors.

    When the whole sorry house-of-cards came down, (as it had to – think Wall St 1929), our Governemnt, the very fuckers we voted to look after us, decided that the laws of Capitalism itself had to be discarded. The idea that you win some, you lose some, didn’t apply to the ‘quality’ people who invested to make a buck out of Ireland. Instead, they agreed to saddle the ordinary citizen with the debts of the banks and promised that the very people who had made nothing out of the ‘hyena’ years, would pay off any losses the speculators seemed to have made. In return, the re-imbursed speculators reckoned that anyone that stupid, would be a bad bet for future investments.

    I venture to suggest that if we had, “A sacred right to bear arms”, there would be blood on the streets by now.

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