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Orders from Berlin — 23 Comments

  1. Hah!  I remember what that was first released.  And the dream could soon be reality.  One lives in hope.

  2. “The sooner that fucking EU edifice collapses, the better.”


    Totally agree. We might as well start calling the country “Little Deutschland,”

  3. Ahem with my Mystic Meg hat on…
    I predict the ‘walls come tumbling down’ when ‘the lights go out’ this November.
     

  4. About bloody time the legal and medical professions got a kicking – the robbing bastards 

    Thank God the EU are going to force us to reform those sectors Irish politicians seem incapable of doing it themselves

    Reich On Europe, Reich on 

  5. I reckon y’all should have stuck with the British Commonwealth way back in ’49. And 1949 was a good year.

  6. Mossy & Bill – Things are looking up.  The Euro is just about fucked!

    TT – Brussels is where the parliament is.  Berlin is where the power is.  And you’re right about the Commonwealth.  At least the Brits are governed by people who speak the same language.

    Dessiegee – Arse lick!

  7. At least the Brits are governed by people who speak the same language.

    You could have fooled me there Grandad.  We have a PM who talks some language that emanates straight out of his arse, a Chancellor who lives in cloud cuckoo land and makes cuckoo noises and a foreign secretary that makes nothing but unintelligible burbles.  We have a deputy PM that no-one listens to anyway and an Energy and Climate Change secretary that speaks with a forked tongue.

  8. They have us by the short and curleys, the balls come next. When it really gets shite and the fuckers have everything from us they will set up blood extraction points around the country.
    This will come around the time they introduce a breathing tax with a carbon tax for when you exhale.
    We will all have face mounted carbon emissions monitors which we will have to pay for.
    http://tstock.pottsgrove.wikispaces.net/file/view/Big_brother_is_watching_you.jpg/85412213/Big_brother_is_watching_you.jpg

  9. Thank you for the link, Grandad.  I wasn’t sure why I was suddenly getting visits from strange and exotic places.  I can’t imagine most of them often encounter Anglican clergy!

    Now, we’ll have to go over that stuff again about loving our neighbours . . . 

  10. Sean – I had a funny idea someone was going to haul me up on that one.  But you must admit the shite your lot talk is a bit more comprehensible than the shite that comes out of Brussels?

    Slab – I think I commented somewhere before that we would have to pay for the bullet at our own executions.

    Ian – My pleasure.  It’s about time some of my lot met some culture.

     

  11. Sorry, but what is wrong with the ‘page 9’ material.  The legal and medical professions in Ireland are a disgrace … the sooner the jackboots sort them out, the better!
    And so many businesses in Ireland have died because of inflated rentals on retail outlets.
    Finally, one more time … who is ultimately better for the Irish consumer and Irish suppliers?  Lidl or Tesco?  Discuss
    Sorry, GD, we can’t govern ourselves, and that’s the truth of it ….
     
     

  12. TonyS – Welcome!  We were led to understand that any interference in our affairs was to be strictly financial in order that we could be seen to be taking the correct path.  Meddling in our taxes, expenditure and the like is therefore “reasonable” [under the terms of the bailout].  However for the life of me I cannot see what the legal and medical professions have to do with our ability to repay loans.  I can’t comment on Lidl v Tesco as I have never been in a Lidl store.

    Finally, the point about not being able to govern ourselves – that is true,  HOWEVER, independence should mean that we have the right to select who fucks up our country.  We have the ballot box to respond, as we did to Fianna Fail.  We have no comeback whatsoever to those bastards in Brussels.  They are quite literally untouchable.

  13. OK, I understand your point and agree wholeheartedly on the importance of sovereignty, but …

    You can probably guess from the flag as to where I live now … and what I find is that here there’s an eminently affordable medical and dental system. And it doesn’t seem to be that difficult to organize … In addition the equivalent of medical consultants are not interested in milking the system the way their counterparts in Ireland are, nor would they be allowed to get away with it.
     
    Similarly the legal profession – we are actually worse than the Americans in how much the legal profession ‘earns’ ….. and it has always been that way.  The fact is, in Ireland, the legal and medical professions are still seen as the ultimate careers, whereas in other countries this is no longer the case

    I wish I could conclude differently, but I honestly think that we as yet don’t have a mature political system and as such can’t be trusted to run our own affairs.

    (On Lidl, the reason I made this point is that, as far as I could judge when I lived in Ireland, the amount of Irish produce in Lidl far exceeded that of stores such as Tesco … just saying ….)

  14. TonyS – I could not agree more that our system needs more than an overhaul.  It needs rebuilding from the ground up.  We should start by overhauling the constitution, and then the entire legal system [most of which dates back pre-independence].  Our health service is a sick [sic] joke and the way we treat the elderly and the disabled is verging on the criminal.  However, it should be up to us to sort this out and not some bureaucrat in Brussels.  That is, after all the very essence of an independent nation.  With freedom comes responsibility.

  15. We both agree essentially but the fact is we do not have the political maturity (yet) to run our own affairs

    1. The legal system will remain unchanged.  Too many vested interests …. I may be slightly incorrect here, but I recall hearing that four of the top ten Irish companies in terms of income are law firms.  Also, too many of our TDs are lawyers.  I know the law is an ass wherever you go, but we Irish seem to have worked out an extra level of ‘kickback” (witness the tribunals etc)

    2. Our political system is immature. There has never been a proper choice between left and right.  We have never decided whether the country is closer to Boston or Berlin … instead we tried to ape the Americans (resulting in our own little financial crisis) while milking Berlin (the EU) for all it was worth.  Now both have come back to bite us, and it’s too late now.

    3. My reading of the healthcare fiasco is again one of essential fecklessness and ‘me fein’ attitudes, rather than a lack of will on the part of the government.  We don’t have the maturity to run a proper bureaucracy.  I remember the absurd arguments put forward very skillfully by the medical consultants when there seemed to be a genuine will on the part of our politicians to do something about the health service, and money available to do this.  Just one example of fecklessness ….

    Perhaps now, with the emergence of the latest clerical abuse scandals and the ‘line in the sand’ drawn by Enda Kenny recently, we will begin to see the emergence of a truly mature system, but I’m not holding my breath.  

  16. Hi Grandad, I would like to pick up on a couple of points TonyS makes if that’s OK with you.
    First he says:
    I honestly think that we as yet don’t have a mature political system and as such can’t be trusted to run our own affairs.
    That may be so as you’ve only had around 90 odd years to get yourselves sorted out with a descent govmint, whereas we in the UK have had centuries and still haven’t got it right.  However, surrendering what you have got to a bunch of socialist nutjobs in Brussels ain’t going to help none, and besides the EU is an even younger organisation than Dáil Éireann in its present form. It is a great great pity that the EU wasn’t still born!!
    In his second post he states:
    Now both have come back to bite us, and it’s too late now.
    That’s the wrong attitude!  Many people I speak to about the festering EU sore respond with “Yes, I know, but what can we do about it?”  Defeatism is not an Irish or British trait.  There is plenty we can do about it.  There are a lot more of us than there are of them!

     

  17. Apologies GD, for using this forum to reply to Sean, but here goes:

    1. “whereas we in the UK have had centuries and still haven’t got it right”

    One never gets ‘it’ completely right – to paraphrase one of your most eminent politicians: ‘democracy is a pretty bad system of government, until you look at the alternatives (see if you know who it is before Googling it).  The UK has had a basic left/right choice for almost 100 years now, and before that you had the Liberals/Tories and before that the Whigs/Tories.  It’s true when you say that the UK (and many other democracies) has had a considerable headstart on Ireland in historical terms, but many younger democracies than Ireland’s have overcome significant challenges to achieve a status that is far more mature than ours.

     2. “a bunch of socialist nutjobs in Brussels”
    Really?  On what basis do you judge ‘people’ in Brussels to be ‘socialist’ or indeed ‘nutjobs’  They (whoever ‘they’ are) are bureaucrats, with the attendant insensitivities therein, but that’s as far as I could define it/them.  Also, the last time I checked, the European parliament seemed to be pretty clearly alighed along the left/right divide ….

    3. “Defeatism is not an Irish or British trait”
    So, by extension, I’m interested to know which countries in Europe you consider to be ‘defeatist’

    4. “There are a lot more of us than there are of them!”
    I’m curious to know as to how you reach that equation.  Last time I checked there were/are approx 60 million people in the geographic British Isles, whereas the population of the EU as a whole is around 300 million

  18. Sorry again Grandad, but I have to clear us a couple of points TonyS makes:
     
    1. No problem with this response.  As you suggest Ireland could have got itself better organised more quickly.
    2. You mention the EU Parliament as if it had some power.  It hasn’t it’s a talking shop with each member expected to use their rubber stamp and sing from the same hymn sheet.  The real power resides in the EU Commission, which is where all the socialists live.  Barroso, the head honcho, is a Maoist for christ’s sake.  Simonet – Belgian Socialist Party. Barrot – Convicted embezzler.  Delors – French Socialist Party I could go on believe me.
    3. Well, that’s easy. The one you live in springs to mind. A “land of cheese eating surrender monkeys” to quote an effectionate US description.
     
    4. You misunderstood my meaning here.  I was referring to peoples v the elite.  In the case of the UK around 60million against 650 MPs.
     

  19. Reply, Sean

    2. I misunderstood; I thought you were referring to the Parliament

    3. My, what a cheap shot, and very lazy.  Let me deal with this as follows:

    In World War 1, almost 75% of the French armed forces were killed or wounded in battle.  No other nation touched it in terms of sacrifice.  Ultimately it was a pointless sacrifice, as was so much of the carnage of that war, but they (the French) can hardly be accused of cowardice.

    WW1 was a traumatic experience for them, so they built the Maginot Line. In the battle to defend the country as the Germans circled around the line and attacked via Belgium, the French lost over 100.000 men.  In fact, French losses in WW2 easily exceeded American losses proportionally. 

    I agree that the conduct of Vichy France left a lot to be desired, but the more one learns about that period, the more one realises the complexity of occupation.  Easy to judge until one is actually in the situation.

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