A change of heart
I thought about writing some stuff today.
I thought about writing about the saga of the new National Maternity Hospital and how they announced that the cost has risen to €800 million before announcing that they haven’t even decided where to build it yet. I could also have written how our National Children’s Hospital was also supposed to cost around €800 million but is now running at around €2 billion and it’s not even finished yet.
I thought about writing about how with the easing of restrictions, pubs were now allowed serve outdoors only and how councils had given permission for extra tables on the streets, only for the Gardaí to announce that drinking outside pubs is illegal.
I thought about writing about Varadkar [our deputy leader] and how he has announced that he wants 70% of the population to own their own homes by the end of the decade, ignoring the fact that it would require about 340,000 new houses to be built and that if the Plebs could afford them then so could the vulture funds who would just buy the housing en masse to rent back at exorbitant rates.
I was going to write about these topics as an illustration of just how insane life has become here in Ireland with everything just apparently running out of control.
But I decided I wouldn’t bother. What is the point? Ireland has become a story written by Flann O’Brien. We have become the very definition of Murphy’s Law – anything and everything that is proposed will inevitably be fucked up royally.
We are living in a parody.
Your lot are amateurs – the UK Government is currently spending £106bn (and rising daily) to build a giant Hornby train-set, taking folk who no longer need to travel, from somewhere they weren't to near somewhere they don't really want to be, a few minutes quicker than it used to take and, in the process, ripping through a few hundred miles of previously unspoilt countryside, in addition to demolishing masses of properties and businesses along the way.
That's close to £2,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, almost none of whom will ever need, or even want, to use it. On the scale of economic madness parodies, that takes some beating.
I thought that had been shelved for the moment? And don't forget, you lot are talking about a bridge between Scotland and Norn Iron! That would cost a pretty penny?
Well, there's really only one of us talking about such a bridge: the one who was once a Conservative, but is now a woke green feminist type, courtesy of his latest doxy who appears to have him firmly by the 'nads. Hardly surprising that his grasp on reality seems tenuous, to say the least.
I suspect the fantasy 'bridge' is actually a double-edged political weapon – it panders to the Unionists, convincing them that there isn't really a master plan to unify Ireland whilst, at the same time, annoying the EU by suggesting that the UK may take sovereignty over the whole of its realm quite seriously. It'll never be built, but a shed-load of consultants will bank a shed-load of planning money before it's quietly canned.
Ah now, be fair to Flann O'Brien! The wily Sergeant Pluck was a model of clarity and transparency when compared with the chicanery surrounding Saint Vincent's Hospital and the Sisters of Uncharity.
Transparency is a word that doesn't exist in the Irish lexicon.