I'm Glad Ireland Is Not In Africa. (Or Am I?)

I am, kind of, glad that Ireland is not in Africa.
If it was, there would have been a coup a long, long time ago.
Why?
Well, all the ingredients are there.
We have a prime minister who is paying himself and his cronies more than just about any other leader in the world. And he’s doing it with public money, money taken off the people in taxes.
In addition to that, he has taken ‘loans’ from friends. These ‘loans’ weren’t ‘loans’ at all until it was discovered that he had received them. Up to that point, not a cent had been paid back.
He then lies, or at least doesn't tell the truth, to a tribunal of investigatioin.
And he won't explain what it was necessary for him to abandon the banking system and hide money in a safe while he was going through his separation.
I can only presume, despite his record, that he declared the money in the safe as part of his assets when he was required to do so.
Furthermore, he managed to wangle himself a bank loan of £19,000 without formally applying for it and without having to pay anything back for 18 months. It’s clear, he wouldn’t have got the loan if he had not been Finance minister at the time. And using your position for personal gain is more or less the definition of corruption.

If he could do the job, you might turn a blind eye.
But look at the country.
The health service is an unmitigated disaster, kept afloat only by the incredible and largely unrewarded efforts of the frontline workers.
It is top heavy with overpaid administrators who couldn’t run the proverbial in the brewery.
Our road network is still in an horrendous state. For years, little bits of motorway and dual carriageway were built here and there. This was a) to facilitate local political and electoral need and b) to avoid the legal requirement to open such schemes up to tender from construction companies in Europe.
Currently, only two cities on the island of Ireland are linked by motorway/dual carriageway. And Belfast and Dublin are linked for ideological reasons, not infrastructural.
When roads are built, they’re built badly and with little concern for history, culture, heritage or archaeology.
The M50 is, quite simply, a joke and it will always be a joke. And it will become an even more ridiculous joke when the National Roads Authority - possibly the most inept body in the world - is given control of the Westlink toll bridge.
The National Roads Authority. That’s the body that was charged with building roads to bypass towns and villages and then refused to allow services along the new roads telling people they could go into the towns and villages.
It is the body charged with signposting Ireland. Honestly. Someone is actually in charge of that.
It is the body which believed a bramble hedge was sufficient barrier in the central median of a motorway.
It’s another joke.
The Department of Education can’t build sufficient schools.
The Department of Sport is paying for the building of Lansdowne Road, a stadium too small by half, having funked building a national stadium.
It is also at least partially responsible for the pay-for-pay debacle in t he GAA.
The Minister for Social Welfare can keep a straight face telling us that €300 a week is sufficient for pensioners, when his pay rise alone is almost twice that.
The Minister for Enterprise is watching jobs vanish.
The Minister for the Gaeltacht has created division in Dingle where there was none.
The Minister for Justice is presiding over a brutal gang war, a police service corrupt in parts and a system that sees fewer gardai on the streets now than there were in the sixties.
As for the ‘Green” Party ministers, it seems there is a direct relationship between the amount of money they’re paid and the abandonment of their principles.
And as for the ‘independents’ they have, largely, been bought.
The years of prosperity are over, and the only ones with anything to show at the end of it all, are politicians who received more than twenty pay rises, and the construction industry.
It’s an outrage. It’s a scandal. It’s a tragedy.
We still have the desperately poor. We still have in sufficient places for the intellectually disabled. We have virtually no facilities for those who wish to try and beat their addiction to drugs.
We have nothing.
So maybe, at the end of it all, it’s a pity we’re not in Africa.

Read More......

A little bit of China over here

❍Tara: Buried by the ignorant and the stupid

Welcome to a little bit of China.
It’s right here on the west coast of Europe.
It is run by a man who has expressed his undying admiration for the Chinese way of doing things.
And like the modern day China, nothing, not a single thing is to be put in the way of business doing business.
Not once has the government of this place stepped in on the side of the little man. It’s always to on the side of business.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, from a business point of view, of the Aer Lingus decision to abandon it’s Shannon to Heathrow service - in the name of profit - it demonstrated, yet again, the government’s disdain for ordinary people.

The leader of this country has said how much he would love to be able to undertake the development of infrastructure the Chinese way. “Up and over,” were the words he used.
No attempt to take on board the worries, concerns or fears of the people. Development by decree.
Of course, every arm of the state apparatus has been put in place by the government. And so, regardless of what appears on paper to be a just and fair system, every appeal, every concern, every fear of the people, is dismissed out of hand.
Roads are built by a state agency, working hand in hand with, you’ve guessed it, business.
The local authorities back business against people.
The courts rule in favour of business.
The planning appeals board does the same.
Because in this Chinese outpost, the people don’t matter. Only business does.
Those who get in the way of business, are summarily dismissed. They are described as 'anti-progress' and worse.
They are portrayed as enemies.
You will have gathered by now, that this place is - at least currently - called Ireland.
It is a place where once it was debated whether it should be closed to Berlin or Boston. Well, Beijing has been the choice.
Our leader can barely contain his admiration for the country which massacred students at Tiananmen Square, a country which pollutes the atmosphere without a care for the consequences. Ireland is following suit on the latter, but not yet the former.
Of course, it is not just the Chinese who are admired by our leader.
He likes the warmonger George Bush too, regardless of what he does or where.
Why?
He’s good for business.
Some politician not too long ago, had the gall to suggest twinning Dublin with Beijing.
What not Auschwitz?
Back here, in this little bit of China, they’re still destroying Tara in the name of business.
No railway, because you don’t build retail parks, hotels and big DIY stores along railway lines.
And no honesty to admit that the road got priority over the railway because it will open up land, sacred land, for development.
With an utterly inept Heritage Minister in charge, it is likely they will continue apace to bury forever, 5,000 years of history so someone somewhere can make money..
What kind of people are there in government, local authorities, planning boards, legal profession and business, that would boast - as they do - of doing such a thing?
Certainly, it is not a surprise that a prime minister who takes large sums of cash off people he hardly knows, would do so.
But to ignore the appeals of people from all over the world? To spit on the views of the majority of people in Ireland? To snub international archaeologists? To offer two fingers to the Europe that actually built Ireland?
You would have to be an ignoramus. You would have to be a boor. You would have to be a Philistine and an fool.
Sadly, that’s what we have in charge.

Read More......