Week in Politics - the Green Party Convention in Wexford

tags: Recapitalisation (Lenihan) and Health (Harney) wage cuts, the social partners anglo reports price waterhouse coopers




Apart from anything else it strikes me as odd the way this programme is being used to communicate, rather than the Dail.

Where is Brian Cowen?

Bruton and Burton replying to Lenihan - questions about which banks will and will not be helped, what are the terms and so on.
Burton is saying the Lenihan is very reluctant to reform the banks or to ensure return of taxpayers money down the road.

We are really being told nothing, as we were on the Guarantee.

In order to maintain services we need to have cut backs at every level,
says Mary Harney.

cactus flower wrote:

In order to maintain services we need to have cut backs at every level,
says Mary Harney.

Quite extraordinary logic.

She really has to go..............

In the late eighties, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I moved to London along with many of my peers. I found work in a bar owned by a pair of Irish builders. I'll call them Tom and Brian for the sake of simplicity.

Tom and Brian had their fingers in many pots, including some very shady ones that I knew instinctively not to ask too much about. We had to keep the customary double books for them; we loaded a lot of dodgy kegs of beer through the side door from the back of a van driven by a guy called Jimmy the Pills and we spent many an hour in the cellar pouring cheap vodka into Smirnoff bottles.

Tom and Brian's main business was the building game. Nothing grandiose, just house renovations and conversions. They always had at least ten lads working for them and sometimes up to twenty of them. Every Friday evening these guys would come in to the pub and order a pint while waiting for their wages. They would wait and wait and wait and drink and drink and drink. They would have been drinking in there every evening during the week too, putting the pints "on the tab".

Sometimes Tom and Brian wouldn't show on the Friday and the lads would be told to come back the following evening and the drinks would flow again while waiting for their wages. More liquid profit for Tom and Brian. By Saturday evening some of the lads would have drank their weeks wages while waiting for them. I watched guys slowly turn into alcoholics there. Tom and Brian didn't care. They were too concerned with lording it in their manor. The lads couldn't do anything about this or they were out of a job. Nobody who worked in the bar said anything either for the same reason.

We all lost our jobs in the end as Brian lost the pub in a game of poker. No joke! They retrieved the pub but most of the staff left in disgust, including myself.

Five years later I moved back to Ireland and was here for the entire Celtic Tiger movie. Throughout this time I was reminded again and again of Tom and Brian; their ilk was everywhere. Dodgy builders, dodgy tax affairs, and residing at the bottom of the pile were the 'lads' who waited for wages, who found out they had no pensions, and in the worst case scenarios found out they weren't even covered by insurance.

So, why have I related this story to you in this thread? It's to warn you all that this story sums up the Irish mentality. I have seen how low we as a people can go and I have no doubts that there are Toms and Brians throughout our system and that includes politics. Anyone who still thinks that any of these guys have our best interests at heart needs to get their heads checked.

Is that true ? Great story, well told, very very sad. You could expand that into a small screenplay by the sounds of it. Might ring true for a lot of people at the moment.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Is that true ? Great story, well told, very very sad. You could expand that into a small screenplay by the sounds of it. Might ring true for a lot of people at the moment.

Sadly, it's very true. It was true for many Irish-owned bars throughout London at the time. I saw it everywhere.
It's funny you mention a screenplay because as I was writing it down here I thought to myself how significant it is to now. Unfortunately I wouldn't know the first thing about writing a screenplay.

floatingingalway wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Is that true ? Great story, well told, very very sad. You could expand that into a small screenplay by the sounds of it. Might ring true for a lot of people at the moment.

Sadly, it's very true. It was true for many Irish-owned bars throughout London at the time. I saw it everywhere.
It's funny you mention a screenplay because as I was writing it down here I thought to myself how significant it is to now. Unfortunately I wouldn't know the first thing about writing a screenplay.

Have you read Roddy Doyle's Barrytown Trilogy ? I think those books approximate to screenplays - not much different from a play really.

But it's a fitting parable for what went on not just in Ireland but in the states and perhaps beyond as well. Below is a collection of clips of a Wall Street investor, Peter Schiff explaining the 'boom' in America (sounds more like a bomb going off now). Listen to him - he's talking about drunks, drink, alcohol, bingeing ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IY5ELVdWQc



I can't remember what pont I'm making overall now - off topic and up all night

The Unions, The Greens, the Economy - watch it half live right now on RTE 1 at 1055.

With Seán O'Rourke and Dermot Ahern and Charlie Flanagan.

Ahern reiterating that it's a global problem ... America loses 500,000 jobs...

We're not turning our back on infrastructure - Ahern

O'Rourke: We've been looking far too much at international problems - are paycuts on the table?

Ahern: yes

Interesting stuff on selection of FF candidates. "HQ interventions" taking away the local members right to choose the candidate.
Unease among the grass roots.

cactus flower wrote:

Interesting stuff on selection of FF candidates. "HQ interventions" taking away the local members right to choose the candidate.
Unease among the grass roots.

yeah i was listening to that out of the corner of my ear only - thanks for writing that down.

why are the "dictatorship" doing that ? Some fellas are too ugly I heard ??

Audi,did I hear the lean and hungry Ahern Ahern reference some Soden rated agency ?I think he called it "Mitches"

'Twas "Fitch"

Auditor #9 wrote:

cactus flower wrote:

Interesting stuff on selection of FF candidates. "HQ interventions" taking away the local members right to choose the candidate.
Unease among the grass roots.

yeah i was listening to that out of the corner of my ear only - thanks for writing that down.

why are the "dictatorship" doing that ? Some fellas are too ugly I heard ??

No feedback. Apparently.

powderfinger wrote:

Audi,did I hear the lean and hungry Ahern Ahern reference some Soden rated agency ?I think he called it "Mitches"

I heard that out of earcorner too - his voice is hypnotic or soporific.

What was the Soden reference ? Did he say it in the middle of an outpouring about the World Economy being a crock and that we'd get out of it better - or was it about talking up our Banking choices ?

Orfeckinwellian

He said we're in much better shape to pull through this than the UK or the USA... despite those two economies constituting over 70% of Ireland's overseas economics business... seems odd that we could expand ahead of those economies given that statistic.

johnfás wrote:

He said we're in much better shape to pull through this than the UK or the USA... despite those two economies constituting over 70% of Ireland's overseas economics business... seems odd that we could expand ahead of those economies given that statistic.

I thought he was talking through his

Auditor #9 wrote:

powderfinger wrote:

Audi,did I hear the lean and hungry Ahern Ahern reference some Soden rated agency ?I think he called it "Mitches"

I heard that out of earcorner too - his voice is hypnotic or soporific.

What was the Soden reference ? Did he say it in the middle of an outpouring about the World Economy being a crock and that we'd get out of it better - or was it about talking up our Banking choices ?

Orfeckinwellian

It jumped up out of nowhere alright.An o'neachtian insertion fumbled.Dermo was going well until he quoted some agency called Mitches
Never heard of them.Did he mean Fitch?

Could be powder - sounded to me like he was rhyming off stuff. Fianna Fáil have a party line and a media interface machine and you can hear certain of the cogs grinding together - you can pick up the phrases they use, Eamon Ryan is at it as well.

It IS different this time, of course.

Auditor #9 wrote:

Could be powder - sounded to me like he was rhyming off stuff. Fianna Fáil have a party line and a media interface machine and you can hear certain of the cogs grinding together - you can pick up the phrases they use.

As established by the Grand Lodge, we don’t do it off the top of our mucker heads you know, some respect please.

tonys wrote:

Auditor #9 wrote:

Could be powder - sounded to me like he was rhyming off stuff. Fianna Fáil have a party line and a media interface machine and you can hear certain of the cogs grinding together - you can pick up the phrases they use.

As established by the Grand Lodge, we don’t do it off the top of our mucker heads you know, some respect please.

I don't deny it works incredibly well - you know that I'm waiting very impatiently for people en masse of a Sunday night to starting jumping at their televisions and proclaim they heard so and so say the same thing last week.

I very much doubt they're rhyming it off the top of their head either - I'd say it's very well thought out by the, eh, Grand Lodge and is perhaps even signed off on by Stephen Harper and John Howard's advisors.

I might be waiting though ...

cactus flower wrote:

Interesting stuff on selection of FF candidates. "HQ interventions" taking away the local members right to choose the candidate.
Unease among the grass roots.

The interviewing is a new process AFAIK and has generated a lot of interest in the local Galway papers.
But the disenfranchisement of the grass roots started years ago. I know a few of the people who famously walked out of the Galway East Selection Convention in 2002 when HQ dictated that Paddy McHugh couldn't run and that Tom Kitt would run instead.
McHugh then ran as an independent and took the seat at Kitt's expense!

Dermot Ahern mentioned taxing second home as if this was a new thing.
It was introduced in Budget 09.

I see over on the other place nobody except Jomamma realises that the tax already exists.

I guess Ahern meant that the tax should be increased.