Eirbiz.com…Ireland…The Reality

Another reason why you did nothing for the hundreds of thousands of pounds for ‘yourself’. Yes Bertie, you were paid to do nothing and you excelled at it!
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Is this the peace that you were bladdering about in the USA when you addressed the Joint Houses of Congress? Did you know Bertie that while you were being accoladed by those who, like yourself, are totally divorced from reality, that there were decent people terrified in their own homes in this ‘great country of Ireland’ because YOU and your inept government have abandoned them?
You would better serve your country Bertie if you had stayed at home and tended to the mess that is now Ireland.
Is this the ‘peace’ that you were talking about?
From Sunday Independent

Gangs turn ordinary lives into a living hell
How can you expect a child to go to school when his mother is to scared to cross the road to go to Mass, asks Jim Cusack

By Jim Cusack

Sunday May 04 2008

THE terrible price being paid by families caught up in the widespread gang intimidation and constant threats of being murdered in Limerick is leading to nervous breakdowns in both parents and children caught up in the city’s lawlessness.

One family who agreed to speak produced letters from a primary school head teacher and a doctor, describing how a seven-year-old boy’s life has been destroyed by the threats and intimidation of his family. The boy has been too afraid to leave his house for months, cannot sleep at nights and needs constant company.

The letter from a doctor describes how the situation has caused his mother to become depressed. The letters were written in an effort to have the family relocated out one of the worst affected areas of the city to a place of safety. The family has been waiting for months to be found a new house away from the gang-controlled streets where they live.

The doctor’s letter warns: “Such a move may also be necessary to save her life.”

While speaking in their front room, the boy’s parents constantly looked through their net-curtained windows at anyone or any cars passing. The family seal the front door letter box at night with tape before going to bed as young gang members are squirting petrol through letter boxes using washing up liquid bottles and setting the fluid on fire. Several houses in their street have been shot at. Hundreds of homes in the city, abandoned by families in similar circumstances, are due for demolition under the regeneration programme to try and revive the areas.

They say that they have been on the receiving end of constant attacks and threats since a relative gave evidence in court against members of a gang under the control of the city’s major crime family, the Dundon-McCarthys, who now control a large swathe of the city. The Dundon-McCarthy’s main rivals, the Keane-Collopys are now restricted to a small area in the Island Field. In April, houses of the Keane-Collopys came under attack by Dundon-McCarthys who fired from an automatic assault rifle at four houses in St Mary’s Park in the Island Field.

According to local sources, in the past two years the Dundon-McCarthy gang have consolidated their control on drug dealing and other criminal activity in areas from their stronghold in the Ballinacurra-Weston and Southhill areas in the south of the city to the area including Moyross on the north side. In Moyross, the Dundon-McCarthys are understood to have taken control of the area from a gang which includes members of various crime families.

The Dundon-McCarthy gang, which has links with gangs in Dublin, Limerick and in Britain, is still being directed by leading members of the gang from prison who still have access to mobile phones. It is understood that the takeover of the Moyross area was completed last year when one of the Dundon-McCarthys walked up to one of the leading Moyross gang members and handed him a mobile phone. On the other end was the Dundon-McCarthy leader speaking from jail. He simply told the Moyross gang leader that he was now under the control of the Dundon-McCarthys. The reputation of the prisoner is such that the Moyross gang immediately conceded control of the area.

Residents — who all asked to have their identities kept secret for fear of being murdered — say they have lost confidence in the gardai to protect them. They said that their lives have been a hell because of the constant intimidation including daily death threats from young gang members driving by in cars.

“There are children here that need inoculations but are too afraid to go to the health centre because it is a no-go area. We can’t go to Mass in the local church. If we want to go to Mass we have to cross the town. We can’t go to the shops. They are coming to our houses and busting up our cars.

“A woman here has a son with spina bifida. Her house is attacked all the time. When she called the guards she automatically became a ‘rat’ to the gang members. They told her to get out or they would burn her out with her and the child in the house.

“99.9 per cent of people here believe that the guards are useless. Don’t get me wrong, there are great gardai, young ones who really care. But people here truly believe that there are people on the take. They [the gangs] have no fear. We call them [the garda] all the time — but nothing happens.”

Locals have dubbed the garda’s armed response unit in the city, the AUU — the “Armed Unresponse Unit”.

These two letters, one from a primary school head teacher about a seven-year-old boy and the other from a doctor about the effects on the boy’s mother illustrate how lives are being destroyed. Names have changed to avoid identification because of the real fear of being murdered.

The head teacher’s letter says: “John is enrolled in [name withheld] school since October 8, 2007. John is a nice, quiet boy who is always willing to please. He enjoys school and gets on well with both staff and other pupils.

“However, I am very concerned about John, as since coming to the school he has missed a total of 44 days. I have been in contact with both his parents and they with me on numerous occasions, both of us doing our best to get John back to school.

“John’s parents have told me that he is frightened to come to school, he is afraid that if he leaves his parents they will be dead when he comes back, he is frightened to sleep at night so he has resorted to sleeping during the day. John will not go to the shop, play outside or join extra curricular activities in his community because of the verbal abuse that he receives when he leaves his home.

“This is a sorry state to have a seven-year-old boy in. John should be at school with his friends, enjoying life as a seven-year-old typically does. I am worried that John’s future within the education system is at stake.

“To date John has missed 25 per cent of school and this could escalate to 50 per cent by June if John does not return to school. I have been in contact with [name withheld] of the Education Welfare Board with regard to his attendance and the situation that John is in.

“I would hope that you would strongly consider the family for re-housing as quickly as possible in order that John can return to school and enjoy a life suited to his age.”

A local GP has also written a letter on behalf of the boy’s mother seeking assistance in moving the family:

“This is to certify that this lady is under severe stress and has become depressed.

“Her depression is secondary to intimidation and threatening behaviour to both herself and her son. Her life has been threatened and she is afraid to take the bus, go to the shop and effectively live a normal life where she resides.

“She has reported the threatening behaviour to the gardai, but they seem powerless to protect her. She is afraid to make a statement to the gardai for fear of the consequences she would face if she did so. She is anxious to move from her present address. I hope you will facilitate her in this to prevent further damage to her health. Such a move may also be necessary to save her life.”

Local people see no end in sight for the violence in the city. Over the coming seven months, a number of major gang figures from both the Dundon-McCarthys and the Keane-Collopys are due to be released from prison. Sources close to the gangs say neither side is prepared to back down.

- Jim Cusack

Millionaires pay no tax while the poor die on our streets
Eat your heart out Mugabe!!!
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It seems that every week now we hear of factories closing leaving hundreds unemployed. Today Dell announced that they are to shed 250 jobs in Cherrywood.
Anyone putting ‘two and two’ together right now must surely realize that the party is over and the piper is waiting for his money. I don’t know how many times in the last few days that I heard the phrase ‘food shortage’ mentioned in the media.
Are we being kept in the dark with regard to how serious the economic situation is worldwide?
One thing is certain. If anyone expects to get the truth out of our pathetic government, they will starve first.
Our Dear Leader ‘Kim Jong Il’ Ahern is gone to the USA to blow his own coal in the Joint Houses of Congress where he might get a few more brown envelopes for his ‘performance’.
At any rate, looking to him for any solution is a total waste of time.
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I was just watching RTE’s Primetime which highlighted the anomaly of how the wealthiest Irish business people don’t pay any tax here while 7 homeless people died on our streets over Easter.

Has the wheel come full circle?
The captains of industry never lose!

Gardai/Police cover up real crime figures

Richard Finn dragged a young Polish woman into the grounds of a church where he kept her for over two hours while he repeatedly raped her. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the thug used his mobile/cell phone to take pictures of his victim.
After being arrested, Finn admitted the offence and pleaded guilty.
Father Pat Bradley from a Clondalkin parish wrote a letter to the judge in the case explaining that Finn came from a respectable family and obviously thought by this action that the rapist would be treated with a little leniency.
The respectable family involved are so respectable that two of Finn’s brothers were killed while out joyriding in a car stolen from some poor bastard who had to work his arse off to pay for it.
The putrefaction that is the Catholic clergy in Ireland who are not happy to have gotten away with covering up child sex abuse committed by them for decades - if not centuries - are now out to get rapist thugs off the hook.

Full story

Here’s another reason why you didn’t HAVE to anything for the brown envelopes that you received Bertie.
There are than 43,000 people are on council housing waiting lists who have been there for the 11 years of your ‘government of the well heeled’. When legislation was introduced to compel developers to allocate 20% of their projects for Social Housing, these greedy crooks bought their way out of it to the tune of €78m.
YOU couldn’t possibly have seen a loophole that was the size of Dublin Bay.
Thanks for another great legacy, ‘Man of the people’!

Full story from the Irish Examiner

Developers splurge €78m to avoid building social housing

By Juno McEnroe
BUILDING firms have paid €78.6 million to avoid their responsibilities under the social and affordable housing scheme.

But home-seekers remain the real losers as city, county and town councils receive the payouts but do not re-invest the monies in social housing, say housing rights campaigners.

More than 43,000 people are on council housing waiting lists — with many anxious to avail of affordable housing.

Under Part V of the Planning and Development Act 2000, developers were required to set aside 20% of their rezoned land for social or affordable housing.

But contractors can skip their responsibility by availing of a buy-out loophole.

However, housing support groups are concerned the builders’ opt-out payments could lead to young couples, in particular, continuing to struggle to get a house.

Many applicants, who could only afford a mortgage under the social and affordable scheme, are slipping further down council waiting lists.

A breakdown by the Irish Examiner of the amounts reveals developers paid 31 county councils, five city councils and 22 town councils.

Focus Ireland last night demanded councils stood up to developers and insist on homes being provided rather than cash.

“If they’re buying their way out, they’re being let buy their way out,” said head of development David Burke.

“Local authorities have to step up to the mark and not be pushed around.”

Mr Burke said local authority social schemes were designed for young families. On average, however, they are waiting up to four years to get a roof over their heads.

The Irish Council for Social Housing said the developer payments meant it took years longer for local authorities to find or develop other housing schemes with the cash.

“That slows the process of people being taken off the waiting lists,” said executive director Donal McManus.

With the slowdown in the private residential building, the fears remains there will be little or no social and affordable homes built in the near future. Local authorities, it emerged, are not allocating the builders’ funds into social and affordable schemes. Now the Department of Environment is warning local authorities that budgets will be cut if they continue to hoard payments from developers.

Correspondence from the department shows its secretary general Geraldine Tallon is “determined” funds are used as soon as the councils receive the money.

“Unused Part V funds will be taken into account when allocations to authorities for the main social housing programmes are being finalised,” said Ms Tallon’s letter.

The people who most fervently believed the lies of Bertie Ahern will end up paying the highest price for his corruption  and mismanagement. 
Eamonn Sweeney in today’s Sunday Independent has ‘got it in one’ with his description of that ‘great Irish leader’ Bertie Ahern.
He shows precisely what the Irish people have been saddled with for what the naive call leadership for over ten years. And now we are heading into a scenario of depression whereby those who though that Ahern was ‘god’ - society’s most vulnerable - will pay the highest price for their judgment or lack of it.
The fact that Bertie Ahern is to address the Joint Houses of Congress shortly says an awful lot about American politics.
Sure, why don’t they invite Robert Mugabe over as well to make a speech on corruption!!!

By Eamonn Sweeney

Sunday April 27 2008

I could never warm to Bertie Ahern. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that I simply didn’t get him. The Taoiseach’s appeal, like that of the novels of Michael Ondaatje and the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger, seemed absolutely mysterious. The charisma, warmth and intelligence of the man, so obvious to the nation’s political journalists, just weren’t apparent to me. I had come to wonder if this was a fault in myself and if perhaps our emperor really was decked out in a resplendent suit of new clothes.

Today, I don’t feel so alone. Because, over the past year or so, a great many people’s feelings about Bertie Ahern have progressed from affection through ambivalence to outright antipathy. This is something Bertie brought upon himself. It resulted not from what the Mahon tribunal revealed about the Taoiseach but from what the man revealed about himself in response.

It took just a little bit of pressure for the mask to come off and reveal a Bertie very unlike the easy-going media cliche of yore. When the heat came on, the Taoiseach resorted to three main modes of address: the sneer, the snivel and the snarl.

The sneer has never been far from Bertie Ahern’s lips, but this tendency became more and more pronounced. His outrageous statement likening those who complained about the state of the Irish economy to the suicidally depressed was one example; another was his dismissal (”pub talk”) of the possibility of an amnesty for Irish illegal immigrants in the States. I wondered why the man had to be so mean. If he didn’t agree with Niall O’Dowd and his cohorts, fair enough, but was there any need to rub their noses in it? Apparently, there was.

The snarl got its big outing on the night of the general election count when he stormed into the RTE studios and decided to lambast the media for reporting on the financial irregularities revealed by the tribunal. A bigger man might have regarded the hour of victory as a time to be gracious, but Bertie behaved as though the electorate had not just voted him back into office but had voted the judiciary and the journalists out of their jobs.

Looking at it, you couldn’t help feeling that there must be worse to come in the tribunals if the Taoiseach still felt the need to be scoring points. Who knows what would have happened had he been contrite instead of confrontational? It was a moment when he could have come clean and survived. Instead, he behaved like a man spoiling for a fight when that was the very last thing he wanted.

However, it was neither the sneer nor the snarl that defined Bertie’s final months in office, but the snivel, something at which he proved himself a virtuoso, rendering himself pathetic in a manner never approached by any previous Taoiseach.
The snivelling began with the infamous Brian Dobson interview. Bertie might have opted to tackle this in the manner of Roy Keane being quizzed by Tommy Gorman. Instead, he opted for the Princess-Diana- meets-Martin-Bashir approach. Generations yet unborn will cringe at the sight of a grown man attempting to give the impression that he’s on the verge of tears. The Taoiseach did everything except put his hand up to his eyes to check for moisture. This was how he was going to play it.

There was a precedent for this kind of ignoble tomfoolery. When Ray Burke first came under serious scrutiny for the way he did business, the Dublin North man turned on the waterworks in the Dail, bringing his dead father into it and bravely rebutting allegations nobody had ever made against him. The initial response from the political correspondents was that Burke had saved his political life with a masterly performance. They changed their minds when it became clear that the public reaction to this oratorical tour de force was that it would have made a dog laugh. The oul’ gra mo chroi shite didn’t save Ray Burke.

It didn’t save Bertie Ahern either. But the Dobson debacle set a pattern for the way in which the Taoiseach would defend himself against every allegation. He would, to be blunt about it, hide behind women. It wasn’t a particularly manly thing to do and it committed Bertie to the snivel rather than the sneer or the snarl, but presumably someone thought it was a tactical masterstroke.

Initially, the Taoiseach sheltered behind his wife and daughters. References to his marital difficulties almost seemed designed to give the impression that he had been going round with the begging bowl because his wife had skinned him in the separation settlement.
Perhaps it was an entirely accidental outcome, but this was the excuse hinted at by many of the Taoiseach’s backers in the media when it looked as though our hero might still spring free with one mighty bound.

It certainly won Bertie a lot of sympathy from the kind of self-pitying men obsessed with the cupidity of women who insist on getting a few quid to look after themselves and their children. One of the characteristics of these sorry souls is their persistent demand for gratitude from the recipients of their largesse. This could be called Look How Good I Am To You Syndrome. He mightn’t have meant it, but it was Bertie who made his separation the stuff of public gossip.

There were more women to hide behind. He made the suggestion that some of the money being called into question had been left to him by his dead mother. When it emerged that Celia Larkin had been given €30,000 of what were supposedly party funds to buy a house, Celia’s elderly aunts were deployed as human shields, with the suggestions that all these inquiries were making life unbearable for the old dears. Grainne Carruth was not the only person to be placed between Bertie and trouble as he acted like a B-movie burglar warning the coppers that if they come any close they would end up shooting the innocent woman in front of him.

The problem was that Grainne Carruth moved out of the firing line and, in doing so, gave the lawmen a clear shot at Big Bad Bert. This was not how that encounter was supposed to play out. I’d have a wild guess that Bertie may even have thought that the questioning of his former secretary would be to the tribunal’s detriment. Look at what they did, his supporters could say. They made a woman cry: finally, the tribunals have gone too far.
Let’s wind them up and not ask any more awkward questions.

Unfortunately, people tend to grow impatient with the Sniveller and his perpetual cry of, “Look what they’re after doing to me.” It wasn’t the tribunal people blamed for Grainne Carruth’s tears, but Bertie. Our hero had sheltered behind one woman too many.
There was a fascinating insight into how Bertie felt the scenario should have played out in an excellent interview by Aengus Fanning in this paper a few weeks back. You might have thought that divesting the burdens of office would have left Bertie free to move out of Sniveller mode. Not a bit of it. He caterwauled on about the fact that Ms Carruth is a mother of three, though why this information was in any way germane, nobody knows.
And he declared the questioning to have been particularly unforgivable because it took place on Holy Thursday . . .

It’s not the first time Bertie has brought religion into an argument, something which should give pause to those deluded liberals who believed that the fact of the Taoiseach being shacked up with his former secretary was some kind of bold gesture against the hegemony of the Catholic Church rather than a purely personal decision. Whether it was sanctioning a deal that allowed the Church to escape paying its fair share to the victims of institutional abuse or droning on about his connections to All Hallows, Bertie was never slow to wrap the papal flag around himself.

The most revealing part of the interview came when, after Bertie had banged on about how sorry he felt for Grainne Carruth, he was asked if he’d seen her since the ordeal. No, he said, I haven’t had the time. No? Really? Quelle surprise.

It’s interesting how few people have sought to portray the Taoiseach’s downfall in a tragic light. (Except for himself. Do you think all his ministers really did cry when they heard he was resigning? It sounds to me like someone’s been reading too many of his daughter’s books. Next, he’ll be telling us he cheered them up by bringing them shopping, cracking open a few bottles of lambrusco and singing I Will Survive while dancing around Mary Harney’s handbag.) It wasn’t tragedy but farce: the whole caper was far too cheap to be tragedy.

That cheapness was most evident in Bertie’s inability to depart the scene with any modicum of dignity. Even Charlie Haughey was able to summon up some form of gravitas when he had to fall on his sword. By contrast, Bertie snivelled as he went. You had the description of the tribunal as indulging in “low life stuff.” Better again, you had the unconscious comedy of the Taoiseach wittering on about the fact that Grainne Carruth was paid very little money. Well, old son, you were her boss. Perhaps if you hadn’t given Celia that thirty grand there might have been a few bob to pay Grainne Carruth. It’s just a thought.

There was more. He affected to find great significance in the fact that the act governing the conduct of tribunals was actually “a British law”. You almost expected him to suggest MI5 had put it on the statute books in the hope of snaring an as yet unborn Taoiseach.
This kind of childish anglophobia was bad enough coming from Bertie’s old mentor CJH, but coming from a man who probably owed his re-election to the big deal his followers made out of his House of Commons speech it was downright ungrateful.
The “British law”, he explained, came from a time when the little man couldn’t get justice in this country. Good old Bertie, leader of the country and still thinking of himself as a little man. Because when you’re a Sniveller, you’ll always see yourself as the underdog.
And you’ll reach for anything that might protect you from your pursuers. It’s not just that
famous suit that was yellow.

There were also complaints that Enda Kenny had been insufficiently gracious in wishing Bertie all the best in the future. Ungracious? Hang on a second and I’ll give you ungracious. Bertie only became leader of Fianna Fail because Albert Reynolds resigned after inadvertently misleading the Dail. In the light of his successor’s behaviour, it’s questionable whether Albert should have resigned at all. The Longford man had the unusual distinction for a Fianna Fail leader of having perhaps been too scrupulous.
Soon afterwards, Albert sought the Fianna Fail presidential nomination. Had he got it, he would have been elected to the office and given a just reward for a decent, if truncated, time as Taoiseach. Instead, Bertie and his allies shafted him and gave the nomination to Mary McAleese. Not a lot of grace there, and not a lot of gratitude. Bertie will hope he is treated a bit better by his own successor. He probably will be, because there’s no sign so far that Brian Cowen subscribes to the particular Dublin Fianna Fail model of politics whose most notable contemporary practitioners were Ray Burke in the North, the late Liam Lawlor in the West and Bertie Ahern in the centre. They were more than Charlie Haughey’s supporters, they were his disciples.

One positive aspect of the downfall is that we won’t be burdened further by the repetition of that Haughey quote about his factotum being “the most cunning and the most devious of them all”. It was always a stupid quote anyway, used as though it was to Bertie’s credit when the abiding lesson of the CJ era should have been that cunning and deviousness are qualities Irish politics has been disfigured by for too long.

In the end, it turned out not to be true. Confronted by the tribunal, Bertie was neither cunning nor devious enough. Instead, he looked sleazy, slippery, slimy and completely incompetent. Day after day, the news told us that the Taoiseach had endured a bad day at the tribunal as new inconsistencies emerged in evidence. It was all a bit like Whack A Mole, the game where the more you strike the titular animals on the head with a mallet, the quicker others pop up on different parts of the board. You almost wished Bertie would have just one good day, one day when a witness turned up to confirm that he had at least been telling the unvarnished truth about something.

Even those of us who were sceptical about the Manchester dig-out story couldn’t have imagined the bad turns the tribunal would take for the Taoiseach. Anyone who’d suggested back then that Bertie had probably sanctioned the handing over of party money so his girlfriend could buy a house would have been derided as the crudest kind of conspiracy theorist. When all this started out, no-one could have imagined that Bertie operated a private account in his constituency, imagined the amounts of money involved or how blatantly ridiculous some of his explanations would prove to be. And, let’s face it, there’s probably worse to come.

It was striking how, as time went by, the Taoiseach didn’t even bother giving explanations for the money that was being uncovered. Haughey, you felt sure, would have ducked and dived a bit better. He’d certainly have shown a bit more fight. Then again, for all his faults, Bertie’s old mentor was not a Sniveller.
The problem with Snivelling is that it puts you on the defensive. The “look at what these terrible people are doing to me” gambit only works as long as people feel sorry for you.
When the sympathy wears out, as it invariably does, noble suffering begins to look like self pity.

The worst thing for Bertie is that his behaviour is going to look a lot worse as we enter a recession. Because when everyone was riding high on the hog it was easier to blink an eye at politicians who put the paw out to developers and businessmen. It will be different when recession bites.
One of the articles of faith of the right-wing economic creed espoused by Bertie and his government is that people have to look after themselves and not expect others to bail them out. It is a noble thing, this code of sturdy self-reliance, and we were assured after the last election that members of “the Coping Classes” had kept Fianna Fail in power.
Which is an irony, because if there’s one thing Bertie is not, it’s a member of the Coping Classes. Whatever story you believe, one thing is indisputable. When Bertie ran into a few
financial problems he put the paw out and accepted donations left, right and centre. Some of these people were allegedly his friends and some of them were businessmen who simply liked giving their money away for no reason. Bertie took it all. Even when he had a great deal of money in the bank, he was still collecting the loot.
This runs counter to everything modern Ireland is supposed to be about. Because the Coping Classes are not a myth. They exist and their core belief is that you pay your own way and don’t look for favours. They deserve better than to be represented by politicians who have taken the exact opposite attitude for most of their careers, people who don’t pay their way if they can get someone else to do it. To this class Bertie belongs, to the political class that fastened their fangs into the necks of their victims and sucked for dear life. It was a miserable existence for a miserable bunch of bastards.

In reality, the taking of that money is itself a form of corruption. For all the talk of Bertie’s great empathy with the plain people of Ireland, he wasn’t one of them. Because if property prices keep going down and unemployment continues to rise, the plain people of Ireland will be on their own. There will be no one handing us big sums of cash. That’s how we live our lives. That it’s not how our Taoiseach lived his was his shame and his downfall.

He couldn’t fool us forever. The plain people of Ireland are not plain stupid.

As Bertie snivelled his way into imminent obscurity, he declared that his great regret was not to have built a national stadium. No, you heard him right. He’s not losing any sleep over the state of the health service, public transport or education, he’s miffed that he didn’t get to build a white elephant no one asked for and no one’s felt the lack of since.

It’s not surprising we don’t have a contemporary equivalent of Scrap Saturday. Bertie made satire redundant.

Goodbye Sniveller. And good riddance.

- Eamonn Sweeney

HERE! HERE!

More of our government’s ineptitude and crooked dealings with those crooks who really pull the strings in political circles has been exposed by the announcement yesterday that there is to be a crackdown on tax dodgers.
What this actually means is that a cabal of ‘the elite’ have had a blind eye turned to their criminal dealings and tax avoidance by Bertie Ahern and Co for years.
The 2.2million P.A.Y.E workers, who are the backbone of this country, have effectively been swindled by a government who continued to let their friends off the hook while ordinary workers had no choice but to pay up.
This cronyism might be somewhat acceptable if the services that our government were charged with implementing were in place and actually worked but, the reality is, that nothing works in Ireland after 11 years of government criminality. The Health Service doesn’t work. The Justice system doesn’t work. The Transport System doesn’t work. The Tax Collecting System doesn’t work. The Local Authority System doesn’t work.
I can’t help wondering if part of the reason that Bertie Ahern got hundreds of thousands of pounds from his pals was to ‘encourage’ him to make NO changes in the system that was so open to tax fiddling.

IT’S TIGHTEN YOUR BELT TIME AGAIN
It seems that Brian Cowen is going to carry on where our most famous political crook Charles J Haughey left off. On the one hand, he says it’s OK to except a salary increase of 38,000 Euro while on the other hand, telling the unions that THEY can’t have a raise.
Yes, it’s déjà vu all over again. Back in the 80’s Crook Haughey was telling us that ‘we were living beyond our means’ and that we would ‘have to tighten our belts’ while he and his fellow crooks were looting the country left, right and center. Some of the crooks who aided and abetted Haughey, including Bertie Ahern, are still in government as I write this.

How to have sex with a child in Ireland and get away with it

Ireland’s Booze Shame
That was a headline in yesterday’s Irish Mirror and if you care to look through this website in the Crime Section , you will see that it’s no exaggeration.
While the following figures are horrendous, much of the violence not involving death isn’t reported at all because, from the point of view of the victims, reporting is a waste of time and will only bring on more grief as the authorities are totally useless.
===Nearly half of all murders are caused by alcohol.
===130 road deaths caused by alcohol.
===One third of hospital admissions are caused by alcohol.
===€7billion a year spent on alcohol.
===€150million spent on advertising alcohol this year.
===One quarter of serious domestic abuse cases involve alcohol.
When you consider that the people involved in these incidents are not very bright when sober, there’s a strong case for at least limiting the supply, especially when it’s you and me who are paying dearly for the stupidity of others. For example our hospitals are under enough pressure without having to deal with hoards of drunken idiots.

Latest:
Our stupid government are now proposing new legislation to try to curtail the abuse of alcohol by the underaged. If they don’t have either the will or the resources to implement the laws which are already in place, what’s the point in giving us more legislative crap?

Below is an excerpt from the Lisbon Treaty which the Irish Nation is expected to vote on in June this year.
After reading through some of the website, I have to declare that I haven’t a clue and, if I was to understand it fully, the referendum would be history by the time I even had a rough idea of what it means.
The whole thing is as clear as Bertie Ahern’s evidence to the Mahon Tribunal but, that won’t stop our ‘discerning’ electorate from voting. You only have to look at our government and it’s record over 11 years to realize that the ‘people’ of Ireland will vote for anything.
The one thing that you can be certain of about the Lisbon Treaty is that the citizens of the EU, including Ireland, who are at the bottom of the social pile will still be the last to have their lives improved. That’s if any benefit at all filters down in their direction.

Article 5
1. The articles, sections, chapters, titles and parts of the Treaty on European Union and of the
Treaty establishing the European Community, as amended by this Treaty, shall be renumbered in
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Such adaptations shall, where necessary, also apply in the event that the provision in question has been
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3. The references to the recitals, articles, sections, chapters, titles and parts of the Treaty on
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The Irish Health Service that Bertie Ahern forgot because he was too busy collecting nearly half a million POUNDS paid to him by crooked business interests for his ‘promise’ to change nothing until they screwed their wad out of the stupid Irish Electorate.
ANOTHER OF YOUR GREAT LEGACIES BERTIE???
As if this dire situation wasn’t bad enough, when Eamon Gilmore (Labour) tried to draw attention to the issue in the Dail/Parliament yesterday, the contribution of some of Bertie Ahern’s flunkies was to snigger at Gilmore’s efforts.
This wasn’t a situation whereby Gilmore was trying to score political points, he was only doing what he was elected to do. That is to try to provide a decent health service for the people who elected him. It’s a great pity that our other half-arsed politicians - from all parties - wouldn’t shoulder their responsibilities by voicing their concerns now and again.
If Peg McEntee was an exception in the treatment she received from the Mater Hospital, it wouldn’t be such a scandal but, this is happening EVERY DAY in Ireland’s Health System which is run by a shower of well paid pension seekers called the HSE (Health Service Executive).
The reaction of our leader in waiting Brian Cowen was to say that Gilmore was making a scene over something ‘trivial’. The Irish Nation has much to look forward to when this man takes over from ‘Limp Dick’ Bertie Ahern.
Full harrowing story

Is there anything more miserable as having a group of teenagers exploding a football off the wall of the house in which you live accompanied by a number of canine vermin barking their brains out at the same time?
I was infuriated to hear the mother of one of these ‘good’ teenagers whinging on yesterday’s Live Line radio program because her son had received a behaviour order from the Gardai/Police because he and a number of other teenagers had been kicking a football around on the street.
What part of ‘It is illegal to play football on the street’ does she not understand?
It later emerged from other callers that the estate in question is plagued by groups of teenagers amusing themselves by creating as much trouble as possible for anyone who complains.
This type of behaviour, if unchecked, is exactly how housing estates can turn into places of terror for the decent inhabitants and, if nipped in the bud, can send the right message to those who think that they can do what they like while their moronic parents applaud through their curtains.
The Gardai are to be commended.