Death by a thousand cuts

With a title like that, you're possibly expecting another economic rant from me.

Nope, it's option two on this occasion - this rancid government.

I wish I didn't feel compelled to pen my outrage on these two topics so often. It's wearying and depressing to return again and again to stare into the abyss and yell back what I see.

God only knows what you lot feel about it.

(Well, actually, Statcounter knows. And he says you're way more interested when I write about dead porn stars, or tattooing in Goa, or music piracy, or Irish whiskey, or the farce that is Ulster-Scots. Anything, in other words, other than the above two conversation-stoppers.)

So I'll try to think of posting about tattooed porn stars pirating Ulster-Scots albums or something similarly gripping later this week.

Remember when John O'Donoghue got forced out of his cosy, parasitic sinecure?

It felt like something had shifted in the universe. A senior politician in Ireland quit? That hadn't happened since forever.

But now that lying lowlife Willie O'Dea is gone too.

And Brian Lenihan, the last intelligent member of cabinet and the only one with any sort of respect outside a cumann singalong, is way more ill than they are publicly letting on.

And hoppity shortarse Martin Cullen is soon set to depart, what with his back finally caving in (likely due to his utter lack of spine.)

That leaves three seats at the top table soon to be empty,and let's not forget that Harney is only in her supersized chair because nobody else in government is taking enough hallucinogens to think running the Department of Health is a good idea of a career move.

And a level down the greasy pole, their margin is wafer thin in the Dail due to two by-elections and the distaste of panic-stricken backbenchers to continue supporting the insupportable.

Never mind the ever-skittish Greens, and the collection of allegedly Independent village idiots and parish pump attendants their every vote is now reliant on.

Finally, this has roused Fine Gael, many years later than it should have, and we have the riveting sight of blustering Enda in the Dail.

Obviously, with their huge poll lead and the almost unimaginable dream of possible one-party rule, they want to deliver the knockout blow as quick as is humanly possible.

After all, who knows when Labour will cop on and disassociate themselves from the unions' ruinous and publicly unpopular campaign to exempt overpaid, underworked public sector workers with job security from sharing the burden of the recession?

But thus far, the blueshirts remain utterly ineffectual, reliant on the Continuity Greens (the ones still technically in the tent, as opposed to McKenna's Real Greens, De Burca's Official Greens or any of the others who've already walked in disgust) to do any real damage.

The only thing that seems likely to prevent this government limping along, dying the death of a thousand cuts as one rat after another speeds for safety, is the incompetence of the incumbents.

God forbid that a government in Ireland changed because the public got disgusted by its corruption and incompetence and demanded its removal.

No, instead we must have, as we always do, some ridiculously irrelevant issue to get collectively mental about for a week, until before you know it, someone's off up the Aras and those fecking posters sprout on the lampposts all over again.

When O'Donoghue resigned, he whined that others in government had done much worse and seen no harm come to them. Why, his baffled mutton head seemed to ask, am I being picked on?

This week, we've seen O'Dea moaning exactly the same tune.

And so it will go, on. Some of them will slip out the backdoor, pleading illness. But those which remain will face a scrutiny that comes many years too late.

None of them will withstand such scrutiny. All of them will feel aggrieved, to have their past behaviour judged by proper standards of probity at last, when for years they quite rightly believed they could get away with anything, because they always did.

Then they'll be gone, with big cheerio cheques in their pockets, and we'll be left with blustering Enda, a prolonged recession, no jobs and a huge deficit.

And it'll happen all over again in another few decades, unless we start jailing people.

We should start with prosecuting O'Dea, who is guilty of perjury. We should go back to Ahern, who cannot explain away his financial shenanigans to the taxman, and prosecute him too.

Until these people are held accountable, they're beyond the law and will act accordingly.

And exactly the same principle applies to the banksters too.

(Oh, look! This post is about the economy after all!)

Who raped Martin Cullen?

Who raped Martin Cullen?

According to the Minister for Fun and Junkets, media intrusion into his life has been like being raped.

Obviously, no cabinet minister would dare belittle victims of aggravated sexual assault by comparing their suffering to being written about in a paper, so presumably Cullen would only make such a statement if he was genuinely capable of comparing the two experiences.

Hence my question: who raped Martin Cullen?

Because frankly, if he has never been raped, then his statement is a thundering disgrace and a slap of contempt across the face of all victims of rape.

But did anyone ever expect any better from the poison dwarf of this feudal court ruling the country?

The Culchie Coup D'Etat

Yes, I know I wanted rid of Bertie Bung. Be careful what you wish for and all. I know.

But still.

A culchie coup d'etat?

The BIFFO for Taoiseach we knew about. A man with no experience outside of politics running the country (into the ground) in a time of economic downturn. Fantastic.

What we didn't see coming was the near total eradication of Dublin influence in the governing party at the executive table.

With Bertie gone to the back benches, and Seamus Brennan jumping (for health reasons) before he was pushed, and his constituency colleague Tom Kitt bizarrely axed, the cabinet loses three Dublin ministers.

And with Mary Hanafin demoted for her mishandling of the autism issue (and for being from Dublin), the capital loses further influence.

In their place comes perennial non-achiever from Caaark like, 'Batt' O'Keefe, and Cavan-Monaghan slogger Brendan Smith, the man who has spent the guts of a decade ploughing a lonely furrow in the North-East defending the indefensible health cuts on behalf of the government.

And the indefensible herself, Mary Harney, remains at the trough, against all common sense.

We also saw the arrival of Pat Carey as chief whip, replacing poor Tom Kitt. This is the man who previously oversaw the national drugs strategy. No, not the strategy that led to Ireland becoming awash in cocaine. The strategy that tried to prevent Ireland becoming awash in cocaine. So, not much talent there.

And some of the other appointments are culchie-tastic too. Micheal Martin as Foreign Minister? We lose the urbane (but potential Taoiseach) Dermot Ahern as our international representative and have him replaced by Langerman? The man who launched a thousand health reports? Give me a break.

Dermot Ahern to Justice is another demotion, no matter how it's spun. That's Biffo's none too subtle method of de-fanging the main opposition to his leadership. Ahern must surely realise now that he should have had the stones to make a contest of the leadership.

Right now, he'd be better off as a disgruntled back bencher, leading the anti-biffo FF, than in his current ignominious position implementing Brian Lenihan's policy agenda.

But it gets better. Instead of sacking that useless oxygen thief Martin Cullen, Biffo has promoted him to Tourism Minister. Frankly, if this country was the sunniest, safest, and cheapest on Earth, I'd still think twice about visiting if it was his ugly lying mug asking me to. And Ireland is none of those things.

But the real 'fuck you' to city dwellers is the elevation of 'lovely girl' Mary Coughlan to Tanaiste. I mean, come on. Are we meant to laugh or cry at that? Are we now basking in mediocrity to this extent?

In fairness, it's been a bad day for Dublin South, losing two cabinet ministers at one fell swoop. I predict incinerators and sewage plants to be built in Dundrum shortly.

Tom Kitt may have been smarmier than Bob Monkhouse, but he was at least an effective whip, toiling away beyond notice, ensuring that FF maintained their ever-tenuous but ever-present grip on power for the past half-decade.

The loss of two ministers will go down well next to Harvey Nicks. Well, it won't, but it'll go down really well with the bogtrotters who bussed it up to Dublin from Offally and gathered outside Leinster House like gombeen groupies earlier to cheer on Cowen's elevation.

If I were a betting man, I'd go out and stick a couple of quid on Fine Gael to lead the next government. If they can't outpunch this bunch of gobdaws, they don't deserve to ever run the country.

Harney's not the only one should quit

Of course, Mary Harney should quit as Minister for Health with immediate effect. Her performance in the role has been little short of diabolical.

But it is worth recalling, as 97 more women fret about their cancer results, that there is a concept often cited by our Teflon Taoiseach known as collective cabinet responsibility.

They're all responsible for this mess we call a health service. All of them. Some of them are particularly responsible. Some of them, you could say, are more responsible than others.

On this list from the Department of Health, you can see that the two front runners to replace Bertie Ahern as Fianna Fail leader (and de facto Taoiseach of the nation) are BOTH former health ministers.

It is worth remembering how Micheal Martin, as health minister, commissioned over 200 reports which were not subsequently acted on while simultaneously robbing nursing home patients of up to €2 billion which the state had to pay back.

The senior civil servant in the Department said that he had told Micheal Martin about this scandal and had even given him the file in Martin's office. Martin denied this utterly. The file has never been found since, needless to say. Martin remains a cabinet minister. The civil servant moved sideways to the Higher Education Authority.

Brian Cowen, who charmingly called the Department of Health 'Angola', due to the amount of political landmines to be found underfoot, was also Minister for Health for three years. His time in Hawkins House is notable by its lack of anything notable. He didn't do a thing, tiptoeing around hoping no bombs went off until he could scamper for the safety of another Department.

If you were to believe some people, the Irish health system is permanently a wreck, unfixable and always was. This is nonsense.

A potted history of Irish health would run something like this:

The churches ran health provision forever, then the state, having missed the opportunity to create a National Health Service like the UK have, finally and belatedly intervened and the health boards were created in 1970.

Things remained okay for a while, then Charles Haughey slashed a quarter of all hospital beds, because we all had to tighten our belts.

Since then, those beds, that infrastructure, has never been replaced, while the population has exploded. In the Eighties, the scandals began. Organ retentions, blood infections, the lies, the spin. This was the period when the administrators came to power in health. But at least they were monitored by public representatives on the health boards.

When Mary Harney rationalised the health boards into the HSE, in itself not a bad idea, she made two massive errors. Firstly, she eradicated the ability of people to be elected to monitor the administrators. All of a sudden, no one was watching the watchmen.

Then she vowed that no jobs would be lost. The result was that we now have up to eight times as many health administrators as are needed, most aren't doing anything to justify their salaries, and none of them can be sacked.

This led directly to scandals varying from the millions upon millions spent on IT projects that either didn't work or didn't exist to the fact that neither Harney nor her overpaid mudguard Brendan Drumm even knew about the 97 more women whose cancer tests were wrong until yesterday.

By all means, by any means necessary, Mary Harney should quit with immediate effect. Her poodle Drumm, the €400,000 man, must also go.

But so should those who share collective cabinet responsibility for this unholy mess costing Irish lives. I'd start with Martin and Cowen, who have both directly contributed to the ongoing horror. But I wouldn't end there.

Ahern himself interfered in the decision of where to place the national children's hospital by making public statements, with the result that it went to the Mater, in his constituency, and his former employer.

Cullen ensured that Waterford would not get public radiotherapy but a privatised system instead. He even turned the sod on the site of their private hospital for them.

The entire cabinet share responsibility for the beleaguered state of our health service. If any one of them had a single shred of honour, they'd leave now.

Leech by name

Let us once again indulge that rare suspicion that there may indeed be a benign deity in this universe.

PR Puffmistress Monica Leech has been laughed out of the High Court after losing her libel action against the Irish Independent.

The woman, who was banking 650 euro of taxpayers money PER DAY while swanning around the planet on junkets in Martin Cullen's wake, now faces a 350,000 euro legal bill.

(Not that one need feel too sorry for her - her mammoth paycheque for sitting on the board of the Higher Education Authority and her chairmanship of Waterford Chamber of Commerce, as well as her ongoing PR work means that she's probably not shy of a few quid. Oh, and didn't she just take a quarter of a mill off RTE too?)

Leech's team had sought to argue that the offending article, published in December 2004, inferred that she had had adulterous sexual relations with the separated Minister, and that she had performed deeply intimate sexual favours for the minister for the sake of a well-paid and beneficial contract.

Leech, and I tread very carefully here because she is a notably litigious person, was the subject of a crass and coarse allegation, apparently made tongue-in-cheek by a caller to Joe Duffy's Liveline radio show.

It seems fairly obvious to me that few listeners would have for a minute thought that a random caller making such an accusation should be believed for even a second. He was clearly simply being crass and coarse.

RTE apologised immediately at the time, but it's not like you can do much about it when someone comes on the air. You assume they have a proper point to make and not crass insults to share. The Independent reported the incident the following day, mentioning the insult directed at Leech.

Monica's response has been to sue all around her. She sued RTE, despite the apology and the fact that the insult came from a caller. She banked a quarter of a million from that case a few weeks ago.

(Another victory for the TV licence payer. We're paying Bev Flynn's lawyers and Monica Leech's lawyers. No wonder 'Fair City' is so crap.)

Monica also sued the Independent for repeating the allegation in the context of an article about the phone-in incident. She lost that case yesterday. She's also suing at least another couple of media outlets over reporting the phone-in incident, and she's taken some further libel cases against Irish newspapers too, though it seems those relate to separate issues.

Monica is either extremely unfortunate when it comes to being libelled, the most libelled woman in Ireland, perhaps. Or else she is extremely litigious, with an eye to the quick bucks to be made by making yourself out to be a martyr of the Irish media.

It is worth remembering that Monica Leech got her contracts with Cullen in breach of the EU law that says such contracts should go out to tender. No one else was asked to tender for Monica's incredibly, spectacularly lucrative PR contracts.

Of course, all the departments that Cullen worked for have their own civil service press officers. He can also call upon the very able Fianna Fail press office at any time. Obviously those squadrons of spin doctors just weren't sufficient for his spinning needs.

Only Martin Cullen can explain the dire need for a phenomenally paid Monica Leech by his side, especially when on a goodly number of the trips abroad she accompanied him on, including that beautiful trip to romantic Langkawi, not a press release was issued nor a statement made to the media.

Certainly, the two government investigations into the conditions of her recruitment didn't really explain it.

Hopefully this welcome verdict will discourage people from treating libel actions like lottery tickets. Hopefully the Supreme Court, where Monica's headed next, will uphold this verdict, and hopefully her other libel cases against other Irish newspapers and publications will similarly be dismissed.

There is a need to overhaul Ireland's ancient libel laws, as Captain Moonlight cogently argues, which date from the early 1960s. Perhaps greater penalties for those who take frivolous and unsubstantiated libel actions should be incorporated into any future libel law.

Posh Spice's knickers and Robbie Keane's girlfriend are not news, or are they?

It seems that everyone is very animated all of a sudden over the recent spate of fatal car crashes in the country. I won't call them accidents - in the vast majority of cases, human error or impairment is to blame.

On top of the media calling for Martin Cullen's head (no bad thing in itself, but in fairness, it's not like he was driving any of the cars), all sorts of Irish bloggers from Sunday Times' Sarah Carey to acerbic smoker Twenty Major to the Swearing Lady appear to be very agitated about the issue.

So, working on the counterintuitive logic that people have heard enough about road safety, and also operating on the basis that as long as we have cars we'll have car crashes, I'm going to discuss something entirely different.

What passes for news in this country?

The front pages of the morning papers make desolate reading sometimes. Whether it's the warmed over Government press releases that dot the Irish Times front page, or the shrill moralising usually found on the front of the Irish Daily Mail, it's hard to discern actual NEWS anywhere.

Today's Daily Mirror - and I'm not picking on them specifically, it was just the only one I bought this morning - was a case in point that actually had me wondering whether the papers in this country would recognise news if it swanned into their offices wearing a T-shirt that read 'I'm news, print me!'

Front cover of today's Mirror had the jawdropping revelation that Robbie Keane is going to marry his long-term girlfriend. Yup, a football millionaire is going to marry the girl he's been with for five years. Sometime. We're not sure when. But they are engaged. Even though she's had a ring on her finger for weeks. And this is FRONT PAGE NEWS.

The other revelation from the same front page? 'POSH - Raunchiest pictures yet.' Accompanied by a snap of Skeletor flashing half a malnourished silicon tit.

Now, were the reader somehow brave enough to get past this smorgasbord of irrelevance and actually open the paper, page two is equally fascinating. Actual news - that we're not going to let the Bulgarians or Romanians in - makes an appearance.

And down the side of the page, between a tale of rabbits in Antarctica and the fact that apparently lots of Japanese people are really old, we get the following story. This is it in full, by the way:

France behind 1994 Genocide
France is being accused of taking part in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. French troops there are believed to have armed the Hutu militants who killed 800,000 Tutsis in a 100 day bloodbath. France has denied officially taking sides.

That's it. That's all you're getting. Yes, I know it's a tabloid. Yes, it's about a massacre long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away from CelticTigerland. But clearly I'm missing something here.

Isn't the suggestion that one of the world's major powers armed and caused the massacre of nearly a million people NEWS? More than a suggestion, in fact. A downright overt allegation from someone who ought to know - the man who was Rwandan ambassador to France at the time.

We get a full page of puff about Posh Spice's new 'fashion guide', and three sentences about how one of our allies and neighbours conducted the devastation of an entire country?

According to Reporters Sans Frontieres today, we have the most free press in the world, along with Finland, Iceland and Holland. This, of course, is an assessment that predates Minister McDowell's plans for a privacy law that will devastate the media's ability to report the news.

So with such press freedoms, why do we get such an appalling news agenda across the board?

Go on, people. Someone please explain this to me before I go mad entirely.