The PDs are dead!

Hooray! At last some good news.

The PDs wound themselves up tonight, after winding up the rest of us for years. Obviously they couldn't face the hammering they were going to get next year in the locals.

Good feckin riddance to some seriously toxic rubbish.

What a rogue's gallery of chancers, gombeens, blusterers, pocketliners and ne'er-do-wells. I don't know how they ever had the audacity to pitch themselves as Fianna Fail's mudguard when they were the most damaging gombeen opportunists of all.

I note they leave just as the economic meltdown they helped create gets properly underway.

Chickenshit bastards that they are, they won't even try cleaning up the mess they made.

Can we now, pretty, pretty please, kick that lump Harney out of health before there are no public hospitals left, and implement some tax hikes on the superrich?

Thank you.

Michael McDole

As promised, here are some pics of Michael McDowell at the recent general election count at the RDS, during which he made his speech resigning from political life.

There has been some debate in the media and online about whether McDowell was mobbed and jeered by Sinn Fein supporters as he made his speech. This first pic clearly indicates that it was the media who did the mobbing.

McDowell was no sooner in the RDS than he was surrounded by photographers and hacks, as this pic indicates.



Here he is giving his speech about loving his country and so on.



And following his departure, where he was indeed jeered by a People Before Profit member carrying a sign reading 'Michael McDole', John Gormley of the Green Party arrived in time to be declared elected.



Finally, some people might be pleased to know that the 'Michael McDole' sign, a piece of history from this particular general election campaign, was retrieved for posterity and is now in a safe place. Here's me posing with it!

I'd just like to add that I was not the person waving it about at McDowell, nor was I the person who retrieved it from the trashcan. Neither a protestor nor a bin-dipper am I! (But special thanks to those who did retrieve it and who let me borrow it for this snap - you know who you are!)

You asked for it

You asked for a Fianna Fail government and it looks like you're going to get one.

Be careful what you wish for. Good luck with dealing with hours of daily commuting, yo-yoing house prices, a derelict health service and hundreds of new stealth taxes.

Hope you enjoy the corruption in government, an 'unexpected' trebling of the cost of the airport metro, more motorways through sites of national heritage and more revelations of a Taoiseach on the make at the tribunals.

The great thing about the democratic process is that people generally get the government they deserve. Whether it will be Fianna Fail + randomers, Fianna Fail + the Greens or Fianna Fail + Labour, it will be a marginally more caring and equitable government than any government with the morally bankrupt Progressive Democrats.

Farewell and good riddance to McDowell and his neo-con cronies. (Picture of McDowell resigning before my eyes last night to follow.)

But whatever government is returned this week will be a Fianna Fail government. I wonder what it says about us that that is all the Irish people deserve.

When the PDs come knocking...

... banging on about their achievements in Government, remind them of some of these little statistics that their party leader is responsible for presiding over.

Thanks to KrayZpaving of Politics.ie for this.

Mad Mullah bites the hand he feeds again

According to RTE, Justice Minister Michael McDowell launched another unwarranted attack on the media last night.

Apparently, the Minister believes that truth is becoming a casualty in the reporting of politics in Ireland. He also warned other politicians against courting cheap headlines.

Obviously the hypocrisy of the man has few limits, if any.

Wasn't it McDowell, after all, who used Dail privilege to accuse prominent investigative reporter Frank Connolly of travelling to Colombia on a false passport, and being involved in a plot to provide FARC guerillas with IRA explosives?

His accusation has been vociferously denied by Connolly and disregarded by the Gardai. But that did not prevent McDowell leaking his non-story to a pet hack at the Irish Independent.

But the end result of this appalling smear was that funding was withdrawn for Connolly's Centre for Public Inquiry, a thinktank unpopular with the government due to their exposure of state and corporate corruption.

It is no coincidence that the man dubbed the 'Mad Mullah' by the Irish Star is no fan of the media. His grubby pawprints are already all over the forthcoming Privacy Bill which is aimed at silencing the media and preventing them from doing exactly the sort of digging into the great and the good that Frank Connolly was so respected for.

He also criminalised crime reporting in a previous instance of seeking to gag the pesky fourth estate, by introducing a five year sentence for Gardai who speak to journalists.

Clearly, McDowell would rather exist in a state where the media did not exist to report on his draconian excesses of power.

One can only hope, for the sake of independent reporting in Ireland, that the electorate throw this demagogue out on his well-heeled ear come the next election.