Ireland's elderly respond to Medical Card withdrawal

Ireland's Over-70s are responding the the FF-PD-Hobbit coalition's decision to take away their medical cards in this week's budget:

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.

Principles? What principles?

The Green Party were once thought to be too 'flakey' for government. Their insistence on principled stands on issues that mattered to them meant that prior to the present, no one would consider them as coalition partners.

They ran in the recent election on a series of principled stands, and their leader vowed not to enter government with Fianna Fail after the election.

As a result, they garnered many votes from Fine Gael and Labour voters who were intent on seeing Fianna Fail removed from office.

But after ten days of negotiations, during which they were mightily screwed by the Fianna Fail negotiating team, the Greens settled to go into government with them.

What's worse is that they sold out every one of their principled stands in order to gain access to government. What's worse again is that the 500 or so Green Party members who gathered in Dublin yesterday endorsed the deal.

Let's look at the deal:

Hospital co-location (ie giving land owned by the state surrounding state hospitals to Mary Harney's developer pals to build private hospitals on.)

The Greens were bitterly opposed to this, we were told, and were also opposed to Harney continuing as health minister. In their deal with Fianna Fail, the Greens have managed to negotiate that co-location goes ahead and the leader of the two-seat party remains at the cabinet table as health minister!

US rendition flights through Shannon.

The Greens were bitterly opposed to this country continuing to permit US forces to use Shannon as a stopover and refuelling centre for flights involving the kidnap of people, their subsequent torture in third party states, and their transit to illegal incarceration without trial at Guantanamo Bay. In their deal with Fianna Fail, they managed to negotiate that the flights will continue!

Corporate donations.

The Greens wanted to clean up Irish political parties and put a final end to the culture of brown paper envelopes that has plagued political life in this country. They wanted to introduce a ban on corporate donations and overhaul the funding of political parties.

In their negotiations with Fianna Fail, they managed to gain none of these things, thereby permitting their partners in government to continue with their Galway race tent mode of funding. Well done!

The M3.

The Greens were bitterly opposed to the development of the M3 as currently envisaged, for the simple reason that it would carve a massive motorway straight through the hill of Tara, Ireland's oldest and most important neolithic site, and one of the most important anywhere in Europe, thereby destroying forever any treasures or excavation that could be done there. The Greens also wanted to review all current roadbuilding plans in favour of looking into better public transport options.

In their negotiations with Fianna Fail, they managed to ensure that all current roadbuilding plans, including the M3, will go ahead. Great work!

Basically, in their lust for power at all costs, the Greens have sold out each and every one of their principles. One wonders whether they actually negotiated during those ten days at all, or merely choked as they swallowed every refusal that Fianna Fail put to them.

Their sell-out will be remembered, perhaps not by the handful of members who endorsed this appalling deal, but by their thousands of voters who will now see the Greens as the latest prop of Fianna Fail, now that the PDs have been all but dispensed with by the electorate.

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!)

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.

What is Steve Staunton?

A spanner is a handy technical implement used for tightening up loose connections and to keep moving parts in good working order.

Steve Staunton is therefore not a spanner.

A muppet is one of an ensemble of entertainers who brought delight and joy to people the world over with their wonderful performances over a number of decades.

Steve Staunton is clearly not a muppet.

The gaffer is the person responsible for overseeing the lighting arrangements on the set of a movie, ensuring that illumination is shed both behind the scenes and on the performance that is broadcast to an audience of millions. The gaffer is often responsible for providing a steady source of power during the performance.

By no stretch of the imagination is Steve Staunton the gaffer.

Steve Staunton has presided over a national embarrassment, squandering national assets and demonstrating a hitherto unknown level of incompetence.

He has shown an utter lack of leadership, has failed to come up with even the simplest forward planning and relies on preposterous excuses to remain in his job, despite huge public unhappiness with his complete lack of achievement.

Obviously, Steve Staunton is actually a cabinet minister.