Last of the last

According to this morning's Bangkok Post, Europe is the last region to recover economically from the global financial disasters of the past few years.

While the US is showing the fabled green shoots, and Asia is en route to booming again, sluggardly old Europe is lagging behind with barely perceptible growth, major unemployment and ongoing banking crises.

And of course, Ireland is one of the weakest economies in Europe, which given the stiff competition from other messes like Portugal and Greece is pretty dire indeed.

The moral of the story is that we are last of the last, likely to still be suffering from NAMA hangovers long after the rest of the world economies are back on track.

It must be remembered that this is a direct result of the failures in government; the blatantly corrupt and incompetent Fianna Fail aided and abetted by the dewy-eyed amateurs of the Green Party.

If we don't hold them to account, and their hangers-on (the parish pump gombeen independent TDs, the banksters, the specudevelopers) they'll only do it all over again, as they've continually done so since the birth of the state.

Frankly, only an injection of backbone and hard work is going to sort Ireland out now, even if we do rid ourselves of the Fianna Fail cancer.

Where is that going to come from? Hardly from the boatloads of Nigerian scamsters and Roma beggars we imported like idiots to parasite off our ailing economy.

The only place it can come from is the greater Irish nation itself - the Irish in America who are sick of being patronised and ripped off by us, the Irish in Argentina still wrongfully denied their heritage by the racists in the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Irish in Britain and most of all the nearly 2 million Irish in the North.

We're going to have to throw ourselves properly on their mercy and ask for help. But only after we demonstrate our own intent to roll up the sleeves and do the hard work too.

Otherwise, we're going to be the last of the last for quite some time.

Don't posture for me, Argentina

Apparently Argentina has kicked out a Catholic bishop who has questioned the scale of the mid-20th century European holocaust.

And all without any hint of irony.

I've no intention of defending Bishop Williamson, who by all accounts is a very arrogant man. But I have previously pointed out that the way to combat holocaust deniers is with facts and debate, not by trying to shut them up, lock them or hope they go away.

Instead, I'm animated by the pointless posturing of it all. Booting Williamson out of Argentina won't change his views or those of anyone else, I suspect.

And it's not as if Argentina was one of those countries adversely affected by that holocaust. If anything, it greatly benefited from immigration as a result.

And of course, we should not forget how Argentina was one of the foremost destinations for many Nazis who fled justice after World War II. In fact, it now seems clear that they came at the invitation of Juan Peron, who then employed many of them in his government.

But the most compelling reason why this is an utterly hypocritical stance for Argentina to take is the fact that they themselves had their own mass murder of citizens, during the military junta period.

The mothers of the disappeared still gather in Buenos Aires to ask what happened to their relatives and demand clarity and answers which they still don't get. Around 30,000 desparecidos still remain unaccounted for. And the vast majority of those guilty still walk free.

It's long past time that Argentina owned up to its own crimes against its own humanity, and quit this hypocritical posturing about a holocaust that happened long, long ago on a continent far, far away.