The curious case of the empty plane in the night sky

A gombeen stares right into my front room, like a drooling idiot grinning slackjawed at technology never before encountered. His empty-headed moonface is there morning, noon and evening. The police won't permit me to move him along. Apparently it would be a crime for me to do so.

This gombeen's name is Micheal Martin. He is the leader of Fianna Fail and tomorrow he hopes against hope that the Irish people will be so remedially stupid as to forget the economic treachery he played such a prominent role in so recently and elect him as Taoiseach.

You have 450,000 reasons not to do so - all of those people languishing on the unemployment register.

You have 80 billion reasons not to do so, in fact - all of those euro that he and his pals stole from your pocket to pay off the bankers' bad gambling debts.

But permit me to add one other reason, freshly minted. Consider it the latest turd floating on the tidal wave of detritus and sewage that Fianna Fail have made of this country. Consider it Micheal Martin's most recent demonstration of his brazen inability, his brass-necked incompetence.

The Irish air force flew a plane to Libya, where there is massive civil unrest, to evacuate our citizens from the country. Let's park for the moment the question of why the Irish state, with such precarious finances, should pay to evacuate those who pay no taxes to this country. They can be asked to pay later. Right now, they need to get out. The money's not important just now.

Last night that plane departed Tripoli with no passengers. Let me spell that one out. Due to a quirk of election times, we still have a government and ministers, of which the current foreign minister is Brian Cowen, due to Micheal Martin resigning his post after challenging Cowen for the Fianna Fail leadership last month.

So Cowen is immediately to blame for this abject failure to retrieve our citizens. But in a more meaningful way, the blame falls on Martin, under whom all the protocols for such evacuations would have been developed.

It's not a case that people could not be evacuated. In fact, at least two Irish citizens and likely more were evacuated by the British government earlier today. They've been on BBC Radio Five Live explaining their gratitude to the British authorities for doing so, and their gratitude to the British taxpayer for underwriting the cost of their safety.

British prime minister David Cameron is currently out of Britain, in the Gulf on a trade mission. However, he immediately apologised this morning for Britain's slow response to evacuating their own citizens. He's apologising for not getting his people (and ours) out quick enough, even though he was out of the country when this happened.

Where's the apology from Cowen and Martin for failing to get anyone out at all? I haven't heard it. I don't expect to hear it. There won't be an apology because for these corrupt cretins, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

It's at times like these that I feel sickened to be Irish, sickened to be represented by these venal incompetent scum.

They're a cancer in this country. And if we don't wipe them out for good, they will return to kill off their host, this nation, once again, as they've done so many times before.

Imagine sitting in Tripoli airport, afraid for your life last night. Imagine watching the Irish air force plane taking off empty into the night sky. Imagine your relief when the Brits find you quivering in the terminal and tell you that they've a seat for you as far as Gatwick if you want it.

Fianna Fail never fail to disappoint. They should not be trusted with operating a coffee dock kiosk, never mind a nation.

Let's amputate them tomorrow. Let's cut out the cancer for good, before they leave all of us stranded on the tarmac, set to face armageddon, while they jet off into the sunset once again.

More false dawns than a transvestite conference

That's my impression of the ongoing farce that Brian Cowen finds himself in.

Another day, another 'momentous' speech in which he once again clings onto power at any cost, daring the Greens, his own party, the plotters in his cabinet to grow a pair and take him out.

It's becoming like Groundhog Day now. Each time, it's billed as a potentially epoch-changing moment. Mired in the shit he created, Biffo announces a speech. The meeja dust down their overtime slips and grab a cab to government buildings or whatever hotel, shebeen or outhouse Biffo has chosen this time.

Then out comes Cowen, licking his lips and blustering the same tired old bullshit about doing his best for the country, while some few remaining loyal colleagues simper alongside.

Then Pravda RTE announce that it was a strong and important speech by the Taoiseach, to gales of laughter from the public beyond the Montrose cumann.

And the proverbial can takes another kicking down the road, and the country remains essentially misgoverned by incompetents while the much-needed general election is once again delayed for the benefit of a handful of timeserving crooks in power.

Every repeat of this farce is costing us literally millions, costing us more of our rapidly vanishing sovereignty, costing us what little credibility we have left on the world stage.

Sure, the Opposition leaders will be cracking open the bubbly tonight at the prospect of Fianna Fail sliding ever further into obsolescence in the polls. But right now, none of this does the country any good whatsoever.

Will it actually take riots to remove this government? Do we as a people have less backbone than the Icelanders, the Greeks, the Tunisians? I'm ashamed to say we do.

Tune in midweek for another repeat of Cowen's single transferable 'I won't go' speech. If you can stomach it, that is.

Edit: Fianna Fail meltdown gets more amusing and confusing after Micky Martin decides to hold his own press conference. Here's what he had to say (apparently without first convening a committee to draw up a report):


Bottom line: He offered his resignation and it was refused (Real men just resign without asking for permission first) and will oppose Biffo on Tuesday, but confusingly still supports him as Taoiseach. He thinks he should lead Fianna Fail because he introduced a smoking ban years ago. And even though he's holding press conferences, he isn't canvassing for the leadership of the party.

My only remaining questions after two car crash press conferences in a row are:

What in hell are the Greens still doing in Government tonight (other than waiting to claim full ministerial pensions if they can keep going la-la-la with fingers in their ears until May)?

How many more passive-aggressive disgruntled ministers will hold similarly confusing press conferences before Tuesday's vote?

Irish Embassies I've known and loved (and paid for)

I meant to write a post to all the Irish Embassies I've known and loved back when people got their knickers in a twist about our man in Canada getting $11 million to do up his official residence.

I reckoned then as I do now that if people actually knew the opulence of some of our gaffs abroad, there'd be crowds marching with pitchforks and burning crosses towards the Department of Foreign Affairs' HQ at Iveagh House.

One of the embassies I enjoyed the most was the Ambassador's residence in one European country I'm not going to name.

I met the daughter of our chap there on the plane out, and since she was an acquaintance and a nice sort, she invited me round to the official residence. This was fortunate, since my mate who lived in the country had an urgent need of a new passport.

So I belled him on arrival and told him I'd not be staying at his place, and to get his ass around to the residence with a handful of identification, money and some small, square, portrait photos.

We entered via a secure gate and took a private elevator up to the residence. The door opened into a room best described as an indoor football pitch, with angora carpets in each corner, around which were arranged four sofas. That, for the mathematically challenged, is 16 sofas in total.

There was another fellow there, a foreign national though not from the country we were in. He was a pal of our chap and was busy knocking together a joint at the far end of the room. From amid a plume of smoke, he deftly sent the ashtray sliding over the parquet floor towards my sofa.

Our chap greeted me and my mate (and the daughter) warmly with some nice wine. I sat back, supped and inhaled. I had arrived!

That was just the residence. There was an embassy elsewhere of course. Now, Iveagh House would no doubt point to the need for the ambassador to socialise, greet dignitaries, host Paddy's Day piss-ups and so on. But I could simply not get over that football pitch-sized front room. In a city with pretty expensive rents, that gaff cost a mint. And it was rented. And we pay the rent.

Another time, in Africa, I ran into a spot of bother in Mozambique. My problem was that I went on the rampage with some aid workers (the only Irish in the country, apart from some mine owners and the embassy staff) and they told me about this amazing building.

It was built into the cliff overlooking the bay. It was reputedly the most expensive building ever built in the entire country. And it was, of course, the Irish embassy. My problems began when I went out to try and photograph it.

A load of dangerous-looking wide boys with guns were straight out, wanting to know what I was doing. I tried to explain that I was an Irish citizen, taking a nice picture of our embassy. But that wasn't permitted. In short, I was lucky to escape a beating.

A few days later, back across the border in South Africa, I had my passport nicked in Jo'burg airport. I had to head out to Pretoria to get it replaced. Our embassy there was a rented second floor office in a dodgy neighbourhood.

Oddly, it was this embassy that dealt with most of the neighbouring countries. So all the people in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and Zambia as well as South Africa, who were looking for visas to Ireland or trying to get passports on the basis of Irish descent, had to go there.

One lad I met had driven down from Bulawayo (for the fourth time) with documents to prove he was entitled to a passport.

I've never understood why the embassy that did all the work was a shitehole we rented and yet we built the most amazing building for our embassy in a country with next to no Irish people in it.

Our gaff in Paris is notoriously splendid. I met a pissed-up DFA civil servant recently who confided in me that she was one of those who allocated the new third secretaries to their foreign postings.

Paris, she said, is nearly always everyone's first choice. She said she even joked about taking bribes from them, such was the demand to go there. She'd certainly been offered them once or twice in the past.

Rome is also palatial and a soft touch of a gig (except of course when crazy Irish people get slaughtered drunk at weddings and fall into the Tiber, or get mowed down by equally crazy drunk Italian drivers.)

And we have innumerable consulates and embassies in places you'd have to wonder whether they were strictly necessary. Eamon Delaney's book on working for Foreign Affairs in the United States - An Accidental Diplomat - is great on the Chicken and Ceili circuit of those postings.

In short, our foreign embassies and ambassadorial residences are a great racket altogether. The ones we need are underfunded. And there is so much unnecessary waste it's unbelievable in the others.

And let's not forget, it isn't just our man in Canada's gaff we're paying for back here in Ireland. It's all of them, plus the infamous COLA.

Mmm, doesn't it taste sweet!

Don't know about the COLA? It's the Cost of Living Allowance that all of them receive if they're in a country with a higher cost of living than Ireland. Which is pretty much nowhere these days, but needless to say the figures have been massaged to make it look like renting a mud hut in Chad is more expensive than running a mansion in Foxrock.

There have to be questions as to how much of this we can keep paying for. Micky Martin, current foreign minister, is apparently conducting a 'review' of our overseas missions, to decide whether we can close a few and save a few bob.

But when he was Health Minister, he commissioned hundreds of such reviews. Everytime there was a decision to be made, he kicked for touch and commissioned a report into it. That's why nothing happened for years.

So don't expect anything to happen now either. Our chaps in places from Canada to Mozambique will continue to enjoy their football pitch-sized living rooms and their COLA, while we keep stumping up the cash for them.

Aren't we the mugs?