Enjoy the holidays

Seriously, do.

Eat, drink and be merry. Be nice to family and friends if you can. Get over the cloying schmaltz of the season and roll with it. Allow yourself to be suffused with fellow-feeling.

Because I am fearful that this could be the last opportunity for some indulgence for a little while.

Next year we'll see jobs lost. Many of them. Houses repo-ed. A spike in the dole, the homeless, deprivation and poverty in general.

The credit bubble is over and now the bill's arrived. Many people literally won't be able to pay.

It would be nice to think that as a society we can look after the less fortunate in hard times. But that's not the sort of society Ireland is today. Perhaps it was once. If so, that was quite a while ago, and to be honest, I don't remember.

After a decade of gombeen government and PD-brand Thatcherism, we're all out for ourselves now. I've already overheard conversations between people discussing where they hope to buy repossessed houses on the cheap. It's sickening, but that's life today in Ireland.

It will get worse before it gets better. That's the nature of these cycles.

I really hope people throw themselves into Christmas this year, learn to reconnect with each other and get a perspective on true value in society. It might turn out to be the difference in how we survive this depression.

I also hope that people push the boat out one last time this year. A little irresponsible indulgence on top of the already preposterous national credit bill won't make a massive difference. And it might keep a few people in jobs who'd lose them otherwise.

See ya next year. Be good.

Civil Service Skiving

I mentioned a little while ago that I support proposals to cull the dead wood from the Civil Service

I received some responses from civil servants who, while maintaining that they themselves work hard, admitted that many of their colleagues do not.

This week, I've had the displeasure to encounter some of those who don't work very hard at all, and as people in the private sector from Cork city to rural Kilkenny lose their jobs this week, the ongoing job security of some of these public sector wasters gets more and more insufferable.

I went to one public records office staffed by civil servants seeking access to public records. There was a big sign on the wall, demanding that people respect a 'business atmosphere' in the place by not eating, drinking or talking loudly.

Beneath it at a row of computer terminals was half a dozen people, all nattering away loudly at each other and on mobile phones, and half of them were munching on sandwiches.

I waited for a staff member to return from the back office to reprimand them. After about ten minutes I realised they were the staff.

Not once did any of them break off to see if I needed assistance or ask what I wanted, even though they'd spotted me entering (it's not a busy place.) I was forced to interrupt their banter to demand someone to serve me. The scowls I got were frankly outrageous. How dare I have the audacity to ask them to do their job!

In a second public records office, I went in to seek a record that ought to be available to the public. The spotty, barely post-pubescent lad behind the counter dutifully called upstairs and was told I couldn't get to see the record.

I asked the poor lad if I could speak to someone more senior, since the record ought to be available and I got no good reason why I couldn't see it. A random woman wandering past told me that I couldn't have it because a local authority had a copy.

I explained that I had no intention of driving halfway across the country to view a record that was two floors above me and ought to be freely available to the public.

Eventually, a balding man with a white-haired tonsure and flakey skin came down to see me. His manner and tone were appallingly patronising as he told me to go to the local authority. I again pointed out his statutory obligation to provide the record or a damn good reason why not.

He just repeated himself, in 'Computer Says No' fashion.

That's when I spotted the smell of alcohol on his breath. At 11.45 am. Clearly there wasn't any point explaining a person's statutory responsibilities to a person who is drunk at work. Nor is there much point in persevering in an office where people tolerate a senior staff member being drunk before lunchtime while on duty. So I left.

In the interests of balance, I have to report that I did go to a third records office this week. I went in with only sketchy information on what I was looking for, but the staff member I met was brilliant.

He gave me an hour of his time as we scoured records looking for what I wanted. When we couldn't find it, he made a series of useful suggestions on how to proceed. When I got more information, I returned to the office and the same guy came to the counter and told his colleague that he was familiar with my search and was willing to help again.

And after another half an hour, we found what I was looking for. I'd like to pay tribute to that excellent public servant while simultaneously deploring the unprofessionalism, laziness, rule breaking and alcohol dependency of some of the other civil servants I encountered this week.

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.

Cry me a river, Michael Dell

Dell Computers came to build their shitty, always-crashing PCs in Limerick because it was a) inside the EU and b) the IDA offered them tax incentives to do so.

But now it seems like they're upping sticks sometime very soon. Canny people might have spotted them building a huge new manufacturing plant in Lodz in Poland and wondered about the likelihood of them keeping two EU factories going in the current economic climate.

Well, according to the Wall Street Journal, that's exactly what their intentions are. They're laying off 8,000 people, and it looks like closing Limerick will account for 3,000 of those. This will devastate the Shannon region economically. Not that Dell care, of course.

Their share price plummeted today when the news began leaking out. Good enough for them, I say.

Good enough especially for poor impoverished Dell founder, Michael Dell, whose desperation for some cash is what's behind this latest shafting of the Irish people whose tax helped fund his entry into the EU's lucrative PC market.

Michael Dell's eponymous firm has largely justified the preposterous situation whereby computers made in Ireland cost more here than almost anywhere else because they were providing employment here.

Well, since they won't be for much longer, should we expect a 30% cut in prices? My hairy arse, we should. Dell will relocate to Poland, pay the staff a quarter or less of the Limerick wages and seek to pocket the difference.

And whose pockets will enjoy this sudden deluge of cash? Michael Dell of course, the world's third or fourth richest man, a man who clearly wasn't as tight for cash four years ago, when he gave George W. Bush the maximum $250,000 an individual could contribute for his 2004 re-election campaign.

A man who the poor deluded people of the University of Limerick thought fit to honour.

But there's a recession on, and Dell needs money clearly. After all, he's got a $250,000 annual property tax bill on his 33,000 square feet Austin mansion (see pic above). And fuel costs for his Porsche Boxter, his Hummer and his other vehicles are no doubt rising too.

Dell will be blaming that recession on the need for the firm to abandon Limerick. But of course, the real reason that Dell are moving is because they failed, not just the people of Limerick, but themselves.

Michael Dell took on Steve Jobs at Apple very publicly, spoofing that his firm were the more innovative. But despite Apple's products being overpriced trendy trash, Dell has still seen their share valuation go from less than Dell's to triple Dell's in only a few years.

Dell is a shitty firm who have let down the Irish taxpayer and their loyal Limerick workforce. They make crappy computers which break down and crash a lot. Their customer service is famously abysmal.

I hope the Irish people boycott Dell's products. I hope the University of Limerick demand their honorary degree back. And most of all, I hope Michael Dell ends up unable to pay either that property tax or contribute to anymore redneck political campaigns anytime soon.

It's not easy being mean

Trust me. It's no fun being a contrarian.

People tend to make assumptions based on what you haven't said rather than what you have.

When you point out the obvious - like, for example, the unelectability of a Democratic American Presidential candidate who has no experience or the electability of a photogenic Republican Veep candidate, all of a sudden it's assumed in direct contradiction of all evidence that you're rabidly Republican and have left the planet.

This is not fun for me.

Similarly, when you point out some inconvenient truths, like the appalling inequity between men and women over reproductive rights, along comes a gang of fembloggers to depict you as some sort of Taliban.

Again, not so fun, and rather difficult to explain to the Marxist-Feminist better half.

So it is with a degree of trepidation that I say this - John McGuinness, junior Fianna Fail minister of State, is correct.

People want him to resign because he said there is a culture within the Irish civil service that stifles ambition, and that reform is hampered by overprotection of the civil service by their unions.

At the risk of being depicted in some quarters as a neo-liberal wingnut, I have to agree with the junior minister on this one.

I'm sorry to be mean, but there it is. He's absolutely right. The Irish civil service is overstaffed by a large cohort (and I mean in the tens of thousands) of lazy, skiving, entitled, pensioned-up ne'er-do-wells who wouldn't last ten minutes in a job in the private sector.

Of course there are diligent, hard working civil servants. But they're seriously outnumbered by the flexi-time brigade who'd rather apply for career breaks to go travelling, demand auto-promotion every couple of years, and count their end-salary pensions than do a day's proper work.

Just think about any interaction you have with the state. If it isn't the Revenue Commission you're dealing with, you'll be waiting a long, long time for a response. And when it comes, it will be slapdash, ill-considered and probably wrong.

Then you'll have to write to them again, fill in forms again, phone them up and wait endlessly on the end of the line again, while some surly weapon busy gossipping with her mates or some bored graduate completes his fantasy football line-up before deigning to take your call out of the queue.

We've all heard stories about how some parts of the civil service (don't) work. My favourite was told to me by a pal who once did a stint in the Births, Marriages and Deaths office.

On day one, he noticed the phone ringing and no one answering it. When he went to lift the phone, he was advised by his senior that if he did so, it would from then on become his responsibility to do so all the time. So he didn't bother. And so the phones were never answered.

Now, there are major difficulties in overseeing the reform of the service, largely because there are so many working in it. That's a large cohort of people, who unlike a lot of the population working in the private sector, do make a point of voting.

That makes it profoundly difficult for any government that wants re-electing to do anything about the excess of entitlements, massive pensions, guaranteed promotions and daily skiving that exists in the civil service here.

And it is exactly this threat that is being made by the civil service unions demanding McGuinness's head on a spike. They're effectively saying, 'Leave our pork alone, or we'll turf you all out of office.'

And to a very small degree, you can see their point. Why should they have to give up their easy life when the politicians still enjoy some of the highest wages and longest holidays in the world?

But as a taxpayer working in the ever harder-hit private sector, looking at our delapidated health service that can't afford to screen women for mammograms or immunise all at-risk children against cancer, looking at our overcrowded schools and their rundown portakabin classrooms, I want to see a cull in the civil service. A big one.

I want to see someone with the cojones to axe the pension schemes, axe the job security, cut the numbers, and reduce the lengthy list of perks in the Irish civil service.

Under benchmarking, civil servants were pegged against private sector wage levels. This being Ireland, it meant that they ended up being paid around a third MORE than their private sector equivalents, while enjoying a whole ream of things, like auto-promotion, job security and state-subsidised pensions, that no one in the private sector ever gets.

It's now time for the benchmarking to flow in the opposite direction. It's time that the civil service experienced the job losses, rationalisation, pay freezes, and slashed perks that the private sector in Ireland has been experiencing during this economic downturn.

Until we address the huge pork barrel that is the Irish civil service, we're never going to be able to correct our state and our economy to ride out this recession.

Fair play to John McGuinness (and it's rare I say that about anyone in Fianna Fail) for recognising that and putting his career on the line to say so in public.

What a bunch of bankers

So the national pay talks fell apart as everyone succumbed to recession fever.

So far, so predictable.

The trade unions threaten to pull out and start cutting individual deals with employers. The employers are warned by their representatives not to do any individual deals with unions. These are standard negotiating positions in a stand-off.

Someone sensible in government suggests everyone go and have a holiday and calm down for a couple of weeks. And everyone does so, happily. Except for one bunch of greedy unionised bastards who just aren't prepared to wait, and who want to kick off their pay claim at a truly stratospheric 10%.

Who are these cheeky bollixes?

Why, bankers, of course.

Yup, the very sector who ballsed up the world economy are the first in Ireland with their hands out for a bumper payday, now that we're entering a downturn.

The same people who inflated the property bubble, engaged in ridiculously risky lending, and who ran their own businesses like it was a casino crap-shoot are now talking about the need to 'inflation-proof their terms and conditions'.

You can see why they might need to 'inflation-proof' their capacious earnings by perusing this Daily Mail article on how London bankers are having to tighten their belts in these straitened times.

You couldn't make it up. Never mind the fact that everyone else (even the public sector) is looking at job losses and pay freezes, the people working in the single sector most responsible for the current economic carnage want a bonus for ballsing it all up.

I hope the banks, whose share prices have fallen between 50% and 70% in recent months, respond appropriately.

With mass sackings.