Death by a thousand cuts

With a title like that, you're possibly expecting another economic rant from me.

Nope, it's option two on this occasion - this rancid government.

I wish I didn't feel compelled to pen my outrage on these two topics so often. It's wearying and depressing to return again and again to stare into the abyss and yell back what I see.

God only knows what you lot feel about it.

(Well, actually, Statcounter knows. And he says you're way more interested when I write about dead porn stars, or tattooing in Goa, or music piracy, or Irish whiskey, or the farce that is Ulster-Scots. Anything, in other words, other than the above two conversation-stoppers.)

So I'll try to think of posting about tattooed porn stars pirating Ulster-Scots albums or something similarly gripping later this week.

Remember when John O'Donoghue got forced out of his cosy, parasitic sinecure?

It felt like something had shifted in the universe. A senior politician in Ireland quit? That hadn't happened since forever.

But now that lying lowlife Willie O'Dea is gone too.

And Brian Lenihan, the last intelligent member of cabinet and the only one with any sort of respect outside a cumann singalong, is way more ill than they are publicly letting on.

And hoppity shortarse Martin Cullen is soon set to depart, what with his back finally caving in (likely due to his utter lack of spine.)

That leaves three seats at the top table soon to be empty,and let's not forget that Harney is only in her supersized chair because nobody else in government is taking enough hallucinogens to think running the Department of Health is a good idea of a career move.

And a level down the greasy pole, their margin is wafer thin in the Dail due to two by-elections and the distaste of panic-stricken backbenchers to continue supporting the insupportable.

Never mind the ever-skittish Greens, and the collection of allegedly Independent village idiots and parish pump attendants their every vote is now reliant on.

Finally, this has roused Fine Gael, many years later than it should have, and we have the riveting sight of blustering Enda in the Dail.

Obviously, with their huge poll lead and the almost unimaginable dream of possible one-party rule, they want to deliver the knockout blow as quick as is humanly possible.

After all, who knows when Labour will cop on and disassociate themselves from the unions' ruinous and publicly unpopular campaign to exempt overpaid, underworked public sector workers with job security from sharing the burden of the recession?

But thus far, the blueshirts remain utterly ineffectual, reliant on the Continuity Greens (the ones still technically in the tent, as opposed to McKenna's Real Greens, De Burca's Official Greens or any of the others who've already walked in disgust) to do any real damage.

The only thing that seems likely to prevent this government limping along, dying the death of a thousand cuts as one rat after another speeds for safety, is the incompetence of the incumbents.

God forbid that a government in Ireland changed because the public got disgusted by its corruption and incompetence and demanded its removal.

No, instead we must have, as we always do, some ridiculously irrelevant issue to get collectively mental about for a week, until before you know it, someone's off up the Aras and those fecking posters sprout on the lampposts all over again.

When O'Donoghue resigned, he whined that others in government had done much worse and seen no harm come to them. Why, his baffled mutton head seemed to ask, am I being picked on?

This week, we've seen O'Dea moaning exactly the same tune.

And so it will go, on. Some of them will slip out the backdoor, pleading illness. But those which remain will face a scrutiny that comes many years too late.

None of them will withstand such scrutiny. All of them will feel aggrieved, to have their past behaviour judged by proper standards of probity at last, when for years they quite rightly believed they could get away with anything, because they always did.

Then they'll be gone, with big cheerio cheques in their pockets, and we'll be left with blustering Enda, a prolonged recession, no jobs and a huge deficit.

And it'll happen all over again in another few decades, unless we start jailing people.

We should start with prosecuting O'Dea, who is guilty of perjury. We should go back to Ahern, who cannot explain away his financial shenanigans to the taxman, and prosecute him too.

Until these people are held accountable, they're beyond the law and will act accordingly.

And exactly the same principle applies to the banksters too.

(Oh, look! This post is about the economy after all!)

Bankrupt of ideas, bankrupt of money

Ireland is bankrupt financially and its government is bankrupt of ideas on how to solve the problem.

This is to be expected, disastrous though it may be. We are now reaping the property whirlwind that laughably went by the title of 'Celtic Tiger' for the past decade or so.

We were warned, repeatedly, but wouldn't listen. Specifically, we bought into the idea (metaphorically and literally) that there was a property 'ladder' we had to climb, even as prices went up indefinitely and spectacularly.

We bought into the idea that rent was dead money, and that we should all mortgage ourselves to the hilt in the hope of making ever greater returns as prices rose forever.

We know now that it was all a 'Ponzi scheme', a pyramid selling project designed to enrich the developers, who as we know from the tribunals, were backhanding a proportion of that cash to prominent members of Fianna Fail.

Now the credit crunch has happened, and there is a threat of the entire country going to the wall, as Iceland just did.

Our government's response? Raid the pension reserve fund to buy zombie banks that lent money to the developers. Plough hundreds of millions into 'affordable home' schemes, which would be better titled 'developer bailouts'. Then slash public services and public sector pensions (but not ministerial pensions or car entitlements, of course.)

So we're in a series of laughable positions after yesterday's mini-budget (the first of a series, I predict.)

We hand over nearly a billion euro in overseas development aid annually, even as we're expensively BORROWING the money that we then hand over to African despots for vanity projects that achieve little in sub-Saharan Africa.

And this on the same day that the latest exchequer figures came out indicating that we need to find 600 million euro MORE than we thought we needed back in October! (Which is why there will inevitably be more mini-budgets, since this government is incapable of working from up-to-date figures.)

We'd be better off sacking Irish Aid in its entirety and cutting a cheque to Oxfam or Goal, who are at least efficient and responsive to the needs of the communities they work in.

Or we could accept both the argument that we're skint and the argument that Africa does not benefit from the aid we send, and cut our borrowed losses.

But that's just one billion out of around 20 we have to find from somewhere. Sure, cuts are necessary, especially in the public sector. Actual staff cuts are needed, to weed out the Tetris-playing chaff. And pay cuts too, though that sort of happened yesterday.

What's most frightening about the position we find ourselves in is that clearly the government, such as it is - a village solicitor who inherited both his parliamentary seat and the Taoiseachship, a rural housewife as number two, a moustachioed gun-toting idiot in the jump seat and a collection of failures, ne'er-do-wells and shysters as supporting cast - haven't the foggiest notion what to do.

They should quit is what they should do. They should go to the country and seek a mandate to reverse the damage they have inflicted on this country over the past decade. They won't get that mandate, of course. Instead, they'll be slaughtered at the polls. But it would show good grace, respect for democracy and that rare thing in Irish politics, penitence for their mistakes.

But they won't quit. They won't even admit to doing wrong. Last night, Justice Minister Dermot Ahern told the nation that our current economic plight was no one's responsibility. Wrong, minister. It is YOUR responsibility, and that of your government.

Fianna Fail historically has always been a shallow organisation when it comes to principles, and they are beloved of playing government and opposition all at the same time. Instead of policies, they fly kites to guage public opinion, backing down if pensioners march on Leinster House, or pushing ahead if the public sigh heavily and accept another bitter pill.

But at this point in time not only are Fianna Fail bereft of ideas, they have also bankrupted the country quite spectacularly.

It's time for them to go. Those who created the problem cannot be trusted to resolve it. Especially since they are Fianna Fail, who can never be trusted with anything anyway.

Every day, every hour until they leave office is another day, another hour where the possibility of recovery is postponed or delayed further.

And while that continues, while they take 160K flights to America and swan about in 150K Mercs driven by Gardai on 70K euro a year, things will keep getting worse for us, up and until the point where the International Monetary Fund is called in.

We're really not too far from that vista right now, and if it comes about, the pain will be unimaginable - Russia in the late Yeltsin era, Argentina a few years back, that sort of national, hard to forget, deprivation.

We can't let it come to that. The bereft bunch of chancers on the government benches today looked guilty and sheepish and most of all tired. They should go, for their own dignity's sake, but primarily because every second they stay they hurt this country more.

The lies they tell us

(Number one in an occasional series)

Minister for Defence Willie O'Dea, writing in his Sunday Independent column in Summer 2002, spoke out about the Nice Treaty then being debated in the country. He told us:

"The second myth is that the Nice Treaty will mean mass immigration from the new EU member countries in Eastern Europe. This is probably the most odious of the myths propagated by some in the "No" campaign."

According to today's Irish Times, over 200,000 people legally migrated to Ireland for work last year, and of those 130,000 came from the new accession states. Just so we're clear - this number does not include asylum seekers or illegal migrants.

The Times quotes the Department of Social and Family Affairs thus:

"Of the 130,000 PPS numbers provided to accession-state nationals during 2006, most were from Poland (87,115), followed by Lithuania (14,805), Slovakia (9,857) and Latvia (7,368)."

Now, doesn't that sound just a little like the mass immigration from new EU member countries in Eastern Europe that Willie O'Dea vociferously swore wasn't going to happen?