Poison Pens 4: Propping up the Property Ladder

The pips are now officially squeaking.

As the Department of Finance sends auditors into the banks to view their loan books, the developers are beginning to panic properly now.

Previously, they'd been merely concerned. No one was buying their boxy apartments in the burbs for the inflated prices they'd listed them at. They'd tried every stunt in the book, from offering interest-free loans, to throwing in boats or Bulgarian apartments to seal the deal.

But the public weren't interested in buying in a plummeting market, and those few mad enough to consider it can't get a mortgage from the banks.

There seemed to be some light at the end of the tunnel for the developer classes when the budget was presented last week. The state was now going to offer its own sub-prime mortgages which would only apply to the surfeit of new build homes still on the builders' books.

Talk about a bail-out of builders masquerading as helping the homeless!

But now that people are actually being repossessed, there is little tolerance for Government stunts aimed at propping up the property market.

In recent times, the banks have been keeping the whole routine going, rolling over the interest on massive (by which I mean from the tens of millions upwards) loans to developers.

But that is likely to come crashing to a halt once the Government auditors oversee the banks' books. After all, why should the rest of us pay our mortgage under threat of repossession when builders who owe stratospheric amounts of money are being facilitated?

The builders know that many of them are likely to go bust if they are made pay the interest on their loans and the Government bail-out doesn't work.

Which is why we're seeing this week their mouthpieces in the media spinning like mad on their behalfs.

From Independent Newspapers come two classics of the genre: the first for grown-ups by someone who ought to know better (and perhaps does), the second a piece of cartoon analysis by an Evening Herald useful idiot.

In his piece, McWilliams paints his usual colourful pen portrait of his creation Breakfast Roll Man, who starred in his epoch-defining book 'The Pope's Children'.

But now Breakfast Roll Man is on his uppers - the developments won't sell, he can't afford the bank loan, pressure mounting on all sides. It's not an entirely sympathetic picture, but McWilliams ensures to inject some pathos into it.

Where McWilliams lets himself down is when he concludes that Breakfast Roll Man was duped by Bertie, and deserves a dig out of his own. This duplicitous piece of writing runs contrary to all common sense.

But since McWilliams was involved in advising the Government on the bank guarantee, we should take this latest message from him seriously. This is what he is advocating, and he currently has the ear of those in power.

The Evening Herald article is way more transparent. It's an outrageous puff piece in favour of granting Sean Dunne planning for his white elephant Ballsbridge tower before he is declared bankrupt.

Sadly, it's not available online. Let me judiciously present a few representative gobbets for you to choke on:

"Were the city planners pleased? Oh no. The well-heeled resident Leafies of lush Ballsbridge got on their mobiles to the Irish Times and muttered darkly about the destruction of Ballsbridge - meaning their snooty little enclave would no longer be as exclusive nor their houses as expensive."

It's priceless, isn't it? The coinage of the term 'Leafies', for example, as if leaves were exclusive to Dublin Four. What was wrong with the established pejorative term of 'Deefer', I wonder?
Then the snide reference to the Irish Times, the depiction of Ballsbridge as an 'enclave' - gated it is not - all add up to paint a desperate picture of little Dunne versus Big Bastard D4 snobs.

But wait, there's more. So much more.

"After all, Dunne deserves our support and indeed admiration. He's a swaggering, carefree buccaneer, who lives life to the full, takes terrible risks and spends his money rather than squirrelling it under the mattress. In short, like his tower, he's a diamond in the rough."

Let's parse that a little. A buccaneer is a pirate. It's probably the most honest word used by the author, the aforementioned useful idiot, Gwen Halley. Mind you, she likely wouldn't have used it if she knew its meaning.

But a pirate is indeed what Dunne is. And yes, he did indeed take terrible risks. Unfortunately, they didn't work out. He gambled and lost. But Gwen thinks the planning system should see 'the bigger picture' by throwing him the lifeline of planning permission.

Perhaps if Dunne had squirrelled his money away, perhaps if the nation and the Government had all done so, instead of squandering our new-found wealth (Dunne on leveraging property deals, the Government on pork barrel infrastructure and propping up their funders in construction, the nation on easy credit and inflated mortgages) we'd all be better placed to face this recession.

McWilliams and Halley are spinning on behalf of the developers, and Independent Newspapers is facilitating their doing so.

But nothing will save the developer class now. Sean Dunne will go bust, and so will Breakfast Roll Man.

The only remaining issue is how much money will the State (via this preposterous sub-prime lending scheme) and the rest of us (via buying those boxy apartments in the burbs in a falling market) waste in propping up the property ladder until its fall can no longer be postponed.

Catch the pigeon!

It appears that the phoney war between Iran and the USA/UK has reached the levels of cartoon comedy already.

According to reports, the ayatollahs arrested two 'spy pigeons' who were flying suspiciously near their controversial uranium enrichment facility, which the Western powers allege is being used to develop nuclear bomb capacity.

The ever sober and responsible online editors at Sky News' website have produced this mock-up below of the errant birds:

However, I'm more inclined to envisage the event something along the lines of this:


Only, Dick Dastardly would be wearing a big, bushy Mullah beard, Muttley would be in a burqa and the pigeon would be sporting a Star of David, of course.

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:

Budget carnage

Did you enjoy your decade of gombeen government?

I hope you did, because the bill just arrived:

1% 'levy' on all earnings.
2% over 100K.
HSE middle management axed; review of public service to find more job cuts.
Decentralisation paused till 2011.
8c a litre on petrol, 50c on pack of fags, 50c on bottle of wine.
'Review' of pension reserve fund (he's going to raid it later.)
Dublin Metro on pause.
Over 70s med card axed for those who don't qualify - but they'll get a 400 euro donation towards med costs in its place.
Capital gains tax up.
10 euro tax on airport departures, 2 euro for 'shorter' journeys.
Tax on second homes and let homes, but not on homes for sale but not sold (got to look after those poor builders).
Child benefit halved for 18 year olds, and to be scrapped in a couple of years.

When your next pay cheque arrives, notably lighter than before, remember who to blame. You'll get a chance to have your say next year, when the local government elections come around.

(Pic shamelessly nicked from the geniuses at The Irish Sentinel)

So who goes to jail?

Now that economic armageddon has been averted/postponed/cancelled (delete as your confidence in the future dictates), who's going to carry the can?

Taxpayers, of course, will be paying in real terms for the banking and trading sectors' mistakes.

But will any of the criminals who brought us to this point be held accountable?

In Britain, it seems that despite nationalisation of four banks the only penalty for the bankers will be the removal of their bonuses this year. Big swinging mickey. How about removing their pay packets too, then removing their freedom?

In America, the bankers will be inflicted with 'oversight'. Apart from the fact that oversight should have been going on from day one, this seems to indemnify those responsible for this mess from any responsibility.

So we remain in the asymmetrical risk situation, whereby bankers make tons of money when their irresponsible bets come off, but lose little or nothing when they don't.

And in Ireland? No penalties for the bankers thus far, despite the state underwriting all their mess. And I predict that tomorrow's emergency budget will hammer the taxpayer while continuing to reward the big losers who caused this mess - the bankers and the builders.

Nick Leeson, now a successful employee of Galway United FC, went to jail for this sort of irresponsible investing. I'd love to see the many others who emulated his model of speculation receive a similar penalty.

But they won't, you can be sure of that.

A little bell will ring

In a few hours, in New York, a little bell will ring.

And then all your hard work, a lifetime's effort of diligence and sacrifice, will begin to vanish. All that you saved, all that you invested, all that you salted away in pensions for when you're old which is sooner than you'd like it to be, will start to erode, like salt in a rainstorm.

You think it's been bad already, with indices like the Dow and Nikkei falling 7-10% a day, and the Iseq a mere fraction of what it was only a year ago.

But once that little bell rings, complex mathematics overseen by overpaid shouting white men will take over, and all the many hours of your effort, all the careful scrimping and saving, the self-denial, the sacrifices you made, they'll all begin to fall in value.

Not in real value. You put those hours in, you did the work, you strove to ensure the future for you and your family. That value remains in your character and the admiration of those who love you and witnessed how hard you slogged.

But in monetary value, a large proportion of your efforts is about to vanish for no good reason other than the greed of bankers and traders and their deliberately opaque and complex system of self-reward.

The solution is NOT to do what is currently being done. The solution is to do the exact opposite. Rather than ensuring their losses, it is time to hold them culpable for them.

It's a solution I'm prepared to bet no government in the world will implement, not even Iceland which officially went broke as an entire nation yesterday. But it's the right solution.

It may provide you with a little comfort today, after the little bell rings and your savings, investments, pensions and stocks start to diminish before your very eyes, to know what the answer is to this economic meltdown.

That's why I offer it to you. Remember who's responsible for this mess and hold them to account. They just stole years of your working life and pissed it up the wall.

Otherwise, when that little bell rings, take cover. A global depression is coming out swinging.

Update: It's bad alright.

The reality of deadbeat dads

Last week, Minister for (in)Justice Dermot Ahern answered a parliamentary question in the Oireachtas about the inequality suffered by Irish fathers.

His answer was that existing legislation was perfectly acceptable in ensuring the relationship of children with their fathers following parental separation and divorce.

This is utter bollocks as everyone in the country knows. Unmarried fathers have to actually apply to be considered parents of their own children.

Fathers who separate from their children's mothers, no matter what the reason (short of maternal drug abuse or imprisonment) can expect to lose their homes and children in the family law courts.

All this inequality is based on two pillars of untruth - the outmoded prejudice that Mommy knows best, and the myth of the deadbeat dad.

That's why I must pay tribute to today's Daily Mail, whose reactionary politics would normally preclude it from depicting campaigning fathers as anything other than Spidey-suit clad loons.

Their article by writer William Leith is a superlative testimony to the reality of separated fathers' lives.

It should be obligatory reading for the single-mom agitators, who would rather see taxes spent on third party childminding rather than see legislation implemented to ensure children receive proper upbringing by both their parents equitably.

It should also be read by ignorant, complacent men in power like Dermot Ahern, who is only a marital separation away from doing the McDonalds weekend parenting shift himself.

Poison Pens 3: Speaking with forked tongues

So, you're an Irish tabloid editor and Grainne Seoige has finally managed to have that fella removed from her nice RTE couch and replaced with her own sister.

You run the only evening national paper in the country, so you're guaranteed to have the first review of their new show.

But if it's bad, and you slam it, you'll never get access to either of the photogenic, units-selling sisters again. And if it's bad and you don't slam it, then the readers will see through your vapid puffing of poo.

So, like the RTE producers who gambled on the sister act, you hope and pray it works.

Then it doesn't. It's a car crash, unwatchably bad. How do you review it?

Well, if you're the Evening Herald, you pan it and puff it all at the same time! Genius!

Front page today bills their TV critic Pat Stacey's review inside on page three. And Pat pulls no punches - "one great, big, private joke", "the Seoige sisters absolutely drip with smugness", "like being smothered with a pink blanket at a pyjama party", "a ramshackle mess", "catastrophically bad."

Well, that's the end of the Evening Herald running any 'exclusives' about the Seoige sisters for the next century or so, right?

Wrong. Because thirty pages in is where the Evening Herald destroys its own (admittedly greatly diminished) integrity by hedging the bet.

Their 'columnist' Sinead Ryan is one you can always rely on for vapid girly frothiness. There's not a subject on Earth she can't trivialise with her shallow insights.

And of course, she's got an opinion on the Seoiges that she just has to share with us - "super, sassy and sexy", "a winner", "fab combination", deserving of a "prime time Friday or Saturday night slot."

So, what is the casual reader, who missed the Seoige show, to make of the Evening Herald's reviews?

Is the show catastrophically bad or a fab combination? Is it like being smothered with a pink blanket or deserving a prime time slot? Is it somehow both, in the self-contradictory world of the Evening Herald?

And is the Evening Herald a newspaper with opinions and reviews that can be trusted, or is it a self-contradictory bag of shite?

What sort of cold-hearted cunt is Barack Obama?

George Hussein Obama, centre, in Huruma shanty town, Nairobi, Kenya, where he lives unaided by his somewhat wealthier brother Barack.

There are serious questions about Barack Obama that aren't being answered.

Questions like: was he actually born in Hawaii or was he born in Kenya, which would invalidate him from even running?

Questions like: what did he actually do during his years as a community activist and why have his employment records suddenly been made classified the minute journalists started asking to look at them?

But the most serious question about Barack Obama is the one about his character.

What sort of a man can run for high office, the highest on Earth, promising his vision of care for all, expressing his concern that no one be left behind and that the weakest be protected, while all the time he has abandoned his own brother to a diseased shanty town and Third World squalor?

Barack Hussein Obama is that man.

And George Hussein Obama is his brother, seen above being propped up by a journalist and friend due to either illness or drug use.

He lives in Huruma shanty town in Nairobi, next door to a low-rent brothel in an area where AIDS is endemic. He doesn't work, smokes dope all day, and lives with his aunt on a pittance he raises by begging. He also appears to be in poor health.

Barack has never given George any help. He's never even given George a penny to help himself. But he's written multi-million selling books boasting about his pride in family, in his heritage. Somehow, he's never seen fit to share the tiniest bit of that wealth with his own brother, who is forced to beg for a living in a Third World slum instead.

Despite that, poor George still supports Barack and has the whole neighbourhood backing him in the forthcoming presidential race.

I'm not American and I don't have a vote. Even if I did, I'd be a natural Democrat in US terms. But I cannot endorse such a man as Barack Obama.

I'm getting saddened at how so many otherwise intelligent people have fallen for the rhetoric here. Everyone seems to be sleepwalking into believing they've found the black JFK rather than actually questioning the candidate, and properly examining who they're seeking to elect.

John McCain has a thousand pages of medical records, was tortured in Nam and is running for this post four or eight years too late. John McCain, if elected, might die in office and leave Sarah Palin in charge, which is scary for many people.

John McCain has a lot of money, cars and houses. People pick on him for that. But Obama has a lot of wealth too. The difference, for me, is that John McCain hasn't left anyone in his family behind in a squalid gutter.

That's probably because John McCain was the person left behind in the squalor for years when he was a POW in Asia.

John McCain is demonstrably a man of integrity. A man who can't remember how many homes he has, perhaps. Let's say he's an old, occasionally forgetful man of integrity.

But any multi-millionaire man of power and influence who would leave his brother to fester in such a hellhole without even offering to help is no man of integrity.

And when that man then starts spouting about how he wants to care for everyone in his nation, I start thinking about his abandoned brother and wonder whether what I'm hearing is hypocrisy, psychosis or simply cynical lying to get elected at all costs.

Barack Obama is a man without character who left his poor brother to rot in a festering, Aids-ridden, malarial Third World shanty town, despite being himself a millionaire who boasts of his desire to help everyone he can.

Bear that in mind. Don't say I didn't warn you when he turns out not to be the black JFK after all.

P.S. Some Americans wish to help poor George even if his big brother the millionaire senator does not. Here's the link for Help George Obama, if you're interested in being a better human being than Barack Obama.

The world according to one-eyed men

Those jolly japesters in Republican Sinn Fein (the ones who split in 1986 when Gerry and the boys in the Provos went soft by deciding to run in Brit elections) aren't happy at all.

Apparently the PSNI (or 'British Colonial Police' as they are known within RSF circles) have had the audacity to drive around in the North, talking to the locals!

According to a press release from the three men and a dog in RSF, this "use of vans" is "putting lives at risk" because they are "being used in a sinister attempt to build relations with local people."

Why is such relationship-building so sinister, pray tell? Because it "thereby increases British intelligence capacity and capabilities in Ireland," of course.

They're beyond satire. They really are.

Now we're for it

An actual Iseq crash yesterday.

A 7% or so collapse in the Dow.

The Nikkei heading south tonight amid Japanese sub-prime problems adding to the international concerns from the USA.

And the likelihood of the FTSE going lower still tomorrow on the back of more concerns about British banks.

And no chance of legislation in America till Thursday because the Jews are celebrating their new year.

And all this on top of the disastrous market year globally already.

Now we're really for it.

Wave goodbye to your pension plans, your stock portfolios, and start worrying about the safety of wherever your savings are.

Buckle up. It's going to be a very bumpy ride.

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.

Someone in Dell agrees with me

It appears that someone inside Dell agrees with what I wrote about their forthcoming shafting of Limerick, the IDA and Irish customers.

In any case, they've added my post to their media page (see below for screen grab - look at the section named 'Technology News' on the bottom left.)

Let's see how long that stays up before their PR police catch and delete!

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.

A fright with every flight

Sky News (same three headline stories every five minutes) was running a story about another travel agent collapse on heavy rotation this morning.

XL are apparently Britain's third largest travel agent. They have thousands of Irish customers too.

I'd rather leave it to experts within the travel industry to debate the effects of the credit crunch, or fuel prices, or the global economic downturn, or environmental concerns upon their industrial sector.

I do have sympathy for the customers stranded abroad today, and especially for the staff, who found out they'd lost their jobs when they turned on the news this morning, having heard nothing from the craven management whose decision-making led to this demise.

But it seems to me that something a little more profound has taken place than just corporate cocking-up.

This collapse, like those that preceded it and those that will follow it, like the consolidation of the airlines (BA and American Airlines look like the latest to buddy up in the ongoing turbulence of the travel sector), has to do with the democratisation of travel.

In short, this is a victory for the internet. The web's ability to put a vendor anywhere in touch with a potential market of the whole (online) world was inevitably going to lead to professional middlemen losing their jobs.

They're losing their jobs because people no longer need their services (except for special circumstances where professional planning assistance is useful to help organise complex travel arrangements).

They're losing their jobs because people can tell a good deal from a bad one simply by scouring some aggregator and price comparison sites online. The global market drove prices down.

But markets overshoot. And the Ryanair effect of no-frills, no-comfort, no-rights flights is for many people a discomfort too far.

I've discussed the Ryanair effect before on this blog, especially their contempt for customers, their maniacal chairman, their bullshit additional charges that add up to multiples of the advertised price of the flight, and their sense of social responsibility to the disabled.

But the Ryanair effect has pressured prices and practices of other airlines downwards too. And this is what is leading to the streamlining of the industry, as the last fat is burnt off the former national flagship airlines, but as also standards are cut to the bone in emulation of the Ryanair model.

The position of equilibrium for consumers is a happy medium between price and service. Unfortunately, as yesterday's latest Ryanscare emergency at Dublin airport demonstrated, Ryanscare standards of care and service are not sufficient.

We don't want a fright with every flight. We don't want the Seventies back either, when it cost a month's wages to fly one-way to London, but you got lovely meals and could smoke and flirt with the trolley dollies.

We want to be able to travel in a modicum of comfort, at a commensurate price set by a competitive market, in stringently monitored safety standards.

Memo to SDLP

Dear SDLP,
Your vote has been declining in recent elections. People have been querying the party's very raison d'etre, even including senior party members.

Your leader has ignominiously touted his mandate to Fianna Fail in a desperate attempt to shore up some electoral relevance, and been embarrassingly rebuffed.

Now he's proposed scrapping designation, a nice recipe for a return to sectarian majority rule, in an attempt to grab some headlines.

In short, you're still on your own and you need every vote you can get.

So would it not make a bit of sense to sort out your communications?

I got a letter from the SDLP through the front door. There wasn't even a phone number on it, or any mention of how to contact my local SDLP representative.

On the SDLP's website, there is no mention of how to go about joining the party, if anyone was so inclined.

Is it any wonder that the electorate and membership of the SDLP is declining to the extent that senior party members are prostituting themselves at FF, when basic communications are so lax?

Sort it out, or else stand back and watch your decline into irrelevance.

JC Skinner wants your vote

There is a large proportion of the American electorate who are unconvinced by either Obama's vision thing or McCain's maverick conservatism.

Reluctantly, I have finally agreed to put my name forward following a massive groundswell of appeals that I enter my candidacy in the forthcoming election:

I was in the Provos ...

... and all I got was this lousy power-sharing executive.

Well, I wasn't, but a lot of people I'm aware of, have met, have socialised with, were part of the militant Republican movement.

The war was declared over some years back. Now the British overlords have confirmed that the transition to mainstream political activity is complete.

I suppose there wasn't much time left for Martin McGuinness (see pic, far right) to be holding IRA council meetings since his day job as Deputy First Minister to Ian Paisley and Mr Iris Robinson (who himself was a terrorist in his day, as the people of Clontibret can testify, see pic below) takes up so many hours.

But today's final nail in the Provo coffin must be hard to bear for some of the ground level volunteers - the people who took a guerilla war to what were often violent, brutish and sadistic British troops.

They've got out of prison early, which I wasn't a great fan of. But where are they now, the best years of their lives spent fighting a civil war or incarcerated? Sure some of them have got nice state jobs like Marty McGuinness, as 'community workers' and the like.

But most of them must now be wondering what was it all for? This paltry power-sharing deal? The same deal as Sunningdale offered so many decades ago? For Martin McGuinness to swan around preposterously posing as a peacemaker to Iraqis?

And what of the victims? Not just the victims of Provo attacks, but the victims of Provo domination of neighbourhoods, the victims of Provo intimidation of individuals, the victims of Provo insistence that they and only they could speak for Irish Republicanism?

How do they feel today?

Well, the Unionists now have what they wanted. They have Stormont back, they have made the IRA go away, they have their gerrymandered veto on Irish reunification. They have their pet Provos in the ha'penny power places.