according to Fox ‘News’
Front page of the Irish Times today, along with a photo of what looks like Cowen pegging a snow ball at a social welfare recipient:
Cowen says 2009 most difficult year of his political life
“TAOISEACH BRIAN Cowen has described the past 12 months as the most difficult of his political life but has insisted that the economic situation has been stabilised as a result of the measures his Government has taken.”
Seems like Fintan O’Toole was right when he said the terms of the debate have been set and the papers can do nothing but adhere to them. Cowen laid out a list of achievements and a timetable, and here we are 98 days later with letters of congratulation from both the Irish Independent and the Irish Times.
Cowen clears hurdles but he must get off the fence
“The hurdles Cowen identified back at the start of September — “the Lisbon Treaty, restructuring the banking and bringing forward the Budget” — are all overcome, provided Budget 2010 passes, as expected. The Taoiseach can justifiably breathe a sigh of relief at his Government remaining intact.”
How Brian Cowen’s 100 crucial days played out
“All of these Deputies supported the Budget despite speculation that some or all of them might go overboard. Cowen and Carey were also the prime movers at Cabinet in bringing forward the Social Welfare Bill by a week. This passed through the Dáil on Friday December 11th – which was 98 days after Cowen first spoken about a crucial hundred days for the country on the Late Late Show.”
16 Dec 2009
“[The ruling class has constructed] two parallel universes, one in which there seems to be an endless amount of money that can be put into the banking system and another where we have to attack the blind, the disabled, children and the unemployed. It’s remarkable how successful this crude strategy of distracting and dividing people has been.” [Fintan O’Toole, Tonight with Vincent Browne]
The media response to last week’s ‘cowardly‘ ‘budget from Hell‘ has been suitably contradictory and best summed up by the Sunday Independent Editorial writer who described it as ‘courageous masochism‘. While commentators are for the most part agreed that the budget, which focused almost entirely on cutting public sector spending, specifically spending on social welfare and public servant pay, was ‘tough medicine‘, the overriding sentiment is one of satisfaction.
Noel Whelan writing in the Irish Times praised the Taoiseach, “for carrying his Cabinet, his party and his Dail majority through for these necessary draconian measures.” Stephen Collins gave tribute “to the skill with which the public was softened up for the measure and the way it was packaged and delivered.” The Editor summed up the official line on the “harshest budget in the history of the State,” describing it as “courageous, bold, above party politics, above sectional interest and appears to have put the country first.”
The Independent too, while not as openly celebratory, editorialised their feelings under the headline ‘Cowen finally walks the walk‘, writing, “despite being probably the most unpopular [leader] in the history of the state, [he] is managing to get a lot done,” with only one small reservation: “This week’s strong start could be undermined by any weakening of resolve.”
The Irish Examiner’s Jim Power on the other hand had little time to celebrate the forgone conclusion, being too busy looking forward to the next round of cuts: “Despite the harsh nature of the budget, there is still a lot of pain to come…Some measures to stimulate employment would have been welcome, but we can’t have everything.”
A convergence of opinion Garret FitzGerald was surprisingly oblivious to. Writing in the Irish Times the former Fine Gael Taoiseach protested, “no one is actively celebrating the achievement of a further €4 billion fiscal adjustment.” The reader taking for granted he had accidentally omitted the word ‘fantastic’.
In light of the comment above by Fintan O’Toole, author of the much revered ‘Ship of Fools’ and, some might say conflictingly, Assistant Editor of the Irish Times, it may be instructive to look back at the media’s build up coverage to the budget in order to discover whether the media played a role in affirming the ruling class’s “crude strategy of distracting and dividing people.”
There are two prominent features of the reporting in the two weeks leading up to the budget, the first of which is that the nature of the budget had been apparently predetermined, as Jim Power’s comments highlight. The cut of €4 billion was a forgone conclusion and the areas where those billions were to be ‘saved‘ lay in public service pay and social welfare, the ‘big targets‘ according to the Independent. The Government, readers were told, could not “afford to undershoot the €4 billion target.”
The second is that the media were fiercely supportive of the cuts and this support manifested itself in strongly worded calls for Brian Cowen and the political establishment to ‘walk the walk’. The budget provided an opportunity for “clear leadership and good example,” a chance “to resist pressure from vested interests” and “a time for the Government to lead public opinion in the national interest.” “The media,” according to Matt Cooper writing in the Irish Examiner, did “not want to see him fail.”
Other journalists went further still, declaring a state of war: “Decks cleared for budget,” with calls for the Taoiseach to “stick to his guns” and “face down unions” at a “career-defining line in the sand.”
The symptoms of this perceived lack of political manliness were also made abundantly clear, “tax increases are the last resort of weak government;” “the easy option” according to the Irish Times. While the “weakness and indecision” in entering talks with the unions hinted he had “appeared to lose his nerve,” raising “question marks about his continued leadership.” Their eventual collapse saved him from “a political disaster.”
This flirtation with union negotiation, which according to Stephen Collins “exasperated even some of his most loyal supporters,” gave rise to a popular euphemism among journalists, again intended to question the leaders courage, or perhaps his sweet tooth: “There may have been no fudge but some of his colleagues certainly believed they were looking at the beginnings of one;” “Government sources made it clear there was no similar fudge in the offing to avert cuts in child benefit or social welfare rates;” “a fudge could not be ruled out.” As the talk’s ultimately ended in failure, the insult became a warning, “let’s not fudge it next week,” “there is no longer room for mere fudge.”
Of course Cowen did rise to the challenge, implementing the desired cuts and declaring “war on the poor” according to Fintan O’Toole – writing in the Irish Times in one of a small minority of examples of dissenting journalism. Upon fulfilling this call for ‘leadership’ with the ‘draconian’ budget Cowen and his Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan were appropriately rewarded for their “intellectual rigour” and “political determination and courage” in facing “down the trade unions.” The budget was hailed as their “watershed moment,” though one journalist lamented that “the compliments of future historians for addressing the economic crisis will be of little comfort.”
As mentioned above, the nature of the budget had been predetermined long before the details of “one of the most leaked budgets in history” made it into the newspapers. In the weeks ahead of the budget journalists’ time was dominated by search for new and inventive ways to cut towards the magic €4 billion target. As the Irish Times’ Pat McArdle put it, “it is always tempting to play God and outline one’s personal budget.” A temptation he fulfilled seven days later: “What savings can we expect from falling staff numbers over the medium term? What is the minimum size of the public sector required to run the country? Will a property tax be necessary? Will further pay or social welfare cuts be required? Will capital spending have to be eliminated completely?”
Writing in the Irish Times John O’Hagan reiterated the “widespread agreement among independent commentators” that the case for cutting the “over paid and inefficient” public sector was “almost unanswerable.” Epitomising the success of what Gene Kerrigan called the government’s “media team-players” who never fail to depict “the public service as a “bloated” entity, overpaid and lazy.”
An Irish Times Editorial writer declared, “People want the Government to…introduce a budget next week with €4 billion in savings so that we can start believing in ourselves again,” while also intimating that anyone who disagrees doesnt “live in the real world.” There was, we were consistently assured, “general agreement that a €4 billion package is needed.”
Yet an Irish Times/Behaviour Attitudes poll published less than two weeks before the budget found that “more than two-thirds of those surveyed were opposed to welfare cuts, while some 56 per cent said they oppose [public sector] pay cuts.” Clearly then, a general agreement had been made without the consent of the Irish public, a general agreement of the ruling class perhaps.
Alternative budgetary proposals, such as that designed to engender a stimulus plan were for the most part ignored or treated as an after thought. Where this infrequent consideration did arise, it was mentioned in parting, at the end of articles. Even then, the stimulus plans offered were rudimentary at best. One journalist suggested “The car scrappage scheme as an obvious one,” a measure that was in fact introduced to little fanfare: “it will be short term, but may help some businesses survive.” Anything more significant than this was regarded as impossible since “our fiscal position inhibits our capacity to introduce a major stimulus programme.”
Proposals to increase tax where shot down by the likes of Danny McCoy, who insisted that “OECD data show that effective tax rates for high-income earners in Ireland are higher than those in many European countries, including Germany, France and the UK.” A claim which confounded the ‘discovery’ by another journalist “that many lower-income earners pay either no or very little income tax.”
The claim was disputed by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, importantly, five days after the budget: “According to accountants KPMG, the current effective tax rate (including PRSI) for someone earning the equivalent of $100,000 in Ireland is just 34 per cent and for someone on $300,000 it is 44 per cent.” While “unit labour costs (the ratio between productivity and earnings) hardly rose at all in Irish manufacturing between 2000 and 2007. The growth in labour costs last year was slower than the average in the euro zone. This year, unit labour costs are expected to fall by 7 per cent here and rise by 3 per cent in the rest of the euro zone – giving us a relative advantage of 10 per cent this year alone.”
Instead, the debate was as mentioned earlier entirely skewed towards cuts, aimed at increasing ‘competitiveness’ by driving down wages. The assumption being that Irish workers are paid too highly and that “we now need to get back in line, particularly with economies in Europe.” An assumption that is not supported by reputable sources, unquoted in the media. Destatis, the German equivalent of the CSO, found that for all manufacturing employees the “average Irish manufacturing wages are 2.3 percent below the EU-15 average and 17 percent below the average in our peer group (top-10 EU economies).”
During a post budget exchange between Vincent Browne and Fintan O’Toole on Tonight with Vincent Browne, O’Toole described what he saw as a complete failure in responsibility on the part of the media, saying that the media bought into an analysis which says ‘there is no alternative’ (a favoured slogan of former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). He gave the example of a recent ESRI report on subsidies for Irish pensions, which indicated that the introduction of pension relief at a standard rate could bring in a billion Euros, yet there was not a single piece of discussion of this in the Irish media.
Browne asked in response: “Why did that not get headlines in the Irish Times?”
To which O’Toole limply explained: “I think it is because the narrative has been shaped around the fact we are vastly over taxed, which is completely untrue and that wages are far too high, which is also completely untrue. Anything that doesn’t fit into that narrative doesn’t strike people as being news.”
The great irony about this clamour to find ‘savings’, to cut public expenditure and to increase the burden on the poor, is NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency. Set up to take property development-related loans (amounting to an estimated €54 billion) off banks’ balance sheets, NAMA, as one commentator put it, is designed to “overpay for dud assets” in an effort to “prop up insolvent private banks.”
Yet in the 10 days leading up to the Dail vote on the legislation, the media build-up was what you might call mute. Of the dozen or so opinion and analysis articles published between the Irish Examiner, the Irish Independent and the Irish Times, the strongest worded criticism was, “the banks’ fetid loan books” have the “potential to wreck us all.” Somewhat predictably this criticism came only in the context that the public finances have just as much ‘potential’.
Writing on the Anglo Irish fiasco in the Irish Examiner Ivan Yates admitted, “The taxpayer is likely to have to fork out up to €10bn to clear up the mess. NAMA is scheduled to take €28bn of their €70bn loan book.” Plainly, Yates had summed up the massive economic burden one relatively small business venture had condemned the Irish public to bear. Yet in a deftly designed about turn, Yates declared, we “must move on from the blame game and convulsions of public anger” and act to rebuild what his colleague called “this bruised, misused and ransomed country” by “confronting the unsustainability of our public finances and restore economic competitiveness.”
Yates’ position typifies the general media consensus on the economic crisis. While it is widely recognised that a rich elite caused the downturn, the general public should ultimately pay for the recovery.
So where the banking bailout is concerned, there are no calls for ‘leadership in the national interest’, no calls for a ‘war on corrupt financial institutions’, no calls for the slashing the pay of all the ‘greedy, incompetent bankers’ and most importantly no calls ‘to resist pressure from vested interests’.
This “complete failure in responsibility on the part of the media,” paired with the media’s central role in cheerleading the property bubble makes increasingly clear that Noam Chomsky’s observation on the role of the US media is just as applicable to Ireland:
A new MediaShot available here.
“[The ruling class has constructed] two parallel universes, one in which there seems to be an endless amount of money that can be put into the banking system and another where we have to attack the blind, the disabled, children and the unemployed. It’s remarkable how successful this crude strategy of distracting and dividing people has been.” [Fintan O’Toole, Tonight with Vincent Browne]
The media response to last week’s ‘cowardly‘ ‘budget from Hell‘ has been suitably contradictory and best summed up by the Sunday Independent Editorial writer who described it as ‘courageous masochism‘. While commentators are for the most part agreed that the budget, which focused almost entirely on cutting public sector spending, specifically spending on social welfare and public servant pay, was ‘tough medicine‘, the overriding sentiment is one of satisfaction.
Noel Whelan writing in the Irish Times praised the Taoiseach, “for carrying his Cabinet, his party and his Dail majority through for these necessary draconian measures.” Stephen Collins gave tribute “to the skill with which the public was softened up for the measure and the way it was packaged and delivered.” The Editor summed up the official line on the “harshest budget in the history of the State,” describing it as “courageous, bold, above party politics, above sectional interest and appears to have put the country first.”
The Independent too, while not as openly celebratory, editorialised their feelings under the headline ‘Cowen finally walks the walk‘, writing, “despite being probably the most unpopular [leader] in the history of the state, [he] is managing to get a lot done,” with only one small reservation: “This week’s strong start could be undermined by any weakening of resolve.”
The Irish Examiner’s Jim Power on the other hand had little time to celebrate the forgone conclusion, being too busy looking forward to the next round of cuts: “Despite the harsh nature of the budget, there is still a lot of pain to come…Some measures to stimulate employment would have been welcome, but we can’t have everything.”
A convergence of opinion Garret FitzGerald was surprisingly oblivious to. Writing in the Irish Times the former Fine Gael Taoiseach protested, “no one is actively celebrating the achievement of a further €4 billion fiscal adjustment.” The reader taking for granted he had accidentally omitted the word ‘fantastic’.
In light of the comment above by Fintan O’Toole, author of the much revered ‘Ship of Fools’ and, some might say conflictingly, Assistant Editor of the Irish Times, it may be instructive to look back at the media’s build up coverage to the budget in order to discover whether the media played a role in affirming the ruling class’s “crude strategy of distracting and dividing people.”
There are two prominent features of the reporting in the two weeks leading up to the budget, the first of which is that the nature of the budget had been apparently predetermined, as Jim Power’s comments highlight. The cut of €4 billion was a forgone conclusion and the areas where those billions were to be ‘saved‘ lay in public service pay and social welfare, the ‘big targets‘ according to the Independent. The Government, readers were told, could not “afford to undershoot the €4 billion target.”
The second is that the media were fiercely supportive of the cuts and this support manifested itself in strongly worded calls for Brian Cowen and the political establishment to ‘walk the walk’. The budget provided an opportunity for “clear leadership and good example,” a chance “to resist pressure from vested interests” and “a time for the Government to lead public opinion in the national interest.” “The media,” according to Matt Cooper writing in the Irish Examiner, did “not want to see him fail.”
Other journalists went further still, declaring a state of war: “Decks cleared for budget,” with calls for the Taoiseach to “stick to his guns” and “face down unions” at a “career-defining line in the sand.”
The symptoms of this perceived lack of political manliness were also made abundantly clear, “tax increases are the last resort of weak government;” “the easy option” according to the Irish Times. While the “weakness and indecision” in entering talks with the unions hinted he had “appeared to lose his nerve,” raising “question marks about his continued leadership.” Their eventual collapse saved him from “a political disaster.”
This flirtation with union negotiation, which according to Stephen Collins “exasperated even some of his most loyal supporters,” gave rise to a popular euphemism among journalists, again intended to question the leaders courage, or perhaps his sweet tooth: “There may have been no fudge but some of his colleagues certainly believed they were looking at the beginnings of one;” “Government sources made it clear there was no similar fudge in the offing to avert cuts in child benefit or social welfare rates;” “a fudge could not be ruled out.” As the talk’s ultimately ended in failure, the insult became a warning, “let’s not fudge it next week,” “there is no longer room for mere fudge.”
Of course Cowen did rise to the challenge, implementing the desired cuts and declaring “war on the poor” according to Fintan O’Toole – writing in the Irish Times in one of a small minority of examples of dissenting journalism. Upon fulfilling this call for ‘leadership’ with the ‘draconian’ budget Cowen and his Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan were appropriately rewarded for their “intellectual rigour” and “political determination and courage” in facing “down the trade unions.” The budget was hailed as their “watershed moment,” though one journalist lamented that “the compliments of future historians for addressing the economic crisis will be of little comfort.”
As mentioned above, the nature of the budget had been predetermined long before the details of “one of the most leaked budgets in history” made it into the newspapers. In the weeks ahead of the budget journalists’ time was dominated by search for new and inventive ways to cut towards the magic €4 billion target. As the Irish Times’ Pat McArdle put it, “it is always tempting to play God and outline one’s personal budget.” A temptation he fulfilled seven days later: “What savings can we expect from falling staff numbers over the medium term? What is the minimum size of the public sector required to run the country? Will a property tax be necessary? Will further pay or social welfare cuts be required? Will capital spending have to be eliminated completely?”
Writing in the Irish Times John O’Hagan reiterated the “widespread agreement among independent commentators” that the case for cutting the “over paid and inefficient” public sector was “almost unanswerable.” Epitomising the success of what Gene Kerrigan called the government’s “media team-players” who never fail to depict “the public service as a “bloated” entity, overpaid and lazy.”
An Irish Times Editorial writer declared, “People want the Government to…introduce a budget next week with €4 billion in savings so that we can start believing in ourselves again,” while also intimating that anyone who disagrees doesnt “live in the real world.” There was, we were consistently assured, “general agreement that a €4 billion package is needed.”
Yet an Irish Times/Behaviour Attitudes poll published less than two weeks before the budget found that “more than two-thirds of those surveyed were opposed to welfare cuts, while some 56 per cent said they oppose [public sector] pay cuts.” Clearly then, a general agreement had been made without the consent of the Irish public, a general agreement of the ruling class perhaps.
Alternative budgetary proposals, such as that designed to engender a stimulus plan were for the most part ignored or treated as an after thought. Where this infrequent consideration did arise, it was mentioned in parting, at the end of articles. Even then, the stimulus plans offered were rudimentary at best. One journalist suggested “The car scrappage scheme as an obvious one,” a measure that was in fact introduced to little fanfare: “it will be short term, but may help some businesses survive.” Anything more significant than this was regarded as impossible since “our fiscal position inhibits our capacity to introduce a major stimulus programme.”
Proposals to increase tax where shot down by the likes of Danny McCoy, who insisted that “OECD data show that effective tax rates for high-income earners in Ireland are higher than those in many European countries, including Germany, France and the UK.” A claim which confounded the ‘discovery’ by another journalist “that many lower-income earners pay either no or very little income tax.”
The claim was disputed by Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, importantly, five days after the budget: “According to accountants KPMG, the current effective tax rate (including PRSI) for someone earning the equivalent of $100,000 in Ireland is just 34 per cent and for someone on $300,000 it is 44 per cent.” While “unit labour costs (the ratio between productivity and earnings) hardly rose at all in Irish manufacturing between 2000 and 2007. The growth in labour costs last year was slower than the average in the euro zone. This year, unit labour costs are expected to fall by 7 per cent here and rise by 3 per cent in the rest of the euro zone – giving us a relative advantage of 10 per cent this year alone.”
Instead, the debate was as mentioned earlier entirely skewed towards cuts, aimed at increasing ‘competitiveness’ by driving down wages. The assumption being that Irish workers are paid too highly and that “we now need to get back in line, particularly with economies in Europe.” An assumption that is not supported by reputable sources, unquoted in the media. Destatis, the German equivalent of the CSO, found that for all manufacturing employees the “average Irish manufacturing wages are 2.3 percent below the EU-15 average and 17 percent below the average in our peer group (top-10 EU economies).”
During a post budget exchange between Vincent Browne and Fintan O’Toole on Tonight with Vincent Browne, O’Toole described what he saw as a complete failure in responsibility on the part of the media, saying that the media bought into an analysis which says ‘there is no alternative’ (a favoured slogan of former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). He gave the example of a recent ESRI report on subsidies for Irish pensions, which indicated that the introduction of pension relief at a standard rate could bring in a billion Euros, yet there was not a single piece of discussion of this in the Irish media.
Browne asked in response: “Why did that not get headlines in the Irish Times?”
To which O’Toole limply explained: “I think it is because the narrative has been shaped around the fact we are vastly over taxed, which is completely untrue and that wages are far too high, which is also completely untrue. Anything that doesn’t fit into that narrative doesn’t strike people as being news.”
The great irony about this clamour to find ‘savings’, to cut public expenditure and to increase the burden on the poor, is NAMA, the National Asset Management Agency. Set up to take property development-related loans (amounting to an estimated €54 billion) off banks’ balance sheets, NAMA, as one commentator put it, is designed to “overpay for dud assets” in an effort to “prop up insolvent private banks.”
Yet in the 10 days leading up to the Dail vote on the legislation, the media build-up was what you might call mute. Of the dozen or so opinion and analysis articles published between the Irish Examiner, the Irish Independent and the Irish Times, the strongest worded criticism was, “the banks’ fetid loan books” have the “potential to wreck us all.” Somewhat predictably this criticism came only in the context that the public finances have just as much ‘potential’.
Writing on the Anglo Irish fiasco in the Irish Examiner Ivan Yates admitted, “The taxpayer is likely to have to fork out up to €10bn to clear up the mess. NAMA is scheduled to take €28bn of their €70bn loan book.” Plainly, Yates had summed up the massive economic burden one relatively small business venture had condemned the Irish public to bear. Yet in a deftly designed about turn, Yates declared, we “must move on from the blame game and convulsions of public anger” and act to rebuild what his colleague called “this bruised, misused and ransomed country” by “confronting the unsustainability of our public finances and restore economic competitiveness.”
Yates’ position typifies the general media consensus on the economic crisis. While it is widely recognised that a rich elite caused the downturn, the general public should ultimately pay for the recovery.
So where the banking bailout is concerned, there are no calls for ‘leadership in the national interest’, no calls for a ‘war on corrupt financial institutions’, no calls for the slashing the pay of all the ‘greedy, incompetent bankers’ and most importantly no calls ‘to resist pressure from vested interests’.
This “complete failure in responsibility on the part of the media,” paired with the media’s central role in cheerleading the property bubble makes increasingly clear that Noam Chomsky’s observation on the role of the US media is just as applicable to Ireland:
so says Garret FitzGerald.
“Cutting civil and public servants’ wages…Slashing welfare rates…Cutting child benefit…Taking all these steps in a single budget would once have been in the realm of political fantasy land. Yet that is what the Government did this week. Coming at the end of a year in which income taxes were increased dramatically and a public sector pension levy was introduced, it is truly extraordinary. For all the talk about his leadership style, our relatively novice Taoiseach deserves credit for carrying his Cabinet, his party and his Dáil majority through for these necessary draconian measures.” [Noel Whelan, Irish Times]
“The Government didn’t lose a single TD or any of its Independent supporters in the vote on the first cut in social welfare rates since Ernest Blythe’s budget of 1924. That is a tribute to the skill with which the public was softened up for the measure and the way it was packaged and delivered.” [Stephen Collins, Irish Times]
“There will be many editorials written about the harshest budget in the history of the State. Suffice to say, on first reading, that the decisions taken rise up to the occasion financially. They were courageous, bold, above party politics, above sectional interest and they appear to have put the country first.” [Editorial, Irish Times]
“Cowen finally walks the walk…WHATEVER your opinion of the National Asset Management Agency, the outcome of the Lisbon Treaty referendum or Budget 2010, you have to admit that Brian Cowen’s Government, despite being probably the most unpopular in the history of the state, is managing to get a lot done…This week’s strong start could be undermined by any weakening of resolve.” [Editorial, Irish Independent]
“Despite the harsh nature of the budget, there is still a lot of pain to come and we can be certain that this time next year, we will be struggling to come up with another €4 billion in fiscal adjustment. There is no choice however, and at least the minister is now addressing the key issues in a reasonably strong manner. Some measures to stimulate employment, such as cutting employers’ PRSI would have been welcome, but we can’t have everything.” [Jim Power, Irish Examiner]
12 December 2009
Dear Sir
As reported in today’s Irish Examiner, Deputy Paul Gogarty (Green) was to be heard in the Dail yesterday afternoon attempting to persuade Deputy Emmet Stagg (Labour) – and the country at large of the sincerity of his conviction that while inflicting savage cuts on those who cannot afford them might be a wrong thing, it was also a necessary thing. Deputy Stagg evidently had some understandable difficulty with the internal contradiction in Deputy Gogarty’s assertion. At any rate, I think I might have worked out what Mr Gogarty must be driving at: the cuts are a wrong thing in so far as they severely penalise those who are innocent of responsibility for the government’s incompetence and mismanagement; but they are a necessary thing in so far as to say so keeps Mr Gogarty earning approximately 120K per year and the Green Party in power propping up the same incompetent government. I apologise in advance for the unparliamentary language of what I am about to say – and I hope he will take this on the chin for the country – but fuck Paul Gogarty. And fuck the Green Party. Again, my profuse apologies for the unparliamentary nature of what I just said. I’ve become a little thin skinned about suffering cringe-making, self-serving rationalisations from Green Party Deputies.
Yours sincerely
Miriam Cotton
Dear Paddy Smyth [Irish Times Foreign Editor],
Will the Irish Times be covering election fraud in Honduras? The RealNews covered it here [below]. Or will the Times’ Latin America coverage be made up of misleading factoids, “Opposition candidate Porfirio Lobo won a presidential election on Sunday, which was scheduled before the coup,” and cynical US platitudes, “The vote could allow Honduras to move on from the five-month crisis and focus on a new leader.”
Best wishes,
David
1. http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=4573
2. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/1203/breaking44.html
Everyone knows the Irish Examiner is a Fine Gael newspaper and everyone equally knows that even if Fianna Fail is being obnoxious about public sector workers, Fine Gael would be even worse. The incessant cry from FG over the past two years has been for the savaging of the sector. ‘More! More!’ they scream like a mob braying for the burning of a bewildered woman suddenly accused of being a witch.
Accordingly the editorials and commentary in the Examiner have almost without exception come down in favour of cuts in welfare and pay of the lowest paid in society, one way or another. Fergus Finlay (the nearest thing to a working class columnist the paper has) has generally been suggesting it’s all a matter of style rather than of substance and that had the government only gone about the same strategy differently the hoi poloi wouldn’t be as upset as they are.
Why in the name of God does the Government need a report to tell it what is both the right thing to do and the strategic thing to do? If this Government had been ruthless about top pay – especially its own, and especially the bonuses that some senior managers have been offered – and if they had been ruthless right from the beginning, people throughout the country would have been far more willing to follow them.
(Read more.)
In any case Finlay has now declared himself against strikes which begs the question of the former Labour Party spokesperson: how the hell do we get these liars and thieves to take us seriously otherwise? Asking them nicely has never worked before, it isn’t working now and the main opposition parties have abandoned us all by signing up to what are essentially identical economic policies, despite all the sympathetic rhetoric. Speaking on The Frontline while in Dublin recently Noam Chomsky stated an obvious fact: no government has ever conceded any point of democracy or fairness without being forced to do so by the people themselves. Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore has already stated categorically that he will do nothing to change the outrageous and almost certainly criminal NAMA legislation if Labour are elected to government. That alone tells us everything we need to know about the pointlessness of voting for Labour.
In recent weeks Examiner columnist and fomer FG front bencher Ivan Yates has been shrilly defending subsidies to horse racing while demanding the evisceration of the public sector. He has even implied that these subsidies might help reduce the soaring male suicide rate.
Today, the paper is palpably afraid that the flooding crisis ably demonstrates who it is the country has to turn to when real rather than recklessly induced disaster strikes: the very people whose pay, pensions and welfare are to be targetted within a few weeks. Flooding ‘washes away sympathy for strike’ claims the headline over the editorial. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is public sector workers who have been working night and day to deal with the effects on people of the failures of government and environmental management as much as of the weather itself. Incredibly, the Examiner editorial accuses the unions of selfishness at this time of crisis, even though emergency service members have already said they will not strike in the affected areas.
Not to be outdone for viciousness by any editorial writer, Terry Prone, predictably, is in on the act. We’ve written about Prone before: she of the sumptuous salaries at public sector expense who has been selling the lie of Fianna Fail’s Cletic Tiger economic ‘miracle’ more than any other. Lest anybody should begin to notice just how tirelessly and selflessly professional public sector workers have been coping with the flood disaster, Prone is desperate to insist it is really the smiling and laughing, volunteer tea and sandwich makers who are the heroes of the hour. Not that anyone wants to diminish their undoubted and considerable contribution but there’s that divisive theme again: public sector v volunteer; public sector v private sector – the former always coming off worse than the latter, however they are paired for comparison purposes – as if professionally trained people’s skills were superfluous and their lesser motives a given. Prone invites us to consider the joyous liberation of being dispossessed of homes and possessions to free us up for real camaraderie and pulling together. Never mind the destroyed and damaged homes, the lost businesses, the likelihood of dole queue living for many people as a consequence of the flood – think of all the fun it will be while our betters get on with fleecing us of any vestige of hope or the wherewithall to edcuate our children decently or even to survive. Prone’s latest article can be read here.
And speaking of dole queues, Prone was last week bending her talents to working some class distinction into them. Apparently there are those like her pinstripe-suited friend who are the more deserving poor and who should queue up early in the mroning to avoid those who she says wear ‘pyjamas’ and tend to queue later in the day. Oh and apparently last time we all had to emigrate because of similarly induced financial mismanagement, we were doing it ‘for fun’. On top of all of this offensive nonsense, Prone is also trying to make out that there is a need for a similar response to the economic crisis as to the flooding crisis. Not on your well pampered nelly, there is not, Terry. It’s no act of God that brought economic disaster on us but the continuing greed and ruthless incompetence of our government and the eocnomic system whose altar they worship at. It is not just about pay and cuts that we will strike but to make these out of control oligarchs and their political prostitutes realise that the game they are playing with our futures is doomed. We’re not putting up with it any longer. Most of us always knew it was bullshit anyway but it is time now for us take over from the delinquents who are running the show and replace them with adults who will govern according to the wishes and needs of the majority. Striking is the first step along the way until they come to their senses. Contrary to what the likes of Prone and others are spinning furiously in the media, it is not the public sector who are going through the five stages of grief or who are playing the ‘blame game’, it is the government itself which is in deep denial and is lashing out at the electorate in anger.
MEDIABITE 