Haul in the Bloody Bankers! Bring the bloody bankers before the Public Accounts Committee! There should be three important steps taken as a result of what can only be described as the spectacularly successful hearings of the Public Accounts Committee. One, the lawyers cant about Dáil Committees being an intrusion upon the work…
Category: Economy
Scottish Independence Go For it
Whoever thought that the worst nightmare of Belfast Loyalists would be in danger of coming true this year? But ‘tis true they, and those that think like them are dependent on a TAIG, the loyalist term for a Catholic, to preserve the Union. The Taig, Mr David Cameron of Eton and Westminster has emerged Toff…
Will the Celtic Ritz Hotel lower its Rates?
I have been absent from the blogosphere for a little while now and am only reemerging now, just when people were beginning to think it was safe to come out because with my usual imperishable optimism I felt I detected an encouraging chink of light from our parliamentarians over the past couple of weeks. A…
Water could start the Fire.
There is an uncanny resemblance between the present Irish Government and the first Cumann na nGael administration of the 1920s. Both took draconian decisions and had the fortitude to see them through even in the case of Cumann na nGael, to the extent of taking the horrific step of executing former comrades. The present Fine…
Back to the Future
The light is fading on New Year’s Day as this is written, but it is not intended as a song at twilight but as a promise on the dawning of a New Year- I’ll keep the Blog up to date in 2014! After what we’ve been through it would be permissible to open the New…
Next, Bring on the Bankers
Would it be too much to hope that the Public Accounts Committee, having managed to bring the disgraceful story of the ‘Top up payments’ to Fat cats in the Central Remedial Clinic to public airing that the government now finally grasp the nettle of achieving the same result from the Bankers? It was entirely appropriate…
Kathleen Ní Houlihan needs a perp’s walk.
Kathleen Ní Houlihan needs a perp’s walk. If the Government didn’t share my views on the need to make people accountable for what was done to our people and our economy under Fianna Fáil, I’d say the opinion poll results which came out since I wrote my l blog below went far to changing their minds.…
Are we Helpless before the Guilty?
Over the New Year I’ve been pondering the implications of a discovery I made while researching my book on the Famine* namely that one of its principal legacies to Ireland was what the psychiatrists called ‘learned helplessness’. The beliefs that no matter how one tried there was nothing to do in the face of catastrophe…
Summer schools for thought
Throughout the summer Ireland explodes with summer school mania. Indeed, these schools or festivals pop up amongst the Irish across the world, and I would like to take this opportunity to wish success and good cheer to the good people who will be staging their annual event at Butte, Montana, in a few days time.…
Irish mood picks up as sun shines down on Ireland
“This will take an awful lot of hardship.” “It doesn’t take much.” Both of the foregoing contradictory statements are true of Ireland’s economy and mood of the moment. On the one hand there is the demoralizing game of pass-the-parcel being played by the politicians with the report of the popularly-termed An Bord Snip Nua which…