MOVING THE DECKCHAIRS ON TITANIC IRELAND

Last week we had much-heralded Government response to the economic crisis that is engulfing the country like one of those frightening summer gorse fires you see in Australia or America.
Solemn–faced ministers gathered around their leader, Brian Cowen, at a press conference to announce what were predicted to be dramatic solutions to dramatic problems. However, as the farce got under way it was clear to see that the Government was tackling the blazing fires with a garden hose.
Savings of €440 million were projected for the rest of the year. This is a mere drop in the ocean relative to what is needed to combat the doomsday scenario facing the country.
Minister of Finance, Brian Lenehan, appeared inept and unsure when probing questions were asked of the small detail of such savings in the over-hyped plan.
In fact, it was a cobbled together exercise by the Government designed to show that it was doing something in the meltdown facing us. It was non-specific, clouded with the veneer of aspiration rather than expectancy. When forensically examined by economists, the plan failed to meet national school arithmetic standards in that it contained fatal miscalculations.
What hope have we as a nation if this display incompetence is a yardstick to measure future Government action to tackle the real problems? Two days after presenting the ‘great solution’, they all went on their summer holidays until the end of September. What a great little country we are.

Once again, the elephant in the room was ignored even though he was having a piss in the corner. The Minister bleated bland and non-committed assertions regarding public service pay and costs. It was the sound of the lambs surrendering to the foxes.
Bertie Ahern’s legacy lingers with a whiff of the unpleasant stuff. The government are once again capitulating to the public service unions. We said her last week that with at least 300,000 staff, the public service is pulling the economy down to the depths of the ocean. Unless such drastic action is taken, there is no way that we will survive this crisis.
Pluck up some courage and tackle the public service millstone now, for Gods sake!

The government Quangos should be next on the list for dismantling. There are so many mini-organizations operating within Government that one would think the country had a population of 20 million. Quangos are NGOs that make reports on reports and advise the advisors on what to advise the advisors to the government.
It is nothing short of a maze of waste costing the state hundreds of millions each year. Inevitably, these organizations are peppered with people affiliated to the Fianna Fail party. Egos abound within these miniature think tanks and the level of hot air released by them would blow a hole in the ozone layer, if there were not one there already.
Get rid of them now! Send them back to the real world.

The tribunals of enquiry into So Many Things That One Forgets now have cost over a billion and have meandered on for over a decade.
They have investigated the great, the good and the bad. They will arrive at the same conclusion that the public arrived weeks after they started – that corruption exists in public and private life in Ireland.
We have known this for years before these stage shows kicked off. The lawyers have fleeced the Exchequer of vast sums of money representing in many cases the most peripheral of figures. No sooner was a witness summoned than he sought at the taxpayer’s expense an army of lawyers to represent him or her. The tribunals became a real life version of the Dublin Theatre Festival. When it is all over, nobody will suffer. Except, of course, the ordinary folk who foot the bill for the €2,000 per day lawyers.
Stop it all now and let common sense prevail!