Casting the first stone
This whole Bertigate thingy is all getting a bit boring now! For me, the problem with politics is that I don't have the staying power to sustain a particular point of view. In an attempt to provoke a reaction, I even posted a ridiculous 'Bertie should go' post. I didn’t get many comments but people started emailing me telling me that I was right on the money. Then my blogger account was inactivated!
Quick recap for those born yesterday.
We, Irish pride ourselves in our ability to bend the rules. We admire and value the cute hoor. But this benign attitude ignores the fact that basically we are a country of crooks.
DIRT & wholesale tax fraud by the majority of the population, a generation of illegals in US, an army of untaxed building contractors in the UK and swarms of teenagers fiddling slot machines in Germany demonstrate that we are genetically predisposed to "fraud". We don't obey the rules of the road, we drink/drive, given any opportunity we'll thieve and rob. We took ambulance chasing and litigation to such a level even we had to get a grip and invent a “Quantum of Personal Injury Claims”. We rip off visitors. For God sake, we commemorated the visit of the world's best golfer with fake pictures of his wife naked! We pride ourselves in our abilities to beat the system and our best boast is that the Brits found us ungovernable. We invented boycotting and guerrilla warfare. We are fundamentally anti-establishment.
One of the things that we all like about our Taoiseach is that he is decent, hardworking and generally an honest soul. So he got €8,000 for a few public speaking events in Manchester many years ago. Big deal? No I don’t think so. Most people I know would say, “Fair play to you Bertie, wear well.”
No, a big deal is that our legal profession are bleeding the country dry. One tribunal investigating the payment of €30,000 has cost us €24 million and is likely to double the before it is finished. Building contractors have subverted our planning laws. The cost of the port tunnel, M50 and just about every major capital investment programme we ever make escalates by a factor of ‘Think of a number, treble it, add 50% and then double it’. We pour €11 billion a year into our health service and get a third world service. We’ve allowed our hospital consultants develop the most ludicrous and lucrative remuneration system. We poured millions of Euro and thousands of Gardai into a small village for a 3 day golf competition but yet couldn’t afford to police the wild west that has become parts of Limerick. To me, these are big deals.
So folks can we get back to the real politics and stop pretending that we are all holier-than-Bertie?
posted by Paige A Harrison at 9:05 a.m.
3 Comments:
I'd have to disagree. I don't think Bertie is "decent, hardworking and generally an honest soul."
i think he tries to get that imge across but it isn't true.
And if you are going to blame the various legal teams for the expense of the tribunals, well, doens't it all come back on the govts who set up the tribunals? And the individuals who ripped the rest of the country off by being cute hoors, and are now forcing us to pay huge sums of money to investigate them all over again?
Your post leaves me pretty gob-smacked, everyone's found a way to play the system.
Fair play to you, I notice that's an oft used expression when people don't want to voice an opinion.
Great to see you back P
Hi Paige. Glad you seem to be back in business.
I'm inclined to agree with you on Berti-Gate. There are much more pressing matters to get bothered about in Dail debates. I think it was right to address it once it wrongly leaked into public, but it has had enough public airing now and should be left for the tribunal where it should have remained in the first place. I wrote a blog on this also.
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