A little something I wrote for the good people at E!Sharp magazine here.
Last year I wrote a thumbnail guide to the Lisbon treaty. Here’s the new version. With extra guarantees and Evel Knievel added for extra roughage, essential oils and minerals, and now with Omega 3*
*Promise of essential oils, minerals and omega 3 applies only if guide is consumed with multivitamins.
Colm Toibin has said that An Bord Snip knows “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I love the way the arts lobby always pretend that other people’s concern about money is slightly vulgar and beneath them and yet fight like rats with PMT in a bag for the same cold hard cash as the rest of us.
EU member states parallel citizenship of the European Union. Most eurosceptics went ballistic, denouncing it as an infringement of their sovereign right to be British or Danish. Indeed, many even renounced it, although only symbolically, as it isn’t possible to do so legally.
I see that we are dealing with the McCarthy Report in the same way we deal with everything involving public money in this country: By dancing around the decision.
Stage 1: A call for the “vulnerable” to be protected. The definition of “vulnerable” is so broad as to be pretty much anyone in the country who isn’t either a banker or a serial killer, and I suspect a delegation of serial killers are probably beating a path to their local Fianna Fail TD’s office as I write, and probably not, sadly, on the clock. It might have been easier just to call for cuts on the invulnerable, and tax the bejesus out of Superman.
Stage 2: The public sector unions call any pointing out of their generous salaries, perks and obscene pension entitlements “dividing ordinary workers.” Somewhat akin to Marie Antoinette, in between mouthfuls of gateux, condemning the revolutionaries for “dividing ordinary French people.”
Stage 3: Quivering Fianna Fail TDs, waiting for a spine to shiver up (A great Paul Keatingism if there ever was one.) start to agitate for special treatment for, well, everyone.
Stage 4: Quivering Fianna Fail senators leap to defend their rotton borough electorate (County Councillors) from an “attack on democracy.”
Stage 5: The Opposition call for savings through greater “public sector productivity” whatever that is. How does stamping forms faster save us any money? Even if they worked 100% harder, it’s not like we’d then sack the 50% we no longer need. We’d probably just pay them more for getting Repetitive Strain Injury, or put them on sick leave, and then hire even more of them in the place of the ones on sick leave.
Stage 6: Public take to the airwaves to blame politicians, the EU, the banks, evil tree stumps, etc. At no stage does public’s choices at election time get raised.
Stage 7: Waste €400 million a week whilst debating how serious the situation is, and how we must make a decision soon. Go back to stage 1, rinse and repeat.