http://youtu.be/qrQbkjhrANs
http://youtu.be/qrQbkjhrANs
Not happy with the Croke Park Agreement? How about extra pay for special advisers to ministers? Huge severance packages for retiring civil servants? Reducing the Dail by a minuscule 8 TDs? Letting civil servants retire early on gold plated pensions and then rehiring them?
Maybe it’s my inner Victor Meldrew speaking, and I’m finally turning into a cranky contankerous curmudgeon (Turning into, you say?) but the last couple of weeks have for me displayed Irish politics at its worst in terms of pointless showy waffle theatre that doesn’t matter a damn.
The terms “fairness” and “equity” appear regularly in Irish political debate. This does not mean, of course, that they actually mean what most people think they mean, because in Ireland, most political decisions that matter involve money and both phrases are code for “I want stuff and someone else should pay for it.” For example, when some union leaders say they want a property tax that is fair and equitable, can anyone imagine any situation where they will support their members paying any tax amount higher than a nominal amount? It’s the same with Sinn Fein and the United Left.
Many of us, when we were in secondary school, had a friend who was an non-deliberate asshole. What I mean is that he or she kept doing things that annoyed or irritated other people even though he or she was not deliberately trying to annoy other people. I remember there was once an American guy in my class who just could not stop bragging about where he’d been and the things he had done, and it made him very unpopular. He wasn’t a bad guy, he wasn’t doing it to annoy people, but he just kept rubbing people the wrong way. I would occasionally defend him, but just as I’d managed to convince people that he wasn’t a dickhead, he’d go and do something else.