An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Far-Right Patriot.

He is a warrior, only not with a shield and sword but an iPhone through which he confronts the globalist establishment and their (taps nose) paymasters.

He’s a great man for shouting abuse at Guards, calling them names and helpfully suggesting alternative uses of Garda resources. Everyone who disagrees is corrupt and has been paid off.

The first thing he thinks of every morning is Klaus Schwab, which is funny because Klaus Schwab doesn’t think of him at all.

None of his fellow patriots ever seem to notice how he always has money to throw around, or how the Guards always seem to be informed about their events. That’s because they don’t know he’s been a Garda informer since April 2019. That moment where he was accidentally outed by a Guard at a protest was clumsily edited out, but he got away with it.
The big mouth doth protests too much.

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Politics Free Candidate.

Two types of candidate dominate modern Irish politics. The first is the crook, who is actually in it for the cash. The money is good, and if he plays his cards right, there could be an opportunity for more.

Then there’s that curious creature: The politics free candidate. The enigma wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in a ballot paper. The man or woman who goes into politics even though they aren’t actually that interested in politics in the first place? Surely the same as the first type, you say? Curiously, no. They get the good money, but often they spend much of it getting reelected. They aren’t particularly corrupt, so what are they in it for?

Sometimes it’s family. The father was a TD or councillor, and so they will be. It’s what they do. But ask them where they stand on elected mayors, or a carbon or property tax, or neutrality, and they’ll look at you with the face that says “Why are you asking me this? Why don’t you ask someone in authority?” In short, they tend to not actually have any opinion on the issue. Many of them become cabinet ministers, and still, on day one, arrive in their new departments not with the thought “Finally! Now I can do something about X!” but instead tell their secretary general to keep on doing “Whatever the last fella was doing.” The party tells them what they believe, they memorise the talking points, and you see them three weeks later on The Frontline blankly declaring that loading Jews up on to trucks for “evacuation” is a perfectly reasonable policy.  Not because they are bigots or intolerant, but because that was what it said on the piece of paper.

But here’s the thing: Never mind them. To them, it’s a 9 to 5 job, a means of paying the bills. Ask yourself: Who are the f**kwits who vote for them? Who are the people so devoid of any idea as to what they would like their society to look like that they vote for these guys, the equivalent of a jug of tepid room temperature water, because iced water would be leaning too much to one side of the water temperature issue?

See  them? We should be rounding them up on trucks.

An Occasional Guide to EU politics: The Lonely MEP.

Twitter-phoneHe found one of those apps that tells you how much time you spend doing things, and it gave him a fright. Apparently he spends two-thirds of his day on Twitter trying to pick fights with people back home. What’s worse is that they’ve got the measure of him now, and just ignore him. He doesn’t get mentioned on the news, or in papers. He’s just gone. Like he’s dead.

He was going to show this crowd out here in Brussels, boy was he! But of course they’re well used to him and others like him coming out and shouting. Even Paisley tried it back in the day. Know what happened? Nothing. They ignored him. Anti-Christ this and Anti-Christ that and they just ignored him and went for lunch, and this guy ain’t no Big Ian.

He finds that he’s getting up later in the day, and watching a lot of boxsets in his apartment. The other MEPs from his country, the men and women from the parties he was going to make a holy show of when he got out, now just treat him like one of those fellas you buy a Club Orange and a pack of Tayto for down the pub on a Sunday afternoon. They don’t even argue with him now, just give him that “ah, bless, the poor creature” look. The women ask him is he OK? One even offered to sew a button that had fallen off his good jacket back on. He spent a whole day walking around not knowing that he was trailing a long piece of toilet paper on his shoe and nobody’d said anything. One of the Dutch MEPs thought he’d been trying to make some sort of avant-garde protest about waste.

He’s afraid to spend too long on the phone back home because he knows some bastard will FOI it, and he can’t even go home because it’ll effect his voting record, the one thing the public (or at least the media) seem to get stroppy about at election time.

What on Earth was he thinking coming out here?

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Fairweather Revolutionary

Repost: “We’re not taking it any more! It’s time the country be taken back by the ordinary people! Feck the bankers and the political parties!

It’s time for a country based on social justice and equality and housing and health and education as rights! Yes to free healthcare! Yes to free education! Yes to…sorry, say that again…you want to pay for free healthcare by doing what?…means testing children’s allowance….now, hold on a minute there…putting Capital Gains Tax on private residences…wait there one minute now…the rich should pay higher taxes, but not ordinary people like me, yes, I know I bought my house for €300k and it’s now worth €500k, but that’s MY MONEY….tax MY profit???….to fund free healthcare and social justice?…….get away from MY money, d’ya hear, that €200k profit is MY money, not yours! Get your stinking thieving hands off my filthy lucre!”

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Professional NGOer.

It’s all about hedgehogs. If you don’t care about the welfare of hedghogs, and want to spend whatever it takes to ensure hedgehog utopia, you’re a bastard. Never mind the old, and the sick, and poor children, and the third world, the beauty of being in the non-governmental organisation sector (the “third” sector, as it calls itself audaciously, in that it wants public money and pay, but private sector independence from the state that gives it its shekels) is that you can live in your defensive spined creature bubble and live there alone. If they don’t give you what you want, and you’ll always want something, they are absolute monsters.

Not that the money they give you will actually be spent on hedgehogs. It’ll be spent on websites and glossy brochures and fundraising drives the purpose of which is to fund more resources for more websites and brochures and fundraising efforts. And let us not forget the European angle: The vital need to go to Europe-wide hedgehog welfare conferences to consult with other concerned bodies. But the main thing is that at the end of it all the hedgehogs get the money they need. And they will. Eventually. When the NGO has gotten itself an “appropriately” remunerated chief executive and training officer and community liason officer and new “branding” and new offices in the city centre (Never in the more affordable suburbs, curiously enough.) and a development plan which seems to focus on getting more public funds for next year’s development plan.

Then, finally, money will be spent on hedgehog welfare. Normally for a shovel to scrape them off the road after they’ve been driven over by a truck.

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Anatomy of an Irish Issue.

An issue arises that catches the attention of the nation. Reviews are ordered. Followed by other reviews of the reviews. NGOs demand resources*. The relevant minister, or even the Taoiseach, pledges that the issue will be addressed, and that the govt will work towards ensuring that the issue never occurs again.

No one wishes to address the core issue: That an issue needs resources to resolve, that resources cost money, that money means taxes, and that no one (including the NGO involved, which does not wish to muddy itself with the reality of actually paying for what it wants) is willing to advocate either a specific tax to pay for these resources, or direct the funds for these resources from other areas of spending, thus affecting other NGOs and interest groups.

Instead, the issue is made a priority. Alongside the other priorities helping the old, those with disabilities, the unemployed, the farmers, low paid workers, the mentally ill, the GAA, the banks, the car dealers, the inner cities, the west of Ireland, rural areas, publicans, unemployment blackspots, any constituency with an Independent TD, and anyone who can get organised enough to get a delegation together to visit their TD. All these groups are deemed to be priorities worthy of extra resources*.

There is talk amongst government backbenchers of appointing a minister of state for priorities to take responsibility for making priorities a priority. Backbenchers call for the decision to appoint a minister of state for priorities to be made a priority.

Due to legal reasons, the Attorney General advises that no one can be blamed for the issue. However, early retirement or reassignment to another well remunerated state position would be “appropriate”. Tasty pensions all around for everyone concerned.

The country sits back, to prepare itself for the next issue to erupt.

*Resources: Money raised by taxing other people (certainly not the recipient of the additional resources) more.

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Sincere Local Election Candidate.

She secretly reads EPA reports in the toilet, and ponders elderly care provision whilst on the bus, but never tells anyone ‘lest she be thought some sort of dangerous intellectual, into the books and all that. In the party, she’s regarded as quiet but solid, and loyal to a fault. She’ll always be willing to help out at election time, and when the party is in trouble, she defends the line so calmly that one might think she actually believes it.                  Deep down, her conscience keeps kicking, battling with her political nous which tells her to shut up, go with the flow, and when you’re in you can do all the stuff you really believe. Then she sees Noel Dempsey who finally reached the cabinet and decided to try to do the radical stuff and suddenly realised that he was in the wrong party for doing, well, anything other than existing in three dimensions.

But there’s always a chance that just maybe she might make a difference, and lobby to get that extra €100k into the budget that stops some kid going to bed hungry or puts an extra bed into a refuge for some wife getting the tar beaten out of her by a drunken thug of a husband. It’s those tiny victories, those tiny beams of light in the darkness that make her keep pushing against it all, which is lucky, because she is all we have.

An occasional guide to Irish Politics: The Amateur Opinion Poll Spinner.

He’s the bore to beat all bores, the one who extrapolates election results down to the last seat in the Feckerstown ward even though the election is 17 years away.

But it gets worse. Not only is he a moron, he’s a partisan moron. If his party is up a fraction of a percent, he declares as fact that his party could run a rotting headless corpse in a given seat and still have a surplus quota.

But if the party drops an iota, the poll is immediately dismissed as an aberration, not comparing like with like, obviously rigged by the pollsters who are of course in the pockets of the other crowd.

He’s on Twitter at the sniff of a poll, cheerleading for his crowd and finger-pointing at the others, racking up posts the way, well, proper political activists rack up first preferences for their candidate.

Still, could be worse. At least he’s at home out of harm’s way, rather than sitting on the bus beside you and overwhelming you with a toxic wave of body odour and Monster Munch as he flicks through Nealon’s Guide to the 1987 general election and sweats.

An Occasional guide to Irish Politics: The Deputy “whose seat is gone.”

Sure, the politically astute dogs in the street know it!You’ll see him about 18 months before the expected election, fidgeting and wild-eyed. Questions about poster quantities to be ordered trigger a manic response: “ Posters? Sure why bother? The dogs in the streets know it. The. Seat. Is. Gone.”

“Everybody” knows that your man, that Shinner, is a dead cert to take the seat.

“A dead cert. Why are we even bothering to have the election? We might as well just award him the seat. Sure, I’m surprised he hasn’t got a running mate for a run at the last seat.”

The deputy can be seen slinking slope-shouldered into old folks homes, sighing and pondering as to how the constituency, whom he has loyally served for twenty years, could vote for a fella who used to blow up people. And what about his running mate? Sure what does he need two quotas for anyway? The old dears console him with a chocolate digestive and a nice sit-down.   

Of course, he runs a full campaign, but not to win, perish the thought, sure that’s impossible. He’s just running to keep the party flag flying, really. Only in Ireland does a candidate brag about how badly he’s doing, but not too badly.

He grudgingly accepts, without anyone actually asking him the question, that he supposes it could be possible that he might squeeze into the fifth seat on the nineteenth count without reaching the quota if it were a nice day, and all the people he’s helped through the years turned out, but that the Shinner probably “ has it all locked up, with military precision,” he says ominously.

The day after polling day, the deputy comfortably takes the second seat on the third count, but assures everyone that it is a dead cert that this is the last time he’ll hold the seat, no doubt about it. His “safe as houses” running mate’s vote collapses and he loses his seat.

 

An Occasional Guide to Irish Politics: The Political Conspiracy Theorist.

You see him on Twitter declaring that everything, everything, is a wily political chessboard move, and nothing happens that isn’t part of a conspiracy that would give Fox Mulder and Dana Scully a nosebleed.

God love him, but he gives our political masters way too much credit. The PDs, for example, were part of an international ideological conspiracy to destroy the welfare state. He’d never actually met anyone of any significance from the PDs, but then that would have hindered the purity of his beliefs.

Immigration is part of a plot to destroy Irish culture. Apparently there’s a tipping point (he can prove this on an Excel spreadsheet!) whereby one additional Pole tips the balance, and all of a sudden we’re setting fire to GAA clubs and eating cabbage flavoured ice cream.

The Sunday Indo and RTE are the tools of Fianna Fail. Or Fine Gael, depending on the balance of fluid in his brain at any given time.

Everything is part of a plan concocted by people far smarter than him but not smart enough to cover it up from him. He tends to smell of wee a lot, but that’s because every morning they sneak into his bedroom when he is in the toilet, and pour wee on his trousers to discredit him.

The well-organised bastards.