Is there a human trait that stinks in the nostrils more than hypocrisy? In politics, it surfaces usually in attitudes to other parties. If you’re talking about Irish politics, it surfaces most frequently in attitudes to Sinn Féin.
Most recent example of such comes in a moral outburt from Fianna Fail, in the person of Averil Power. She has announced that the FFers would never go into coalition with Sinn Féin. Why? “If you look at the Mairia Cahill stuff, I don’t want to see a Sinn Fein Minister for Justice”.
Avery belongs to a party that was in government for most of the history of the southern state. That was a time when clerical sexual abuse was, according to the record, widespread and habitual. Yet like the good people living near Auschwitz and Dachau, the government of the day didn’t notice a thing. Or if they did, they didn’t do anything about it. In fact, they made a point of public deference to the Catholic hierarchy when the occasion required it. But Averil and Fianna Fail are so disgusted by Sinn Féin’s handling of the Mairia Cahill case, they won’t go into government with them. Yerra sure, couldn’t a Sinn Féin TD maybe become Minister for Justice?
There are a number of assumptions here. One is that Sinn Féin would want the Justice portfolio if they did go into coalition with Fianna Fail. The second is that Fianna Fail, who entered the first Dail with guns in their pockets and ran a corrupt state for decades, are morally superior to Sinn Féin because of the Shinners’ handling of an allegation of sex abuse. The third is that Sinn Féin would want to go into government with a party which mishandled the finances of the state so spectacularly, a mountain of debt was loaded onto the backs of ordinary people and the words “Fianna Fail”, one short election ago, were two of the dirtiest words in southern politics.
But sure wasn’t that, what, away back in the noughties? What’s the point in harking back to the past? If Fianna Fail can somehow manage to get the electorate’s attention switched from them and their years of corrupt politics, who knows? The Irish electorat might not just forgive the many sins of Fianna Fail. They might even forget them.
I agree with a lot of the sentiments. But I’m going to take up a point that is not the main thrust of the article but I have found something of a bugbear for a long time.
The hypocrisy of Fianna Fail is disgusting. However you say ”The second is that Fianna Fail, who entered the first Dail with guns in their pockets and ran a corrupt state for decades,”
Corrupt state?? To what extent is the state across the border a corrupt state?? According to Transparency international, a U.N body that monitors and then grades every country in the world on the basis of how corrupt they are Ireland (meaning 26 counties of) consistently ranks as amongst the top twenty least corrupt countries in the world.
And yet there is this widespread belief, utterly engrained in so many people in Ireland north and south that the republic of Ireland is uniquely and awfully corrupt. Where does this belief come from??
Now obviously it has corruption issues – but where does not ??
Corrupt state?? This is an illusion
Fair point, Antonio. And I guess the UN would maybe know more about the matter than either of us (or certainly me). But didn’t the Minister for Justice and the Garda Commissioner resign not long ago? And weren’t the Haughey years characterised by brown envelopes? And isn’t it true that for years, planning permission in every area virtually was, um, a pliable matter? I’d be the first to say that we in the north shouldn’t think we’re superior – this state was corrupt if ever a state was – but the south’s history is a sad one – somebody characterised it as a counter-revolutionary state. Pretty apt – fumbling in the greasy till and all that
”somebody characterised it as a counter-revolutionary state.” Indeed or as a friend from Belfast who now lives in Dublin said ‘there was no civil war – it was a counter revolution.’
Transparency international is a well funded organisation made up of researchers who all year round study corruption in countries around the world and rank them according to corruption. One main purpose of this is to provide private companies with knowledge as to where is a good place to do business in and where is dodgy. So it is a serious organisation with a serious remit and the 26 counties always does well. But you never hear mention of it from say the press. Next time you are across the border mention it to a few people and see their reaction. I could guarantee you some, if not all of them, will tell you the U.N body is talking nonsense and that Ireland is a mafia state 🙂
The south has significant corruption issues. Of that there is no doubt. But it has long been my opinion that a constructive dialogue about it is damn near impossible. And in turn trying to find ways of solving the corruption are difficult because so many Irish people have an exaggerated view of how bad the corruption is.
I think Irish people can be very self-deprecating and this feeds into this exaggerated national perspective on corruption. Then there are also those quisling types who are never done criticising their fellow country men and women and so latch onto and embellish the corruption issue as evidence of why Ireland shouldn’t have split from the U.K
You gave a good example yourself last week. Haughey, his colleague’s cancer fund and the helicopter. For years I believed that Haughey pocketed the whole lot of the money and that is what most people believed. In the end the truth was not nearly as bad.
Have to say there’s so much awful cronyism, exclusivity, snobbery. It’s hard to make it here without connections. For years if you were Republican you could have been just shot dead with the shoot to kill policy. The fraud in the Councils and again cronyism there. It’s shocking, anyone who remembers the Grant codgery that went on with the not so poor farmers and the EEC would know the corruption there. The shitty little corruptions like people with great jobs taking the day off to be polling officers in the elections. The bigger things like Mary Harney working the system, without contributing anything beneficial, yet gets hundreds of thousands a year in pension payments. But any ‘ordinary’ person lost 80% of their pension. The TDs who pay nothing yet grab more on expenses, robbing really.
The discrimination in the schools to poorer kids and benevolence and opportunity offered to Guards and teachers’ kids. It just goes on and on in a big corrupt mass of smaller corruptions. We’ve Tribunals which show up massive white collar and grubby collar crime, but after hundreds of millions spent, nothing happens to the Big Boys. Even Judges and Ministers can be found to be fairly corrupt, but nothing happens. Heaven forbid if someone doesn’t pay their TV licence!!! A criminal record and jail sentence – may be brief, but you’re then classed as a ‘criminal’. The CC is corrupt in his gearing the Dail to an FG agEnda, there are many questions to be asked about his personal investments & declarations of income etc. He isn’t the only one in the Dail that is not lily white, and we can’t wear lilies in the Republic’s Dail without objection!! Explain that Mr Flanagan.
I’ve noticed that honour can go out the window very easily in lots of quarters, places where it should be a staple, and people exclude truthful people because they are ‘uncomfortable’ to be around. The truth isn’t welcomed. RTE and journos don’t want it, because we have no free press. Usually under grip of the British establishment, now it’s more pro EU, pro America, but it’s Anti Irish to the core, strangely not supportive of Palestine, and again, our friend Mr Flanagan is a friend of the terrorist, Israel.
We could do with someone who will speak up for us, we could do with some honour from public servants, decency in the Guards, some Justice in the Dept of Justice, some Democracy in the Dáil. It isn’t asking too much is it?
There is a fourth assumption – that Averil Power will actually get elected to the Dáil and therefore have a real say on coalition or not. She has failed to do so up to now.
Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you’re moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.
Alan Dershowitz
Averil Power, April Shower.
As things French are in the news un peu these days it is salutary to recall that ‘Poisson d’Averil’/ April Fish is the French equivalent of April’s Fool.
And indeed,like yourself, Esteemed Blogmeister, the pernikety nostrils of Monsieur Le Perc detected an ancient stench, a very ancient fish-like stench which stank delightfully all the way to the h. heavens from the high moral and verily wolfish tone of Averil Power.
Ooops, SENATOR Averil Power to give the good lady her full entitlement. A title fairly and squarely won by this Fianna F. after finishing a fabulously credible fourth in the three seater Dail constituency of Dublin North East. Despite this Dailcheantar containing within its limits the nose-holding haddock-scented Howth fishing village.
A la the Loyalists, this Fianna Failure is as much given to mouthing her party’s neo- mantra of Sinn Fein/IRA as her fellow Fianna Failures are to coupling Connectivity with the Heathrow Slots in the party’s canny, cunning approach to the Aer Lingus sell out.
Leo is not the only one in Sinister House with a neo-mantra in his life.
Such is the banshee whine of her ullagoning, paint-peeling contralto that Averil Power has milkily made ‘Oft in the Shrilly Night’ the most commonly heard anthem in the Free Southern Stateen of late. This is due in no small part to her uber Dub-accented ubiquity on wireless, telly and every other underbelly of the the Machiavelli media.
Like last Sunday’s Dame Dosh Finucane’s two-hour, half the presenter’s onerous working week Show. In which the impartial hostess surrounded herself with a semi-circle of non-sinning Shinner-bashers.
Ranging from Senator Shrill Power to Ms. Niamh Brennan, Professor of Beancounting in UCD. The latter, who in real life, an gra bheith dall, is the spouse of Michael McDowell, later of the late PDs, found a ‘penetrating’ article from the utterly disinterested commentator,Eyelash O’Handup of the Sunday Independent Cult (sic) upon which to bestow her Belfied Imprimatur.
Weddings also got a look in, oddly enough, the diffident presenter having tied the knot earlier in the week. Being a private person (she told us so herself, oft in the shrilly day) she was armtwisted into mentioning the haappy but essentially private event due to the TSUNAMI of tselegrams of congratulations which washed over Donnybrook, Dublin 4 in its wake. Truly did her Popeye proportioned forearms come in handy, the better to wheelbarrow them home.
Tselegrams, she apologetically whispered, from as far afield as Vietnam, Argentina, Belfield (see above), Australia, Lahore, Biloxi and Hell, Norway itself. Curiously enough, seemingly none from Easter Islands where the lucky groom was obviously born, most likely under the pin-striped star sign of Igor.
Meanwhile, Senator Shrill Power contraltoed in her uber-Dub accent on to beat the band, coupling Sinn Fein with the IRA at every door upon which Opportunity Knocked. Little wonder the Fianna Failures pay homage to the surname of Hughie Green. And Perkie’s inner retro-couch potato means that ‘most sincerely, folks’.
Ever since the anorak-accents of Bertie A. Herring were silenced the F. Failures have targetted Liffeyside as their prime area for the recovery of lost political groundhogs.Hence their sublimely cunning stunt of pushing La Poisson d’Averil forward at every op.
And yet, and yet, for some indecipherable reason the piscatorial perfume continues to linger.
Ah, yes.
The other great organ of the FSS to revive the neo-mantra of Sinn Fein/ IRA is, naturellement, Independent House, home of the Sunday Independent Cult (sic) and its daily help, the Irish Independent. French being in the news un peu of late (see above) SIC is also known as Sindo Hebdo, hebdominaire being Kermit for ‘weekly’.
The biggest news from its daily help of late is the appointment of a new editor, the cool, clean Fionnan Sheen.(Fionnan is not to be confused with Fintan, though the confusion is understandable).
Did the increasingly forgetful Perkie forget to mention something? Has he been guilty of yet another ‘senior moment’ in his second childhood as Warbeck Junior?
For none of the above reasons, but rather because it is irrelevant to the topic under disccussion in today’s Blog of Cats, that Senator Averil Power is, in real life, Mrs. Fionnan Sheen.
Entirely irrelevant.
Banshee, Bean Sheen.
“Such is the banshee whine of her ullagoning, paint-peeling contralto that Averil Power has milkily made ‘Oft in the Shrilly Night’ the most commonly heard anthem in the Free Southern Stateen of late. This is due in no small part to her uber Dub-accented ubiquity on wireless, telly and every other underbelly of the the Machiavelli media.” Did a man or a god write this paragraph? The deity gets my nod. It’s not what you do but the way that you do it, Perkie!
In truth, Esteemed Blogmeister, not so much written by the deity, as in the Deity.
As the Gods of the Gaeity are commonly known, the theatre in which the lugubrious strains of ‘Molly Malone’ were first painfully heard. And whose fishmonger’s round-bottomed statue is temporarily missing from its location at the other end of Grafton Street,the bottom. Grafton Street is, of course, the main shopping drag of Dublin’s fair city, a mere Sweet Afton cigarette away from the ‘hadn’t we’ the Gaiety.
This temporary absence is easily explained.
Senator Averil Power is the modern incarnation of Molly Malone as she wheels her wheelbarrow (borrowed, wooden) through the streets of her native ciddy selling her superior wares in her charmingly inferior and worked on working class uber-Dublin accent.
In the Fianna Failure power grab to install her in Sinister House where Senator Windows can best protect it from, erm, that nefarious neo-coupling of ‘Sinn Fein/ IRA’.
Instead of cockles and mussels her wares nowadays consist of side-splitting cliches and catchhrases first caught in the editorials of the funnily-named Irish Independent. ‘Sinn Fein/ IRA’ being the current bawled-trawl.
Her wooden wheelbarrow,incidentally,is on thoughtful sisterly loan on a weekday basis from Dame Dosh Finucane who only needs it at the weekend. The latter’s four-hour week fully meriting her six-figure sum starting with a five from the bulging public purse.
Perkie’s inner poet-taster cannot but rise to the challenge, however inadequate his rising might be.
De Paor of them.
She wheels her wheelbarrow
Thro’ streets broad ‘n narrow
Senator Windows
D’Editor of Indo’s
You, Wooden Allen,Mia Farrow.
Je suis Alexis Tsipras
Brendan Behan once said he could not be a politician as he had only the one face. It is evident that some politicians are either ignorant about the past or just choose to ignore it. The Cussen Report on Child Abuse was published in 1936 and among other issues reported that:
6.11 A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from.
6.20 Cases of sexual abuse were managed with a view to minimising the risk of public disclosure and consequent damage to the institution and the Congregation. This policy resulted in the protection of the perpetrator. When lay people were discovered to have sexually abused, they were generally reported to the Gardai. When a member of a Congregation was found to be abusing, it was dealt with internally and was not reported to the Gardaí.
The United Nations had Standard Rules about the use of punishment in schools, institutions and correctional schools. Ireland became a member of the United Nations in 1955. Ireland did not conform to the concept that children had rights. Successive Ministers in Fianna Fáil ignored the reality that many children in the care of the state did not receive care and in fact were used as slave labour. Many children were deprived of food, medical and dental care. Some of them were also abused physically, mentally and sexually.
Fianna Fáil spent many unbroken years in power, aping their imperial masters. It is evident that many politicians in that party were motivated solely by wealth, power, prestige and status. Ms Power, as her name suggests, confirms what the electorate now know. Fianna Fáil like a leopard, does not change its spots.
Jude, are you sure about FF entering the first Dail with guns in their pockets? Surely you’re getting SF mixed up with FF. All those de facto and de jure Dails, would put your head away.
All sides came to the feast with bulging pockets, history tells us
Gaaagggh …(Removes foot from mouth. You are of course right, pretz – mea culpa. The FFers had yet to be born. (Exit stout party stage left, overcome with shame)
Just to follow through on that quote, here’s the rest of what she said…
Joanie had an oblique pop at Gerry last night on the same matter suggesting that the party had no care for children…
Parties speculating about who they will or won’t go into power with is an amusing and speculative pastime… for now it is better business for most parties to keep SF at a distance, not least for the policy implications of the Cahill case…
But let’s just see how it pans out afterwards…
“not breaking ranks” in this case is equivalent to saying “not beating your wife any more”.Are we saying Gerry Adams broke the law or are we saying we don’t like what he did/didn’t do? If the former, he should be charged. If the latter, people in glass houses, etc…
Gerry Adams, break the law? Heaven forefend!!
What FF and Ms Power are saying they really don’t like the highly partisan way he handled the case, and are dissociating from his oddly phrased accusations that Ms Cahill is lying about what he said to her, or indeed his silence on her ongoing abuse by those who apparently support the party on New Media.
Break the law? Really Jude. Gerry loves breaking the law. It’s part of his outlaw charm!!
Well Mick – as to Gerry’s past sins, I’m sure I don’t know. With regard to Ms Cahill, which is the latest albatross to be draped around his neck, I think if he’s breached the law, like everyone else he should be charged. But somehow I get the feeling that it’s just moral distaste by those who want rid of him that’s dominating that debate. I repeat: glass houses, etc.
FF and FG exploited Ms. Cahill’s accusations for purely partisan gains, but their objection is it engendered a partisan response?
Hi Jude,
I think Antonio really hits the nail on the head when he “wonders aloud” about why there is this notion in the North that the South is somehow “more” corrupt and backward than it is.
My hunch is that it suits both sides in the north for completely separate reasons.
It suits certain sections of Unionism to point to the south as some sort of unscrupulous backwater full of peasants, priests and pixies because that’s in line with the “barbarians at the gate” theme that they have been pushing for nearly a century at this stage.
And it also suits certain sections of republicanism to portray the south as corrupt because its a means of lessening the South’s legitimacy to begin with and deflecting some of the actions of the Provo’s over the years and the antics of Sinn Fein in more recent times.
A more clandestine method for this snide undermining is the constant use (only in the North mind-you) of the term “Free State” which my own personal bug bear these days…
My guess is that if certain sections didn’t have the “canard” right on their doorstep then they would have to look in the mirror and admit the complete mess they have made of the north.
Not forgetting of course Ms.Powers husband is none other than the spindopendent journalist Fionnan Sheehan
Jude ,you have no call to remove your foot from your mouth at all because FF DID INDEED enter Leinster house in 1932 “carrying” ! Not only did many of their TD’S have revolvers in their pockets on that fateful day but one TD was even observed assembling a Thompson in a phonebox in the Dail grounds.Having won the election they were worried that the “staters” were not going to accept the result and there had been rumours that the pro treatyites were contemplating a coup.
Thanks Michael. Illuminating. My foot in mouth was re the First Dail, not in terms of bulging pockets.