I remember about fifteen years ago in Dublin, having a discussion about planning with my brother-in-law John. The possibility that planning permission might be something that the occasional local councillor would use to line his pockets was raised. “There’s not a local council in the south where that isn’t going on – not one!” John told me emphatically. At the time I took it as an overstatement for the sake of emphasis. After recent revelations I’ve begun to think he nailed it.
RTÉ did a sting operation last week and the canny question of Councillor Hugh McElvaney (Fine Gael) – “What’s in it for me?” – was the essential question asked by a number of councillors who had the possibility of a dodgy deal dangled in front of them.
Councillor Joe Queenan (Fianna Fail) and John O’Donnell (Independent) also managed to look decidedly dodgy on the RTÉ programme. But maybe they shouldn’t worry too much: as Fintan O’Toole points out in today’s Irish Times, there are councillors whose political career only got going after they’d served a prison sentence for fraud.
And the corruption doesn’t stop at local level. Five TDs among a group selected at random for an independent audit of their Oireachtas expenses have been found to have claimed more than they were entitled to. Fine Gael’s Helen McEntee had to repay €1,675.88; the Labour Party’s John Lyons had to hand back €1,285.33 ; Ming Flanagan (Independent) had to produce €1, 144.25 he shouldn’t have claimed ; Robert Dowds (Labour) had to part with €520.03; Jimmy Deenihan (Fine Gael) had to repay €287.66; and Senator Katherine Zappone had to cough up €262.91. Excuses such as “technicality”, “human error” and “misunderstanding” filled the air.
Will any of these people be prosecuted? Nah – it’ll probably fill their sails next time out, if politics in the south stay as they are. If you or I took €300 or €500 or €1,000 out of someone’s pocket and were caught, we’d find yourself in front of a judge pretty sharpish. But hey – sure anyone could commit a human error, get snagged on a technicality or be the victim of misunderstanding. See what I did there? Those petty pick-pockets have suddenly become victims.
And that, folks, is politics south of the Black Sow’s Dyke today: teats for sucking and no consequences. Sure where else would you get it?
‘What’s in it for me Nina? What’s in it for me?….’
For those of us who aspire to irish unification it’s all fair and good convincing people in the north to run with it but the likes of these corrupt politicians in the south it could well be a bigger hurdle. There are a lot of skanks who actually welcome the border as it’s handy for spending the sterling they ask for. What’s in it for me Nina? Jesus wept.
“For those of us who aspire to irish unification it’s all fair and good convincing people in the north to run with it but the likes of these corrupt politicians in the south it could well be a bigger hurdle. ”
The politicians north or south don’t really matter, it is the people who will unify the country.
The people who live along the border on both sides will never allow it to return.
The calls for unification will not come from politicians, it will be a citizen movement and it will happen in its own good time.
Hopefully nothing as extravagant as the tory claim for the cleaning of the moat on a private country estate across the water.
In Ireland it is part of our culture though.
Where else in the western world could corporate business have a government willing to pull a few strings to help them avoid paying billions in revenue to the tax payers public purse? Nudge nudge, wink wink
Of course, in doing so, we are grabbing corporate business off the US and other more prosperous nations where corporate tax is not so favourable creating large scale jobs and wealth.
Sure what’s the harm.
On the other hand, Enda shows up at the UN Climate Change Conference where every nation is attempting to play their part in helping alleviate the effects of climate change and is the only nation who rather than give a positive contribution, makes an embarrassing plea for clemency and to turn a similar blind eye to Ireland meeting its previously agreed international commitments in reducing our carbon footprint on grounds of agricultural necessity.
Of course, other small nations such as Tuvalu who only received its independence from Britain in 1978 are not so fortunate already living behind coastal walls and expected to disappear beneath the waves entirely within a generation.
Sure what’s the harm.
Great.story.jude.
Too. true. Jim. Too. true….
Haven’t read the Fintan O’Toole piece yet, Esteemed Blogmeister, but it’s good to hear he would appear to have changed gears in his Rolls Royce brain on the question of corruption in politics.
The reason for not being up to speed-reading the lightning quick piece by FOT is because one’s attention had been completely colonized by another piece in today’s The Unionist Times. A piece which actually requires slow reading, ver…y…..slow…read….ing.
Not entitled (though it might well have been) ‘Seamus Mallon for Slow Learners’ it features Gerry ‘Are you right there?’ Mor-i-ar-i-ty feeling sorry for the Not-as-famous-as-he-would-like-to-be Seamus once more feeling sorry for himself.
Still haven’t finished read…ing….it…yet, as its length just falls short of ‘War and Peace’ proportions. Which word-count is fully justified, seeing that the Mallon who never, erm, headed his beloved SDLP but did stoop to conquer the hearts and pockets of the High and Mighty. For? For making his own name synonymous with Peace while branding all his opponents as mongers in the War zone.
As one was slow read..ing….Sea….mus…..Mall….on….for…..Slow…..Learners quite coincidentally what comes on the wireless only the celebrated bel canto voice of Juan Diego Flores. One took time out from the piece being perused to allow the Peruvian virtuoso’s celestial tonsils wrap themselves around the most glorious of all Christmas, oops, Festive Season carols: ‘O, Holy Night’.
Coincidentally, the last line one was reading before being radio-interrupted was: ‘He seldom uses the words Sinn Fein or the IRA. Instead, he refers to ‘they’ or ‘them’.
One uses the ‘c’ adverb here because Himself obviously requires some assistance in the matter of nomenclature – he is after all just a lad of 79 summers – not least where the unfriends of Himself are concerned. ‘Coincidentally’ because the carol in question started life in France as ‘Cantique de Noel’.
And –quell surprise ! – the name of its composer might well help Himself to get over the hump of ‘they’ and ‘them’.
The name of the composer bears an almost uncannily remarkable similarity to the name of ‘they’ or ‘them’ – give or take a ‘s’ or two – but by speaking this name out loud (the almost name of one who was a member of both !) it might enable Himself to actually get around to allowing his tongue give both ‘they’ and ‘them’ a local habitation and a name.
Voila ! Monsieur (gulp) Adolphe Adam.
To conclude with the same, erm, FOT fall as one started with. The Incorruptible One was not always quite so censorious about corruption in the political world. Not least corruption involving land deals. As this knee-slapping passage from a recently published comic masterpiece (‘The Maximalist’ by Matt Cooper) demonstrates:
‘Tony O’Reilly did something in Britain that required chutzpah. He organized for Heinz to buy Cape Cornwall, a mile of English coastline and then he presented it to the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at a public ceremony, to be placed in the care of the British National Trust. Tony remarked that it was ‘especially piquant than an Irishman should be presenting the tile deeds to a piece of English land to a British prime minister’ and that he did so with a special sense of privilege’.
(Fasten your seat-belts hereaouts, folk, or folks, for here comes the real kicker):
‘Fintan O’Toole later described it as an ‘act of historic cheek, but also an act of great confidence, a public sign that here was an Irishman who didn’t have to watch out for himself in England’.
Eh?
It might be worth pointing out here that before he pulled this stroke of land’s end proportions, this greatly confident Irishman was plain Tony O’Reilly; afterwards, he became (gasp) Sir A.J.F. O’Reilly.
Though in fairness, going backwards, the Knighthood (for which he had to, erm, stoop) might well have also been down to his founding of the Fund which channeled moolah in its millions away from ‘they’ and ‘them’ and in the direction of that Party of which Himself was (alas) the perennial runner up and (sob) silver medalist.
PS As one’s late Great Aunt Nancy used to say: ‘Now, there’s piquancy for yiz !’
As people from Fermanagh and others on the west coast of Ireland struggle with rising water levels, gombeen men and women line their pockets and some in the media plumb new depths. Savage Eye (11.12.15) demonstrated poor taste with ‘political representatives’ chewing bars of chocolate at the bed side of a hunger striker.
During the darkest days of the ‘troubles’ political dynasties represented constituencies from Donegal to Kerry, yet most of the west coast of Ireland remains an economic wastedland. Some constituencies have high rates of deprivation, self harm and suicide.
Only dead fish swim with the tide, hollow men/women go with the flow.
“In this last of meeting places/We grope together/And avoid speech/Gathered on this beach of the tumid river”
I spent nearly 40 years working in education at various levels from primary to tertiary level. Most colleagues, in my experience, supported aspects of the servive that they were meant to deliver from their own pockets. Different story for politicians in local and central government who have this bloated sense of entitlement
Seamus and his cronies always assumed they had a divine right to govern and never got over the fact that “the corner boys” deprived them of this!