I’m assuming it’s the same Liz O’Donnell. You know, the …I was going to say “the nice-looking blonde one in the Progressive Democrats” but a reader has informed me that any mention of a woman’s appearance is rank sexism, so I’ll confine myself to saying she was the deputy leader of the late Progressive Democrats and that she often did radio interviews in her underwear.
And why do I mention this person (I nearly said ‘woman’) this morning? Well, she had a piece in the Irish Independent earlier this month where she lamented the rise of independents in general and Sinn Féin popularity in particular. She’s not a bit happy with that. Polls, she says “are ominous”. She says the Fine Gael-Labour coalition is essentially “a national government”, necessary to tackle the financial situation in the south. The fact that polls suggest people have had a bellyful of this national government she describes as “cynicism”. She’s worried about the tide of dissent and concerned over the need to get “back towards progressive and intelligent political ideology”. There’s still time, she says, for “ordinary citizens” to “wise up” and get back to traditional parties.
She’s slightly amused at the ragbag of independents but “most of us are gobsmacked by polls showing the party [Sinn Féin] taking possibly four Euro seats and topping the poll in Dublin… At home and abroad, peace, political stability and democracy is being taken for granted, leaving space for protest and extremism to thrive… May 23rd is an opportunity for sense and reflection to prevail about this state of affairs in this jurisdiction.”
What a clever person Ms O’Donnell is! Objections to policies which reduce those least able to pay she deems “progressive and intelligent”. The implication being that if you don’t see how all this pain is good for you, you must be stupid. If you don’t see the traditional parties – Fianna Fail, Fine Gael, Labour – as being respectable and smart, you are in need of wising up, because what you are embracing is protest and extremism. Strange, that. I would have thought that if you didn’t protest against corruption and savage welfare cuts that had you on your knees, you’d be a spineless idiot. As for extremism, could there be anything more extreme than reducing a state to the brink of chaos by saddling it with debt that will stretch over generations?
The truth is, Ms O’Donnell should be down on her little pink knees every night thanking God that the people of the south didn’t rise up and inform the government that they had had enough, were mad as hell and not taking any more. Or even engaged in the violent street politics that other countries in Europe have felt driven to. Ms O’Donnell’s view of political stability and democracy is all about scurrying back into the arms of the parties that visited this slash-and-burn policy on the people. That would be the smart thing. Putting your X against candidates who say enough already, let’s turn our faces towards a future where the welfare of the people is put first, not corrupt developers or lying bankers or the payment of debt that you never incurred in the first place.
Ms O’Donnell and the Irish Independent may yearn for the good old days when the right-wing Progressive Democrats pretended to know about economics and led the national finances over a cliff. Please God on 23 May, the people will show her their yearning is to deliver a kick to the traditional parties that’ll leave them aching in every bone in their political bodies for years to come.
You nailed this peon spot on Jude, what the current govt has done is unforgivable.At this stage we all know the cuts that took place and the jobbery that is rife,and the overpaid advisors that run the country but the worse infringement committed on the irish people was the export of our young people all 400,000 of them and told us it was a life style decision and their own choice..this came after their dole was reduced and the grants came off the education system…
Ms O’Donnell has joined the swelling number of failed politicians who now berate the electorate for the error of their ways. What she fails to comprehend is that her party was as progressive as the Green Party and the electorate delivered its verdict. I suspect that the electorate will deal with the Labour Party in an equally decisive manner. The late Luke Kelly, posed a question in poetic form, “To whom do we owe our allegiance today?” He castigated the, “…faceless men/who for mark and dollar betray her to the highest bidder.” The evidence suggests that during critical periods in the evolution of this country, many politicians pursued policies that clearly were not progressive. Ms O’Donnell may fool some of the people, some of the time… .
Putting your X against candidates who say enough already, let’s turn our faces towards a future where the welfare of the people is put first, not corrupt developers or lying bankers or the payment of debt that you never incurred in the first place.
Touchingly naive your grasp of economics is somewhat limited you should be congratulating the Irish govt they have done a good job with the hand that they have been dealt.
Its always easy to spend and spend but it doesnt give you any real growth if you looked at the real economy its doing very well.
Many have still not realised that an unregulated capitalist system will not work. It has been proven to be unworkable with the international crisis over the last 5 years and it is not too much of an exaggeration to compare it with the collapse of the Soviet Union which proved that state-command economies simply do not work.
But after the Cold war’s end a conventional wisdom prevailed and it said ‘well that communist experiment in Russia was an epic disaster so the complete obverse of that must be the solution to the world’s economic issues”. Twenty years later the consensus of neo-liberal capitalism lay in tatters; money did not ‘trickle down’ it simply stayed in the pockets of the super-rich and an equality gap between the haves and have-nots has grown to levels unprecedented for centuries.
Liz O’Donnell was part of the Republic’s neo-Liberal party, the Progressive democrats, the party which told us unemployment was a good thing because it would motivate people to try harder in work and try harder to get a job neglecting of course a most obvious fact, that if there is unemployment then there are not enough jobs to go around in society in the first place and so what jobs were people supposed to be trying hard to get. Doh.
But as a self-designated guardian of all that is right and wrong in the world and in Ireland specifically, O’Donnell is incapable of seeing that herself and or/her former party were wrong in even some regards. Hopefully people down south do not forget that the PD’s were the party for whom Fianna Fail and Fine Gael were not sufficiently right-wing. If it had been up to the PD’s only, there would not have been any tax revenues for Bertie Ahern to spent inappropriately in the wrong departments and at the wrong times in first place. Consequently they’d probably be in an even worse place than they are now.
Perhaps it is a state of denial amongst such people. They devote political careers to arguing for and legislating for a particular economic system, constantly harping on about the benefits of unregulated capitalism and when it all blows up in their faces they look for excuses, others to blame, perhaps it was not the entire ideology that was wrong but simply that the Irish people did not work it properly. The latter is perhaps the route the likes of O’Donnell will go down after all the Progressive Democrats gave off the stink of self-loathing Irish men and women who dislike all aspects of this great country apart from Brown Thomas on Grafton street.
I actually think the likes of her are so selfish they would prefer to have continuous austerity for the foreseeable future rather than acknowledge that her ilk made mistakes and attempt some constructive action to rectify it. Of course the now defunct Progressive Democrats dislike Sinn Fein but this is possibly as much to do with a social snobbery due to some Sinn Fein members having broad accents as it is to do with any genuine belief that the Sinners’ ideological take on economics will lead to disaster because after all what would the likes of O’Donnell know about economics anyway.
Its a bit surprising for Ms O’Donnell to now advocate staying with traditional parties. Lis was a member of a new party back in the 80s. This party tried to break the traditional 3 party block. Why now complain when others try to the same. I voted FG last time but the removal of medical cards for a large number of very disabled children is just wrong. With the end of the old civil war type voting patterns there is a Hugh hole there to be filled. In my opinion! If SF came out and suported the big multinational companies eg google eBay pfizer ie stop being anti big business they could make serious ground. Also as we seen during the late 90s the north is only a vote getter when things are going well up there. This is wrong but many in the south see the north as a place of perpetual strife. With the anniversary of the Dublin Monaghan bombings it is worth asking is there still a fear from the southern government of getting too involved?