Fine Gael’s Charlie Flanagan and Labour Party leader Joan Burton have been directing some heavy cross-border fire of recent days. It is directed – do I need to say? – not at unionist politicians, but at Sinn Féin, their political opponents in the south. Joan is on record as saying that giving Sinn Féin control of economy would be like handing keys back to the troika.
This is an old theme but one which has served southern politicians well. Sinn Féin are uneducated and dangerous clowns who wouldn’t be able to run a corner store successfully, let alone the finances of an entire country. We saw this first and most strikingly in the famous Michael McDowell-Gerry Adams debate on TV some years ago, when the consensus was that McDowell and his Progressive Democrats (remember them?) had an intelligent grip on finances, while Adams and Sinn Féin were floundering around out of their depth. The fact that shortly after that debate, McDowell and his party sank beneath the waves and the economic policies he’d been so eloquent in lauding during the debate brought the south to the brink of bankruptcy. But while the man and the party may have gone, the melody lingers on, thanks to Flanagan and Burton and others.
Except that in today’s Letters page of the Irish Times, a voice cuts in which, if Flanagan and Burton and Co have any shame, will bring to an end the Shinner bashing. Peter Bunting, who’s the assistant general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, has written to denounce Flanagan and Burton for using the impasse at Stormont as a stick with which to beat Sinn Féin. The ICTU, he notes, has been fighting the same battle as Sinn Féin, the Green Party, the SDLP and assorted others to resist the Tories’ policy of punishing the poor through their supposed welfare reform plans. His last two paragraphs sum up the position of ICTU and leave Flanagan and Burton exposed in their ignorance:
“The ICTU in Northern Ireland has never supported any particular political party. Trade unions that support working people are relentlessly opposed to policies that affect and afflict the working poor. That is our function. It is a sad day when our work is undermined by politicians in the Republic of Ireland desperate for a cheap soundbite”
Ouch.
Go to any town in Ireland, and you are destined to see shops/pubs and/or small businesses of all sorts closed or closing. New taxes and rates continue to be placed on the shoulders of working class families at atime when they can least afford them. Cutting social welfare grants is always a popular choice for those in power. Get those ‘spongers’ off the couch and make them work, meanwhile bank bailouts nearly ruin the country. Where ever there are social welfare programs there will be a group of people who will seek to game the system for their own benefit, true spongers. This group in my opinion is a minority as most people on social welfare are not there by choice, especiallyin Ireland, where a party in Govt, FG, has been on record as recommending young people need to to emigrate to work. What other nation would espouse such a diabolical,self defeating strategy.? Bank executives get bonuses and collect exorbitant salaries, politicians ,double dip pensions and the govt answer is to blame it on the poor. Rich stuff. How can Labor, above all, attack any political party who RESISTS cuts to the working man/poor? Next we’ll be told SF was wholly to blame for the troubles. Oh I forgot, we have already been sold that line of cac tarbh. GRMA, Jude, your column keeps the fire lit.
Not only the melody, but the malady lingers on, Esteemed Blogmeister.
. Take Charlie ‘Charles’ Flanagan who was interviewed on RTE’s Morning Ireland today by a restrained Rotweiler in Residence. The Foreign Minister of the Free Southern Stateen seems to be stravaiging on the streets of San Francisco at the moment where one is confident he will not lose, as the melody has it, his, erm, street smarts.
The malady in this case would appear to be what is described in the more polite medical tomes as ‘The Globe Trots’, as For Min Flan gives the huddled masses of Planet Earth an opportunity to familiarize themselves with What They have been Missing. Not least in the Far East where For Min Flan will have an almost Oriental ring about it.
Ever the one with his stethoscope on the pulse of street jive talk For Min Flan’s main concern in San Fran was the ‘thrashing’ epidemic which has beset Irish students abroad of late. Where a group of seven same first rent a house, before then doing what can only be described as, erm, a Packie on it, by promptly moving in seven more of their cohorts and so on throughout the long, hot summer. Till it iseventually time for the Matt the Thrashers to do the Returned Yank and hand back one pristine bunch of keys (thro’ the mail hatch, natch) and one seriously clobbered Clapboard House to a little less than thrilled ole’ Landlady
It can only be a matter of time during his ongoing ‘Globe Trot’ before the Meadowlark Lemon of Mountmellick hits the streets of Harlem where this trash talking first took off.
It was notable how the Restrained Rotweiller, Cathal Mac Coille (for it is he) somehow forgot to bring up the Fine Gale TD’s record on ‘trash talking’ the British Army’s tendency to trash S.F. houses in the Wee Six in the not so long ago. Perhaps it might have been construed as somehow ‘undiplomatic’ given For Min Flan’s current duties as a Planetary Man with an Intergalactic Peace Plan.
Let’s hope he is as Far Away from Tipperary as he can be this Saturday lest the Stonethrowers win the Stickfighting Replay against Kilkenny who are known in Harlem street jive as ‘Da Catz, bro’. For that would only involve another malady of a melody lingering on: ‘Slievenamon’.
Which as Charlie ‘Charles’ Flanagan has been only too well briefed, was composed by another Charles. .Yes, the same Charles who also composed the character of ‘Matt the Thrasher’ in his novel Knocknagow, or The Homes of Tipperary. This other Charles was born not in Mountmellick but in Mullinahone.
And what does one do if one is a Fine Gael Charles, with ministerial aspirations or not, to a Charles who only took up his goose quill when he was not taking up either his fowling piece or improvised musket not to mention his pitchfork, but Kickham up the transom of his Mullinahone all the way to the slopes of Slievnamon or Kingdom Come whichever is the closest. (wich is contemporary for ‘closer’)..
While, of course, one is wearing one’s historical Poppy proudly in one’s lapel, having taken great care and due diligence to ditch one’s inherited Easter Lily in, of course, the trash can of hysteria..
Mention of ‘Slievenamon’ / ‘Mountain of the Women’ enables one to neatly and nattily segue to the slopes of Joan ‘Joanie’ Burton, the tallest of tall Tanaistes not known for pulling her punches or indeed, paunches when it comes to letting the fall guys and gals of the Falls Road have it with both barrels.
Not willing to belabour the point, but Perkie suspects it’s a Proles Party thing as was evident during the Reign of Roy, the masonic lodge man. To the Annual Conferences/ Ardfheiseanna of whose party the Dublin branch sent fraternal and sororal delegates to the Mainland, without fianna or indeed, fail.. Even or indeed especially during such civilizing episodes as B. Sunday, Internment, the morphing of Long Kesh to the wiremeshy Maze, Dublin and Monaghan daytrippers jaunt etc etc etc
In those days the non-fraternal delegate was the legendary Sororal Boring Alice and our (suppressed) Yawnaiste is a fit subject to follow in her flat-heeled platitudes. Devoid of Y-fronts and Y-chromosones though the Yawnaiste may well be, this is one La Pasionada of Labour who is not ‘sin cojones’ como se dice in Espanol.
It is a pattern first glimpsed in her predecessor as Tanaiste, M. Harney, with whom she shares the XX factor, and who once promised the Free Southern Stateen the Horn of Plenty. She too made of the post her own by casting her own spell on the job, even unto changing its spelling: Tonaiste.
Indeed, there are those mischievous miscreants amongst us still – and from whom Perkie is not slow to disassociate his propietous self – who hold that the only thing which held the Tonaiste back from assuming the mantle of Foreign Minister of the Free Southern Stateen was her uncanny ability to flatten all opponents with the sheer logic and weight of her arguments. And that this admirable trait could well have been misconstrued by an unsuspecting world as an inherent Irish proclivity to pursue a policy of Flat Earthism. What was Eire’s gain was the Global loss.
With your permission, Esteemed Blogmeister, one would like to end of a similar note to yourself by referring to a letter in today’s distinguished letter page of TUT. A letter which might cause the bushy Healy-esque eyebrows of the naïve and uninitiated to arch in some a-mazement. Pencil-browed Perkie, of course, is not numbered among those innocents.
It is a letter from an old, indeed a very old friend of this Blog, (roll of drums, please) …Professor Emeritus John A. Murphy (D. Littt, Hon) in which he takes to task his old buttie John Bull Unionist on the q. of J. Redmond. Not to the extent, mind, of actually throwing down a gauntlet for a Duel at Dawn with the Bullock-befriender or anything of that nature. ). Even the tetchiest of Los Torreodores have their natural shelf life and the day has to dawn when even they have to cut el c. Not that it’s an avuncular, arm around the shoulder, let me show you the error of your unhistorical ways kinda episte. Anything but. Indeed it is feisty in the extreme.
So, how to explain? Well, one must be delicate and discrete in the choice of one’s words here: there are times in every hysterial historian’s life when he wakes up one morning thinking he is Oliver Cromwell, another morning when he is Thomas Babington Macauley no less, another when he is even Michael Dara Macaulaey and even, Dia idir sinn agus an t-olc, P. H. Pearse himself. There is no known cure, just bedpans full of T.L.C. ,24/7. There is just no knowing either how long that particular malady may linger on.
(Housekeeping: it has been scientifically proven that the X and Y chromosones began to diverge during the sequencing of the platypus genome. In other words, a long, long time ago. As long ago indeed as when the Alliance Party had as its leader, the oh so articulate Oliver Napier who would have no truck, no truck whatsoever with the primordial slime of Sinn Fein. That would be the politician known affectionally on all sides of the primordial political pond as…the ‘duck-billed platitude’. On the topic of ON one wonders was he and our Yawnaiste in any way related?)
“The ICTU in Northern Ireland has never supported any particular political party. Trade unions that support working people are relentlessly opposed to policies that affect and afflict the working poor. That is our function. It is a sad day when our work is undermined by politicians in the Republic of Ireland desperate for a cheap soundbite”
When have the unions ever created a single job?
They offer nothing to any employer or employee and are a hark back to best forgotten times
Neill,
“When have the unions ever created a single job?”
Mmmmm, I see you didn’t take Peter Buntings advice about using cheap sound bites!
“They offer nothing to any employer or employee and are a hark back to best forgotten times” let me see Neill, are you going to quantify your statement with some quantitive research gained from the many tens of thousands of members of trade unions across Ireland.
I suspect you have been listening to David Vance too much!
Well go on Pointis when did the unions create any jobs and more importantly when did they save any jobs?
Well said Peter,the stater hypocrites put in their box for a change.
The SDLP don’t contest elections in the south and therefore are not political rivals with FF FG and labour (unlike Sinn Fein). So why is there not stronger links between these party’s? Instead of SF bashing they could achieve a positive relationship with the north. It could also help these party’s electorally and sideline SF ( which is what the verbal attacks are about).
In the third paragraph Jude you state, `if Flanagan and Burton and co. have any shame`. Well therein lies the problem, they have no shame. They are obsessed with the rise of Sinn Féin and have shown themselves worse than useless in recent years. Unlike the Unionists who suck up to the British political parties and stand back allowing them to hit the poor, Sinn Féin and it must be said others, are quite prepared to try and fend off these unjust cuts.