Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

I’m still confused about Mary Hernia’s lavish expenses, especially the fee for the most luxurious suite in a five-star hotel which came with a private pianist. I’ve heard of Tina Turner’s “Private dancer” but a pianist?  I love piano music, especially Debussy and Chopin, but even four-star hotels have CD players, so that  if I hadn’t brought my discman with me, I can wallow in the tinkling of

A ministerial favourite?

the old ivories through popping a disc into the machine. But I somehow feel that Mary Hernia’s tastes in music don’t extend much beyond Phil Coulter and Richard Clayderman.

 I’m trying to picture the scene though. There was fatso and her fat parasite of a husband Brian and some of the FAS boys having an old singsong ‘round the Joanna – and all at the public expense! Jaysus, wasn’t it only fuckin’ wonderful! I wonder what they were singing? Maybe “Roll Out the Barrel”, or maybe they each did their party piece, with Mary’s being a very physical rendition of Chris De Burgh’s “Patricia The Stripper” as well as the Olivia Newton-John number “Let’s get physical”– enough to bring tears to the eyes of even the most cynical FAS bloodsucker.

 Not taking up for hairy Mary, I feel that she may not be wholly at the fault for the withholding of her expenses. In fact she is by now so blasé about living it up at the public expense that she doesn’t mind if the truth seeps out. She believes she lives a charmed live. She’s a minister, used to hobnobbing with the world’s important people, and the fact that it’s being paid for by Ireland’s little people should be seen as an opportunity for the dirty, scummy, stupid hoi poloi to share in her glory.

 Her department were at first hostile to admit anything about the minister’s expenses and tried valiantly to shield her from any harmful criticism by mud-slinging journalists. This was the Department of health’s Freedom of Information unit, which showed itself dedicated to preventing access to as much information as possible. Throughout the Irish civil service there are similar Freedom of Information units whose role is to stand in the way of the free flow of information. This oxymoronic set-up reminds me a bit of the joke about the restaurants in the old Soviet Union which always closed for lunch.    They initially said that the decision as to whether to release the expenses details had to be made by a Deciding Officer; only he was at an interminable meeting, and then, as fate would have it, he had to attend to an urgent personal matter – his male budgie had dropped an egg. Faced with such obvious obfuscation the Mail on Sunday then contacted the minister’s personal advisor, and like magic, the situation changed from interminable winter into brilliant spring. It was, as if once the minister had been made fully aware of the problem, the foot-dragging response of her officials, disappeared, and their natural nastiness gave way to a need to please, as well as an admission that they had indeed broken the law, but they were civil servants, so it didn’t really count. Maybe their ‘phone manner was also transmogrified, from a typically curt and Alsatian-like gruffness into a mild-mannered, indeed sugar-coated insouciance.

People may recall Theresa Lowe from Where in the World? She seems to have disappeared off the telly this long while, and I’m not going to repeat any of the dreadful rumours I’ve heard why. Last year my mate Gary was heading back to Meath on the late bus out of Busaras when he saw her. He was going to sidle up beside her and ask: “Is it yourself Theresa?   an’ tell us why don’t we see ya on the box anymore? And what about that patsy Frank ya married? I always knew ya were too good for him. I for one never believed for one minute all that shite about ya hittin’ the jar…”

The maharishi

 What was Minister Panafin doing in India anyway? Maybe it stemmed from her strict upbringing at the hands of the authoritarian Des, who, following Church teaching, frustrated her love of The Beatles. She may have long had a desire to visit some of the sites frdeque3nted by John Lennon during his visit to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and spend some time at his grave.  It is only now that she can finally realise her ambitions, and at the Irish taxpayers’ expense. Alternatively, she may have wished to visit some of the sites associated with Mother Theresa of Calcutta, that poor woman who strove3 so heroically on behalf of the poor and unloved of her adopted city, and who has been so shameless taken over by the rats of the Catholic right, such as Opus Dei and the Knights of St Columbanus, even though they would have been the first to spurn the poor of Calcutta from the doors of their mansions had they sought alms or help there.

 There are discrepancies between Minister Panafin’s version of events and the evidence provided by official receipts. To my mind this amounts to fraud, yet this from a minister who never shirked from getting up on her hind legs to boast of how much her departmental squadristi had uncovered in welfare fraud. There seems to be some double standards here. Why is Barnie from Ballinacurra who does the odd nixer with the brew guilty of fraud while the minister for social and family affairs isn’t?  Barnie would need to have multiple claims before the amount he gets would approach the minister’s expenses. Or maybe minister Hernia told about the great food to be got in India. Well actually the best Indian food is to be found in the British Isles.

 Our government ministers seem to love foreign travel, yet it is not the game show of the late ‘80s I’m reminded of, but RTE’s more recent offering for travellers – No Frontiers. Certainly there are no frontiers to the greed  and arrogance of our rulers for squandering other people’s money.