Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

A view of the world from an Irish hole

Month: March, 2010

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Let’s get physical

The results of a survey carried by RTE news has found that 10 % of Irish secondary schools are dropping Physics as a subject, partly due to budget cuts impacting on teaching.

Now I think this is significant. It is time to challenge this pack of panderers, drunkards and cheats who rule us with the assertion that their claims about wanting to create a smart economy staffed by educated people, which will make Ireland a competitive player in the world market, are nothing more than rancid piss.

 I have many regrets         one being that I did not work harder at Maths while at school, and as a result I turned away from Physics. If I had my life over again it would be so different … I opted instead to concentrate on subjects like history, and in retrospect I feel that history is a subject for losers -it’s a thing of the past.

 But how can we provide significantly qualified scientists and engineers, the bedrock of any truly competitive economy, while removing Physics as a subject choice? The subject needs teachers with properly equipped laboratories. It is not something that you can study on your own. To make cuts which impact so seriously on our ongoing competitiveness is nothing short of stupid.

 But we all know that our government is no more than a pack of puppets in the hands of a small group of unrepresentative and shadowy scoundrels. They seem inexorably wed to the McCarthy report, a document which, once it proposed cuts in social welfare payments was like a wet dream to the hard right in Ireland, and to those who, having managed through fairer means than foul to scrape their hoards together, are damned if they’re going to let anyone else do the same.

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Pog mo hol aris

A report issued on March 29th by An Cominiseir Teanga castigated a number of public bodies and county councils for their failure to carry out their statutory duties vis-à-vis the Irish language.

 What a piece of unbelievable tokenism. I never knew such an organisation or person existed. Talk about Mahogany gas-pipes!

 People can be assured that, through the efforts of this organisation, they are being ripped off, cheated and oppressed bilingually. For so many officials of local government the only phrase of Irish they might need would be “An bhfuil an airgead agat?”

 In spite of all this hypocrisy the Irish language still thrives, though its obsequies have been choreographed with typically bureaucratic incompetence, and its undertakers have been richly renumerated.

 By the way is there a Cominiseir Bubilin?

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Animal cruelty on TV

I hate seeing cruelty to animals. Some people may recall the old Mart & Market on RTE, where the livestock prices from the country’s marts was accompanied by a very grainy piece of film of a man poking a poor demented creature around a ring.

 Well all this came flooding back to me just now when I turned on TG4. The advertised program was live coverage of the Dail. Instead there was a picture of a bespectacled pig in a suit. He was grunting wildly and incoherently, trying to fend off the prods of threatening spectators. He was obviously in pain and distress as he was urinating and defecating all around him, so the smell must have been so atrocious. This was so upsetting that I switched channels to Cash in the Attic. Someone tried to tell me that this was our Prime Minister, but they were obviously pulling my leg.

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How long is a piece of string?

How long is a piece of string? Does the answer differ if those charged with finding it out are supposed to work longer hours?

 The public pay agreement is a marvellous spectacle of selfishness. Many of those who suffered cuts in the recent cowardly budget had no option but to sit and take it. The unemployed whose benefits were cut, were unable to go on strike. Similarly those like myself whose blind pensions were cut could not threaten to go on strike either.

 What’s more public service union members will not face any pay cut until 2014, when it is hoped we have got back to Celtic Tiger land. No such guarantee exists for the unemployed, the blind or the partially sighted.

 I have never had much sympathy with the complaints of people while being low paid, have permanent jobs. (Whenever I have been “fortunate” to have a job, I have invariably been low paid, and if I appeared the least dissatisfied with my wages or conditions out I went and what’s more I never had any union to protect me,) When there were protests about the pensions levy I wondered what would be the response of the public service unions when cuts in welfare payments were introduced. I predicted the deafening silence. None of these cuts could have been introduced without the active involvement of public sector workers who processed the changes. And they certainly could not have been implemented without their help.

 The government knows that further cuts cannot be implemented without the support of public service workers. In fact the government relies on these storm troopers to carry them out. And just in case the government is seen as caving in to the threat of strikes they’ve tried to conceal their actions with talk about Public Service Reform. This probably involves a commitment by the membership of public service unions to work really harder at doing less.

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Crossing the Red Sea poll with Micheal Martin

Ah come on now Carla...

It was so sad to hear Micheal Martin’s response to the Red C Poll findings. He sounded hurt and bewildered. How could the Irish people respond with such negativity when the government’s actions were earning plaudits from the European Central Bank, the European Commission, stock brokers, fat cat bankers and fascists everywhere. He hadn’t sounded so dejected since Carla Bruni turned down his request for a quicky while Nicolas’ back was turned.

 Micheal, in spite of his Master’s degree in history, obviously still has a problem with how governments work here. Most of those people who think the government is doing a good job live outside the country. What’s more they have nice, well-paid jobs, they’re educated and able-bodied and work in comfortable, heated offices. They don’t have to suffer as a result of the cuts instituted by this government.

 The devil’s in the detail. It’s all very well having a high-sounding policy, if its implementation is unjust, and is dependant on selfish and cowardly decisions inspired by short-term thinking and prejudice, it is worse than useless.

 The sad thing is that we know that it doesn’t mater who is in power. Whether it’s Fianna Fail or Fine Gael the people of Ireland invariably lose and the gangsters who donate to the parties win hands down every time.

 But Fianna Fail has a strategy up its sleeve for dealing with its electoral decline. If the poll findings get really bad Fianna Fail will play the race card. It will say that the cuts in social welfare, not to mention the bollocksed state of the health service, is all due to FFers (f*%£ing foreigners) coming here to steal our dole, our jobs and our women. This way they will hope to steal support from Fine Gael and the Labour Party.

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Gormley’s claptrap

Remember the days when Green Party conferences were places of slightly hippy and left-field idealism? Well thanks to Gormless John those days are past. In fact his speech could well have been delivered by a Fianna Fail minister. So identifiable with a Fianna Fail Ard Fheis was the whole thing that one wonders were the foyers of Watervford’s hotels filled with Green Party activists who had crashed out after a skinful.

  Take the claptrap about “tough decisions”.. This swill could have come from the mouth of that bitch Mary Hanafin.  It was worse, because it was an attempt by Gormless John to try and present himself as a big, hard man, but it sounded as butch as the hysterical squeaks from a harem’s eunuch.

 Now cutting the blind pension is not a tough action; it is cowardly John. And then you come out with the real howler about commitment to a just society – in your dreams.

 I find it hard to square the fact that John Gormley sat at cabinet with people making such cowardly cuts with his supposed defence of the rights of people in Tibet. It will be recalled how the Chinese ambassador was so incensed by his remarks some years ago that he left in protest. If Gormley cares as much for the people of Tibet as he does for Ireland’s blind and partially sighted, he is nothing but a common hypocrite.

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Green Party advertisement

Here is the copy for a potential DIY advertisement.

 Are you involved in pollution, dodgy planning or climate change?

 Let’s face it, you’re going to have to deal with Green Party infestation.

 But there’s no need to suffer in silence.

 Gormley Green Party Killer destroys Green Party activity from within, turning it into ordinary scum.

 Gormley Green Party Killer – It does exactly what it says on the tin.

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True blue

Leo Varadkar’s snide attack on Dr Garret Fitzgerald was nothing short of disgraceful/ Dr Fitzgerald , during his political career, was a beacon of honesty and integrity, within the general sea of political filth. Garret was always committed to the principles of just society, something for which many in the Fine Gael party have never forgiven him.

 Varadkar is probably one of this government’s greatest assets. He demonstrates to many people the futility of replacing the present government with 

Dr Garret Fitzgerald

a party which, at its heart, is dedicated to the same heartless, right wing policies.

 It is also a most heinous abuse of parliamentary privilege to make derogatory comments about named individuals who are not members of the house, and who are unable to defend themselves. I suppose Captain Kirk was asleep.

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Brian’s reshuffle

Credit where credit’s due. Brian Cowen did make some worthwhile changes. Moving Mendacious Mary Hanafin was top notch, while promoting Sean Connick from the backbenches was inspired.

 Yet the cabinet continues to have its shady members. Ireland’s health service is barely functioning (and that’s the best that can be said for it), but the globe-trotting sybarite Mary Harney remains in place, even though she has no party allegiance. In spite of the fact that the Health Service is going down in flames Maro continues to fiddle like the Emperor Nero – or should that be tinkle the ivories in her five-star suite? No, she gets someone else to do that – at public expense. In fact given Mary Harney’s liking for piano music, would it not have been better if she had been appointed minister for the Arse … Arts and Mary Hanafin had been cast into the wilderness?

Also this new name for the old department of Social Warfare  – the Department of Social Protection is clunky.  It sounds like a brand of condom, though this is probably apt considering the number of pricks who’ve always worked there. 

As for the Greens .. who?

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Sean Connick

I sincere congratulate Sean Connick ion his promotion to a ministry of State. Sean and myself have one thing in common. We both have to use wheelchairs. I hope that Brian Cowen’s actions are not motivated by tokenism here. Sean has shown himself well able to perform the arduous and difficult tasks associated with government.

 This is not the first time I’ve congratulated Sean. I sent him a message at the time of his first election. Sadly he never replied.

 Sean has the opportunity of becoming a real role model for disabled people. He can demonstrate that we deserve a real chance to contribute to society, and be more than the obsequiously nodding backing groups to the often short-sighted actions of those who take responsibility for promoting the disabled.

As I have said myself and Sean have one thing in common. He has just been appointed to government, and yet I languor in obscurity. Sean has worked hard for his promotion, and deserves to be able to reap the rewards of his efforts, yet I’m supposed to just sit here and quietly accept the ongoing attempts of some people in this locality to rubbish me and my work.

Some might say that I somehow deserve my lot because of my outspokenness. But all I’ve ever done is call attention to waste and shortcomings. There are attempts also to portray me as some type of angry hothead who has never come to terms with his disabilities. I see my disabilities as gifts, yes gifts from God. Rather than raging against them it is up to me to work my way through and around them, as Sean Connick and many others have done. I remember once seeing an interview with him, where he said that, like everyone he had his good and his bad days – so do I. The most important thing is to keep going on and feel that you are making a positive contribution to the world around you.

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