That extra F

I've blogged before about how parents who give their children stupid names should be up on child abuse charges.

It's a global problem, generally committed by the lumpenproletariat whose imagination, stunted by a childhood diet of smokes and deepfried food, leads them to brand their offspring with the name of whatever pop star, white wine, car model or city happens to be in front of them at the time of birth.

But surely there must be a special ring of Hell set aside for people who, given perfectly reasonable names by their perfectly normal parents, jettison that in favour of some eye-popping nonsense.

I'm not talking about actors and writers assuming stage or pen names. I'm talking about Celtic Tiger eejits who decided to 'rebrand' in order to feed the ravenous monster that is their attention-seeking ego.

That extra F did it for me. Malcontent with being just another Aoife, some balloon off some RTE reality show (another ring in Hell dedicated to anyone involved in making those, I'd have thought) decided she needed an extra F in there 'to be different'.

Note to Aoiffffffe: Adding random letters to your name isn't 'different'; it's illiterate.

Graduates of advanced level Celtic Tiger naming idiocy include people who call themselves 'Puffin', 'Turtle', 'Doodle', 'Vogue' or 'Gavin Lambe-Murphy'.

By no coincidence whatsoever, all of these people can be found on the southside of Dublin 'working' in jobs that don't sound like jobs to people who work 9 to 5.

You know - they're models, or in PR, or they simply consider themselves to be celebs. Some such shit.

These people need to realise that it's not big or clever. It doesn't make you look different, or special. It makes you look like a self-important tool who can't spell and has industrial sized attention issues.

A kid like Rocco Ahern I feel sorry for (in more ways than one.) It's not their fault. But the adults who insist people call them by the name of exotic animals? I simply feel contempt for them.

It's not 2007 anymore. Change your name back to Mary or Padraig or whatever normal name your parents gave you before you copped a double dose of Celtic Tiger delusions, you planks.

Cold, skint and depressed

I haven't blogged with particular regularity recently. This is because, as the title states, I'm cold, skint and depressed.

Like most of the country, basically.

Well, like those who aren't actually bankrupt or in hundreds of thousands of negative equity they now owe to the bailed-out banksters.

Or like those who aren't actually flooded out of the homes some gombeen developer built on flood plains with dodgy planning and possibly a brown envelope or two.

Or like those who can't get their operation or healthcare because our minister for Obesity keeps hiking the cost of a prescription or attending A+E.

Equally, I'm not so smug, comfortable, with my African dictator-sized Merc and Garda chauffeur, with my dodgy finances and my millionaire daughters to comfort me, that I'm in a position to advise those complaining about the state of the nation to fuck off and grow bluebells, like Bertie Ahern did.

I'm cold, skint and depressed, and I'm still better off than most. That's how bad this place has become. And it will get worse as Clowen and his cohorts seek to mug us all again in the budget.

Come the Spring, I might well grow some bluebells, in order to bring some much needed colour back into the place.

And then I'm going to Drumcondra to look for a former politician's arse I can ram them up, to stop the corrupt little fucker from speaking out of that particular orifice any further.

Seriously, why isn't he in jail yet?

Lies, damned lies and TD expenses

Just a quick post to point out the further contempt in which Irish politicians hold their electorate.

In a brief moment of lucidity, Justice Minister Brian Lenihan decided to deal with the issue of dodgy TD expense claims by asking them to swipe a card in and out of the building.

This of course has the additional value of letting security know instantly who's in Leinster House and who isn't at any given time, which would be sort of important in a crisis, like a fire.

The response of one (sadly unnamed) TD in the Irish Independent?

"Can you imagine a member of parliament with a constitutional role having to swipe in as if he were a factory worker?"

To which, the answer from the majority of the people is undoubtedly, 'Yes, we can imagine it. But we don't want to imagine it. We want to see it done. Sign in and out so we can find out how much work you actually do, and let's see how many of you have been fiddling your expenses up until now.'

"What if a fella comes up on a Monday night and decides to go straight to his or her hotel," continued our anonymous TD. "Is he meant to swipe his card first in the Dail?"

Yes. That's the system, gobshite.

You get a card, you swipe it when you go to work and when you leave. You want to go to Dublin late on Monday night and crash out in your hotel room? Fire away. No one is stopping you. But don't expect us to pay you for going to a hotel and lying down!

It's the tone that is objectionable, the self-entitlement that oozes from every word. Scratch the surface further, and you hear of how FF members of the committee that made this recommendation to Minister Lenihan have been continually lobbied by their own party on this issue.

Bottom line is that the Leinster House mob don't want to lose their lucrative expenses and daily allowances that they can currently claim for whether they're entitled or not, because no one checks TD claims.

Earlier this year, the Sunday Mirror did. They found that Beverly Cooper-Flynn had claimed enough mileage in one year to drive the circumference of Planet Earth twice! This clearly did not actually happen, so one can only conclude that Deputy Flynn has got away with yet another lucky and undeserved payday at the taxpayer's expense.

Which is ironic, given her previous job was helping Bank of Ireland customers avoid paying tax. In different ways, Flynn has been screwing us all for years.

Or how about Bertie Ahern claiming mileage (he doesn't drive, has no licence, and as former Taoiseach already has a state Merc and driver on call 24-7) and overnight allowances (he lives in the North inner city, ffs)? Ahern's expenses claims are now about as plausible as his tax status, which continues to make no sense to anyone, least of all the Revenue Commission.

Jackie Healy-Rae also claimed thousands upon thousands of euro in mileage - yet the paper photographed him getting the train! And as a pensioner, he is entitled to travel for free anyway!

The fact is that the honour system can not be used any longer, because it is demonstrable that our TDs don't have any honour.

We need to save money - lots of money - from the state expenditure. Parliamentary remuneration has to stay top of the list. They shouldn't get to take a penny of us without hurting themselves first, because it was them and not the rest of us that scrapped banking legislation, fuelled property speculation and that blew our economy apart.

And we have to start with their expenses, the massive pay cheques they effectively sign for themselves each year without scrutiny.

Let the fuckers sign into work every day or not be paid. Let them produce receipts for everything or receive no expenses.

It's the very least they could do, and Lenihan is utterly right to demand this of them.

The Celtic Tiger disease

Image courtesy of The Community Voice.

I was listening to Start The Week tonight. (Well, it beats watching Prime Time, obviously.)

Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson was on explaining how come a disease researcher like him ended up penning a book about why societies need to be more equal.

His book is top of my 'must buy and read' list already. But if I got him right, basically he was researching illness caused by lifestyle (stress, obesity and so on) and found it more prevalent in the most unequal societies, even if they were overall very affluent.

By contrast, more equal societies like Sweden have much lower levels of all these social and personal ills, despite having less disposable income overall.

Then he looked into things like violence, and found again that deeply unequal societies have the worst violence. What was really interesting was that he discovered that the very rich elites in these societies suffer too. Their wealth merely takes the edge off the risks.

He made the very good point that in such unequal societies - America, Britain, us, but also places like Singapore and Portugal, as well as the obvious African despotocracies - everyone suffers from status anxiety.

In other words, having the big car is no comfort because someone richer has a bigger car. And meanwhile, everyone works harder to earn the money which they then squander on such status symbols instead of using it usefully to develop their lives and society in a genuinely positive way.

Any of this sound familiar?

This goes to the core of the Celtic Tiger lie. The rising tide may well have lifted many of the boats (although you'll always meet plenty of people who it completely passed by.) But it didn't improve Irish society or make our lives more fulfilling and happier.

Instead it made us work harder to live in worse conditions (boxy apartments in dormitory estates miles from anywhere) in order to support the ostentatious consumption that was thrust forth as the be all and end all of our human existence.

Now that the Irish people are finally waking up from the nightmare, we can come to acknowledge that the squandering of the wealth we created wasn't just the fault of bankers, politicians and a golden circle, culpable though they all are.

We're all collectively responsible, and that can be seen in the fruits of our labour. The Celtic Tiger disease is best expressed by what we wasted our money on.

The rise of vacuous celebrity magazines, trumpeting the values of vapidity like the Beckhams or Jade Goody is possibly the most defining symptom of our collective disease.

So was the proliferation of bling, the pointless plumage of the self-obsessed. As were the overt penis-extensions like the big cars, the McMansions and the endless foreign holidays where people went to ever more exotic locales with the sole intent of boasting of it afterwards.

There is a cure for both this emptiness and for the deep social inequality that caused it. But that cure is currently a dirty word. Don't believe me? Listen to the shills scaremongering.

Let's start with a personal favourite, the Sunday Independent, mouthpiece of 'Sir' Tony O'Reilly, the man who got our gas and oil for nothing who now resides as a tax exile in Barbados and who closed Waterford Crystal, such is his commitment to our economy.

Here's his trustworthy senior journalist Jody Corcoran, a hack who previously excelled himself by accusing the late Liam Lawler of being with a prostitute when he died in a Moscow car crash (the poor woman was his interpreter.)

According to Jody, there is a battle for the hearts and minds of Ireland, and our Jody fears - gulp - that the battle may already be lost. Apparently the future of Ireland is socialism.

Yup, the S word. The word that the neo-cons successfully, and utterly inaccurately, linked so directly to Soviet gulags and Stalinist purges, to Mao's mayhem and famine and death, that even socialists themselves rapidly felt the need to rebrand as social democrats all over the world.

The word that Bertie Ahern once risibly sought to claim.

Socialism, the big boogyman, the dangerous ideology that would destroy our society.

How did we not see this 'reds under the bed' nonsense for what it is the SECOND time they played us with it? The truth is that it was the exact opposite of socialism, the inane, greed-driven inequity at the heart of neo-conservatism that destroyed what was good about Ireland.

I hope Corcoran is right (that's possibly a first for me.) I hope the future of Ireland IS socialism and for one very simple reason - we already tried the alternative he and his ex-pat billionaire employer espouse, and it's brought us to the brink of destruction.

We've destroyed our social cohesion, squandered our wealth and bankrupted our nation, while simultaneously abandoning the sickest in society to the vicissitudes of Harney's marketplace, and beggaring our young families on lifetime long mortgages for piss-poor accommodation.

Don't let the very people who beggared you, who stole your healthcare and social services, who sold you on extreme debt to fund crap you don't need that enriched only their already obscene bank balances - don't let them scare you any more.

The only way out of our current crisis is to recognise it for what it is, and wake up from the nightmare we sleepwalked into. The way out is to build a more equal society. The way out is to adopt the one political vision that this country has never tried in its entire history.

The disease, as Dr Wilkinson rightly diagnoses, is that we replaced a slightly unequal society with a desperately acutely unequal one.

The cure for that inequality is socialism.

Enough to make a Jackal puke

Dan Kennedy, writing in the Guardian, is spot on.

US Vice-President Dick Cheney, the real power in the White House during the Bush presidency, is attempting to claim that the invasion of Iraq has worked out well.

Not well for Saddam Hussein, obviously, who was caught hiding in a cellar some five years ago and subsequently executed rather than sent to the War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

And not well for the people of Iraq, unless one considers the faint autonomy of some of Kurdistan to be worth it.

Of course, the invasion and occupation of Iraq went really well for Dick Cheney himself, as he was able to transfer large amounts of US tax dollars into the hands of his old pals at Halliburton.

Increasingly, as one listens to the whining of Tony Blair about his anguish over the war, or indeed scoffs at corrupt old Bertie Ahern as he pleads to be considered the great peacemaker of Ireland, I have come to realise that the place to hurt these people is in their legacy.

Blair's not stupid, and now realises that his legacy will be ever ruined by his involvement in Iraq. Ahern is rather stupid, but his arrogance and ego demand that history credit him with things he had at best a tangential involvement in (peace in the North of Ireland and the boom economy), rather than the things he was up to his greasy little neck in (endemic Fianna Fail corruption, clientelism and gombeenism).

Cheney is also concerned about the legacy. And he remains in cynical denial about the wrongs he has committed.

His only out now is to try to persuade the rest of us to see things from his twisted point of view - a point of view which says that it doesn't matter if there were no weapons in Iraq, it doesn't matter if hundreds of thousands died needlessly, and it doesn't matter about America kidnapping and torturing people in third countries.

As Dan Kennedy says in his excellent commentary on Cheney's delusions, it is enough to make a jackal puke.

Bertie the martyr's STILL laughing at us

If you were to listen to some of the hagiography being spouted about Ahern at the moment, you'd think he was a cross between Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King.

The blessed one, betrayed and cast out unfairly by those he selflessly served for so long. But still beatific in his sacrifice.

In other words, us sentimental Irish are getting carried away again, and are spouting a load of cobblers about a man who, let us not forget, was described by the ultimate Fianna Fail crook Charles Haughey as 'the most cunning and devious of them all.'

By his actions let him be known, I say. Thumbs up for the Northern peace process. Thumbs down for lying to the nation, via Brian Dobson, about his shady finances.

And a middle finger for bringing another liar, Beverly Cooper Flynn, back into the Fianna Fail fold as his latest act.

Hopefully Cowen, who kicked her out of Fianna Fail in the first place, will have enough sense to keep her at a long arm's length.

If Fianna Fail are ever to turn a corner away from the taint of corruption, which is about as much as they can hope to achieve by sacrificing their electoral trump card Bertie, then they need to keep venal Bev as far away from power as possible.

Previously: They're laughing at us now.

Bye Bye Bertie

The most cunning, most devious of them all is gone.

From the steps of the government buildings plinth he fell on his sword, his lip all a-quiver with pent-up tears.

Well, Bertie was always one for the dramatic touch. Whether it was the yellow suit in the company of world leaders or the famous anorak as he stood in the floodwaters of Drumcondra, Bertie always knew how to hold a crowd.

Unlike Jack Lynch, Charles Haughey and Albert Reynolds, Bertie is the first Fianna Fail leader in living memory to go at a time of his own choosing.

Of course, perhaps it is more a time of The Mahon Tribunal's choosing.

Either way, the reign of the Bert ends on the 6th of May, following his address at the Houses of Congress in the US and, strangely, the visit of the Japanese Prime Minister.

And later, there is Taoiseach's questions in the Dail, when the invisible man Enda Kenny had planned to draw blood. That flush is busted for Fine Gael now, a small consolation for Bertie today.

Bertie was flanked by nearly all of his cabinet. Looking very out of place, John Gormley stood behind Bertie as he barely mentioned the Green Party in the lengthy list of shout-outs he gave to all who had ever supported him.

Whereas Mary Harney, who Bertie described as a 'good friend', had the sense not to appear on the plinth.

Cowen looked bored, looking over Bertie's shoulder at his speech as if trying to see how long Bertie was going to talk for. Behind him, stood Brian Lenihan, who in Bertie's absence may well be elevated to Minister of Finance when Cowen becomes Taoiseach.

Bertie said that his resignation had nothing to do with recent events. That's not the first untruth he's told in recent times. But it is one, perhaps, that he can be forgiven for.

There's no harm in letting the man leave with his dignity intact. But I still look forward to his appearing before the Tribunal to explain the hundreds of thousands of punts that washed through his bank account.

There is a sea-change in Irish politics. Bertie, whose sins compared to those of Haughey are venal, has had to resign, and those in Irish politics who are much more corrupt, much filthier than Bertie should now quake in their gucci loafers.

The clean-up has begun.

Ahern's solicitors try to silence online debate

This is really quite concerning for free speech in Ireland and on the internet as a whole.

Frank Ward and Co., the solicitors representing An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern at the Mahon Tribunal, have sent a letter to popular discussion website Politics.ie, threatening legal action.

Their threat, which can be examined here, alleges defamation and libel in relation to a thread on Politics.ie about Grainne Carruth.

Ahern's solicitors have demanded that David Cochrane, who operates the site, provide the real life identities of six individuals who contributed to that particular debate.

I am one of those individuals.

I categorically state that I libelled no one. I also am of the opinion that at least four of the others whose identities are sought also libelled no one.

My contribution to the debate referred to by An Taoiseach's lawyers was to pose questions about Irish legal history to another poster, who despite answering my questions and being one of the most prominent posters on the offending debate, is NOT one of the people Ward and Co. wish to unveil.

In that context therefore, I can only assume that the legal firm have chosen to stifle all debate rather than merely seek to address an alleged libel.

I am also of the opinion that any potential libel can be simply removed in an online debate upon request, as opposed to libels in print which are impossible to retract.

I am therefore stunned that the solicitors representing An Taoiseach have chosen instead to threaten legal action against a popular politics discussion website, and against named internet identities.

David Cochrane has stated that he was told the person who drew this debate to the attention of Frank Ward and Co. was Sean Dorgan, the General Secretary of Fianna Fail. I have no idea if that is the case or not.

I would also like to identify some other facts of interest in Irish current affairs:

David Cochrane is a prominent member of lobby group Libertas, which is running a strident and successful campaign against the Lisbon Treaty.

Fianna Fail are campaigning in favour of that treaty.

This week, the leaders of two parties in the governing coalition of this country called upon An Taoiseach to make a statement clarifying the apparent contradiction of his evidence to the Mahon Tribunal with the evidence of Grainne Carruth.

This weekend, people are debating all of these facts in pubs, in restaurants, around the family dinner table, and yes, online too.

I do not suggest any connection between these facts, causal or otherwise, nor do I suggest any connection between these facts and the threat of legal action against David Cochrane and Politics.ie.

I do suggest that it is wrong to seek to silence freedom of speech and vibrant political debate online in this country, however.

Death by a thousand cuts

History will not record that Louth Fianna Fail councillor Tommy Murphy dealt Bertie the first cut.

Nor will history record that Progressive Democrat senator and leader candidate Fiona O'Malley dealt Bertie that first cut.

Despite the belated scramble by the abject Green Party leader, Minister for Environment John Gormley to slide a knife into Ahern, history will not record that he dealt the Taoiseach the first blow.

No, the first of the thousand cuts that kill Bertie's Taoiseachship came from Minister for Health, Mary Harney.

Let me be clear. I do not like Mary Harney or her policies in the Department of Health. She has presided, literally, over a repudiation of responsibility that verges on criminal and has undoubtedly contributed to circumstances in the Irish health service which have cost people their lives.

But I will acknowledge that she has integrity. She left Fianna Fail because of its endemic corruption and has remained outside since. Many will query whether that made a big difference, since she so cleverly positioned her tiny party in such a place that it propped up successive Fianna Fail governments.

I would suggest it made a difference to her. Fianna Fail used her as a mudguard in regard to the health service. She knows this, and knew it when Bertie re-appointed her to the position recently.

There are easier jobs she could do, no doubt. Especially following the decimation of her party last year, and her having the leadership foisted upon her after McDowell had so rudely demanded she relinquish it.

But her integrity ensured that she remained at her post. More's the pity, I would say. There are few other health ministers who would have pursued the privatisation of our health service with such blinkered vision and such disastrous results.

But just as her integrity can have negative consequences, so it can occasionally be positive for the nation also.

Such as today.

Her conscience jogged by Fiona O'Malley, Harney finally spoke out, finally removed the knife from the belt and slammed it into the back of Bertie.

Apres ca, le deluge.

Let the bloodletting begin.

Big Ian leaves: compare and contrast

Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, his fellow Chuckle Brother, said:

"Obviously there's a lot of interest in the work I have been doing with Ian Paisley in the course of the last ten months," he said at Stormont. I think I have to say it's been a remarkable and unique experience."
"I think many of you will know I had a very dim view of Ian Paisley prior to the 26th March last year (when Sinn Fein and the DUP agreed to share power) and I suppose he even had a dimmer view of me if we are to be truthful about all of this."
"But we managed to work together on a deal brokered by Ian Paisley and leader of my party Gerry Adams and we developed a positive and constructive working relationship within the Office of First and Deputy First Minister."

Bertie Ahern, of Fianna Fail, and Taoiseach of the Irish Republic said:

"I'm not going to say I didn't spend most of my political life taking a different point of view (to Mr Paisley), I did."
"But when it came down to making the Good Friday Agreement work and to having an inclusive executive in Northern Ireland and to have North-South bodies, he made the big moves. We've worked hard to get the stability, we've worked hard to build a relationship with Dr Paisley."
"We've achieved that, it was not easy, and now the main player in a few months' time will go off the stage. We have to now work to see if that harmonious relationship can continue. Obviously, I hope so but time will decide that."

Only Seamus Mallon of the SDLP had the balls to say:

"The paradox is that it was the Good Friday Agreement, which he set out to destroy, that allowed him to be inside in terms of influence for the first time in his whole political career. Those are two of the areas that historians will look at and people will be assessing from now on."
Mallon, who once watched Mr Paisley during the famous Civil Rights march at Armagh when he took over the city said "it was that desire for dominance that many people in the nationalist community will remember."
And he also pointed out that the fact that among Paisley's first moves during serious negotiations with the Governments was for seats in the House of Lords and a Privy Councillorship indicated "his desire, not just for power, but for the trappings of power."
"Yes he brought unionism into a power-sharing arrangement with Sinn Fein, but to do that he had to destroy, as he had destroyed Terence O'Neill, as he destroyed Faulkner, as he destroyed Chichester Clarke, he had to destroy the unionist leader David Trimble."
"It tells you about the paradox of all this, that the creativity which he undoubtedly gave the political process in Northern Ireland in his later years, was achieved as a result of the destructive element in his approach to politics and this type of political atavism which demanded absolute and total power."

Correct, Seamus.

Additional useful perspectives on Paisley from Trimble and Ruarai O'Bradaigh can be read here, at Best of Both Worlds.

Keeping track of the dig outs

30 December 1993: Bertie Ahern lodges IR£22,500:
of which IR£15,000 cash,
IR£5,000 from Padraic O'Connor of NCB
and IR£2,500 from Des Richardson.

25 April 1994 Bertie Ahern lodges IR£30,000,
of which IR£27,164.44 to special savings account
and IR£2,835.26 to current account.

8 August 1994 Bertie Ahern lodges IR£20,000
to account in names of daughters

11 October 1994 Foreign Exchange. 
Bertie Ahern lodges IR£24,838.49 to deposit account
(equates to £25,000 stg)

5 December 1994  IR£50,000
(in two amounts-28,000 and 22,000)
is transferred from Bertie Ahern's account to Celia Larkin account (CL1)

5 December 1994 Foreign Exchange. 
IR£28,772.90 lodged to Celia Larkin account (CL2)
(equates to $45,000)

19 January 2005 IR£50,000 transferred from Celia Larkin deposit account to cash save account

27 January 1995 IR£50,000 withdrawn from Celia Larkin Deposit Account and given to Bertie Ahern

15 May 1995 IR£8,442 withdrawn from CL2

19 June 1995 IR£20,050.91 withdrawn from CL2 for  work on house

22 June 1995 Foreign Exchange 
IR£9,684.71 balance from CL2 used to open a new Larkin account - CL3
Also lodged to this account on this day was IR£11,743.74,
comprising IR£2,000 and £10,000 stg (£IR 9742.74)

24 July 1995 IR£9,655 lodged into CL3 account

1 December 1995 Foreign Exchange 
IR£19,142.92 lodged to Bertie  Ahern's deposit account
(equates to £20,000 stg)

New A/Cs Feb '08
IPBS a/c £38,000
BT a/c £52,000
That's half a million euro worth of dig outs in total.

It chokes me to say it

But I'm proud of Baby Ian.

Not because he's been diddling the taxpayer over his office expenses (150 seater office, Ian? WTF?) or because he was blatantly lobbying to privatise the Giant's Causeway into the hands of his pal, private developer Seymour Sweeney.

Nope. I'm proud of Ian Junior because he has singlehandedly resurrected a political practice I feared had been abandoned forever on the island of Ireland. That of resigning when you've been caught doing wrong.

Okay, he hasn't (and won't) admit he's done wrong. And he only resigned to protect his da, who also has a series of hard office-related questions to answer.

But it is entirely refreshing to see an Irish politician having the relative decency of falling on their sword when caught out.

I do hope the denizens of Leinster House will take note and learn from this. There is a long queue of wrongdoers in there who by any moral compass ought to have jumped a long time ago.

Top of my personal list are Mary Harney, for crimes against the Irish people by seeking to privatise the health service into her funders' pockets, and Bertie Ahern, for the most eye-wateringly bizarre personal finance practices ever engaged in by an alleged Finance Minister.

Who would you like to see emulate Little Ian and resign, then?

The lies they tell: Part 5

Two weeks ago, Bertie Ahern said Enda Kenny told a 'bare-faced lie' after the Fine Gael leader had pointed out that the Taoiseach is not tax-compliant.

It turns out that the Taoiseach was telling a bare-faced lie. He is not tax compliant.

Ahern then went on to claim he was unable to become tax compliant until after his involvement with the Mahon tribunal ceases. He said the tax authorities told him that.

This also was a bare-faced lie.

Bertie then claimed he had meant to say 'authorities on tax' (ie his accountant), rather than tax authorities (ie the Revenue.) Yesterday in the Dail he finally admitted that the Revenue have made no mention of Mahon and are not intending to, or required to, wait until the end of the tribunal to deal with the Taoiseach's tax issues.

So, Enda Kenny told the truth. And the Taoiseach has repeatedly told lies about his tax status.

The only remaining question to my mind is why anybody in this country still believes a word this man says.

He's still laughing at us.

More on this from Slugger and Public Inquiry.

2008 Predictions

I made a few predictions this time last year. I'll return to see how wrong I was about 2007 in my next post.

In the meantime, here is my doom-mongering for 2008.

1. Pakistan becomes the no. 1 threat to world peace. By no. 1, I mean the return of the nuclear fear and five minutes to midnight.

2. Bertie gets dumped at long last by Fianna Fail. When the chairman starts offering support to the manager in soccer, it's invariably followed by a sacking. So how else to read the fact that half the cabinet are sympathising with El Berto's ongoing tribunal antics?

3. A Republican, possibly Romney, will be the next US President. Pace Richard Delevan, who's been proselytising for Obama for some time (which is odd as eggs for an American right-winger), I can't see the US electing a black man. If he ran as Hilary's Veep, they could do it, but the 'dream ticket' will never come off, now that Obama thinks he can gain the nomination.

4. Man Utd for the premiership, annoyingly. Ferguson to again fail in Europe, and again to delay his retirement, much to Carlos Queiroz's chagrin. Real or Sevilla for the champion's league. Rafa Benitez to leave Liverpool in the summer after row with the club owners.

5. The SDLP and UUP to leave the Northern executive and set up in proper opposition. The SDLP will be courted by FF and Irish Labour who both finally formally set up as Northern parties, thus simultaneously copper-fastening the union and pissing off the unionists.

6. British final pull-out from Iraq, and probably Afghanistan too.

7. Ongoing dollar collapse, commodity surges, oil spikes, banking crises and falling house prices in Northern Europe, especially the bubbles like NI and Spain. In other words, job losses, house repos, and the end of living beyond your means on credit. There will be no credit available this time next year.

8. No boycotts of the Beijing Olympics, despite the appalling behaviour of the Chinese government. The Chinese will finally outperform America in the medals table. People will mutter about drugs, as if that's a surprise. The 13 year old British diver will be the new Eddie the Eagle Edwards. In other words, he'll be crap but the British public will love him.

9. People will realise that 'social networking' sites are a waste of their time. Others will migrate from one site to another with increasing frequency. Astronomical share valuations in these firms will collapse. Call it Dot-bomb 2.0.

10. I will finish my damn novel. Really, I will.

Harney's not the only one should quit

Of course, Mary Harney should quit as Minister for Health with immediate effect. Her performance in the role has been little short of diabolical.

But it is worth recalling, as 97 more women fret about their cancer results, that there is a concept often cited by our Teflon Taoiseach known as collective cabinet responsibility.

They're all responsible for this mess we call a health service. All of them. Some of them are particularly responsible. Some of them, you could say, are more responsible than others.

On this list from the Department of Health, you can see that the two front runners to replace Bertie Ahern as Fianna Fail leader (and de facto Taoiseach of the nation) are BOTH former health ministers.

It is worth remembering how Micheal Martin, as health minister, commissioned over 200 reports which were not subsequently acted on while simultaneously robbing nursing home patients of up to €2 billion which the state had to pay back.

The senior civil servant in the Department said that he had told Micheal Martin about this scandal and had even given him the file in Martin's office. Martin denied this utterly. The file has never been found since, needless to say. Martin remains a cabinet minister. The civil servant moved sideways to the Higher Education Authority.

Brian Cowen, who charmingly called the Department of Health 'Angola', due to the amount of political landmines to be found underfoot, was also Minister for Health for three years. His time in Hawkins House is notable by its lack of anything notable. He didn't do a thing, tiptoeing around hoping no bombs went off until he could scamper for the safety of another Department.

If you were to believe some people, the Irish health system is permanently a wreck, unfixable and always was. This is nonsense.

A potted history of Irish health would run something like this:

The churches ran health provision forever, then the state, having missed the opportunity to create a National Health Service like the UK have, finally and belatedly intervened and the health boards were created in 1970.

Things remained okay for a while, then Charles Haughey slashed a quarter of all hospital beds, because we all had to tighten our belts.

Since then, those beds, that infrastructure, has never been replaced, while the population has exploded. In the Eighties, the scandals began. Organ retentions, blood infections, the lies, the spin. This was the period when the administrators came to power in health. But at least they were monitored by public representatives on the health boards.

When Mary Harney rationalised the health boards into the HSE, in itself not a bad idea, she made two massive errors. Firstly, she eradicated the ability of people to be elected to monitor the administrators. All of a sudden, no one was watching the watchmen.

Then she vowed that no jobs would be lost. The result was that we now have up to eight times as many health administrators as are needed, most aren't doing anything to justify their salaries, and none of them can be sacked.

This led directly to scandals varying from the millions upon millions spent on IT projects that either didn't work or didn't exist to the fact that neither Harney nor her overpaid mudguard Brendan Drumm even knew about the 97 more women whose cancer tests were wrong until yesterday.

By all means, by any means necessary, Mary Harney should quit with immediate effect. Her poodle Drumm, the €400,000 man, must also go.

But so should those who share collective cabinet responsibility for this unholy mess costing Irish lives. I'd start with Martin and Cowen, who have both directly contributed to the ongoing horror. But I wouldn't end there.

Ahern himself interfered in the decision of where to place the national children's hospital by making public statements, with the result that it went to the Mater, in his constituency, and his former employer.

Cullen ensured that Waterford would not get public radiotherapy but a privatised system instead. He even turned the sod on the site of their private hospital for them.

The entire cabinet share responsibility for the beleaguered state of our health service. If any one of them had a single shred of honour, they'd leave now.

National Digout Day

Please go to the website of National Digout Day. Your leader needs you.

Why?

Because he's worth it, of course.

After all, he doesn't have a yacht or a personal jet. Poor deprived Diddums.

I always tell the truth, even when I lie.

Is there any other possible explanation for Bertie's continuing, conflicting, fairytales about his financial dealings?

Thanks to Armchair Activist from Politics.ie for the photoshop!

The boom keeps getting boomer!

As if the ongoing housing market collapse wasn't enough, now the government have the following little problem of rising unemployment to contend with.

Most concerning is the fact that these jobs are being lost in the services sector, the area we were supposed to excel in after abandoning our manufacturing base and most of our agriculture to elsewhere.

There is now a sizeable segment within Fianna Fail who appear to be unhappy at the prospect of having to clean up the economic mess they themselves created. For them, the smarter move would have been to lose the last election, and then cast Fine Gael and Labour as a bust coalition once again.

Thanks to the hubris of Bertie and his unshakeable desire for a third term, they're now stuck with having to deal with falling house prices and rising unemployment, while trying to keep the three mutually unintelligible aspects of their coalition - the Greens, the PDs and the FF genepool independents - all happy.

It's gonna end in tears.

But for Bertie, sure he can just hand the poisoned chalice over to the anointed successor and vanish, a la Tonee B-liar, off towards a happy twilight on the international statesman equivalent of the chicken and chips circuit.

Rumour is he fancies the Euro-presidency. Nice work if you can get it. So for Bert, the boom just keeps on getting boomer, just as long as he can keep nasty Justice Mahon away from his financial details.

For the rest of us, falling house prices, significant unemployment, inflation and economic difficulties lie ahead.

Who did it come from and why?

Okay, now that we've cleared that up, only two questions remain to be answered.

Who gave Ireland's Prime Minister $45,000 in 1994, and why has he been making up implausible stories about the payment?

When the girlfriend and supersecretary of Bertie Ahern, Celia Larkin (right), dropped into his office at St Lukes in December 1994, at his request, to pick up a suitcase full of cash and take it to the AIB bank and deposit it, where had the money come from?

Who gave Bertie such a massive sum of American currency, in cash, a sum he has consistently blustered and given ever-changing and bizarre explanations for? And more importantly, why?

Let's recall that Bertie, formerly a Finance Minister who didn't have a bank account, the allegedly qualified accountant who signed blank cheques for his mentor, corrupt former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey, initially claimed that this cash was an amount that his landlord Michael Wall had given him in order to refurbish the house he was renting.

Of course, such an amount to refurbish a relatively new home is bizarre to begin with. To have your landlord hand it over to you in foreign currency banknotes is stranger again. Since Bertie was signing so many blank ones for Charlie, you'd think these people might have heard of cheques.

For that landlord to subsequently sell the house to his tenant only a couple of years later, after ploughing £30,000 STG into it, makes virtually no financial sense whatsoever, especially since he sold it to Bertie for only £140,000 punts and had only owned the home for a couple of years, during which it seems Bertie was renting it the whole time.

Remember, this is only ONE of the strange payments Bertie received in cash at that time. Let's not forget the two whiprounds totalling £8,000 punts that he got from businessmen pals in Manchester. Or the debts of honour, totalling £39,000 punts he received but never repaid until this all became public in 2006?

Then there is the £50,000 punts he had apparently saved up between 1987 and 1994, despite having no bank account in that period.

Now that we know that the £30,000 STG house improvement donation from Michael Wall doesn't add up, the question remains, who did give Bertie that money, which appears to be $45,000? Was Bertie receiving large undeclared cash donations from American interests?

And more importantly, why?

Sadly, like the end of season cliffhanger, we've now got to wait for months for the answer. Tune into the Tribunal in the Autumn to find out.

Greens sign suicide note

Well, the Greens have been bought off by the Prince of Darkness and will now enter government with Fianna Fail.

They will replace the previous small party, the PDs, who were decimated by the electorate following their dalliance in government with Fianna Fail.

The Greens may just have signed their own suicide note.

Certainly it must now mean the end of Clever Trevor Sargent's leadership. Only a few months ago, he said he would resign the leadership if the party goes into coalition with Fianna Fáil after the next Election.

However, Mr Sargent also said that he would make himself available to serve as a Minister in such a coalition.

So don't expect him to stay out of the ministerial merc on principles.