Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week January 17, 2010
Posted by Garibaldy in media.trackback
Quite a bit of competition this week, with a quote that I thought was going to win initially not even making the top three. Having said that, the odd sensible thing too, and not just from Gene Kerrigan. Must have been the snow giving people time to think. I’m sure it will wear off shortly.
In third place, Brendan O’Connor, at the start of his analysis of what went wrong with the banking system.
Okay. Everyone got greedy — the whole country.
All those unemployed, people on minimum wage and children on the poverty line or in need of extra help at school. The greedy bastards.
A spot of faux-feminism from Carol Hunt, which completely misses the point about why Irish Robinson has been the victim of so much oppobrium. It’s called corruption. Anyone who has lived in Ireland, and especially over the last couple of decades, shouldn’t need that pointed out to them.
This is ultimately a personal tragedy, which any family should be allowed to suffer in privacy. This is also a political tragedy in that a very sick woman is being punished by losing her career and having her life held up to ridicule.
And in first place, Aegnus Fanning, who seems to think that Thomas Hobbes is the person to rescue us from our ills.
It can be argued that Noel Dempsey is entitled to his holidays, that people are entitled to social welfare, that public servants are entitled to their pay and pensions. That may be so, but only if there is enough money to pay for them.
In fact, we are entitled to nothing at all if the money isn’t there.
The day before Hitler attacked western Europe in 1940, the Belgian army increased its annual leave from two to five days a month. Eighteen days later, King Leopold surrendered unconditionally, leaving a 30-mile gap in the front line.
No doubt the Belgians felt entitled to the extra holidays, but did they get them?
Did it even matter?
And after all this, a suprisingly sensible piece about the need for a stimulus package from Daniel McConnell.
McConnell is calling for a Keynesian stimulus. In Keynesian terms Ireland’s deficit of 11% of GDP is a huge stimulus,-one of the highest in the world. Clearly McConnell knows nothing about Keynesian economics.
It’s impossible to read Brendan O’Connor without recalling that he was an MC for a comedy spot in an earlier life. So how can one take him seriously, especially in The Sunday Independent, which is riddled with comedians? Don’t see Ms Hunt writing about the abuse by a prominent novelist of a 15-year-old boy with learning difficulties, of which crime the novelist was subsequently convicted, and this within even journalistic memory. The feminist Heavy Mob kept shtum about this one, too, while calling the horrors of the Inquisition down on a priest’s head in Listowel for the ‘crime’ of commiserating with a man up on a rape charge. Don’t see her calling for answers from Gerry Adams about what he did or didn’t know or did or didn’t do about Liam, his brother; journalists seem to be on a warning to treat Gerry (and therefore the Peace Process) very softly-softly. Is Carol’s copy banged out on the kitchen table at home with the aid of a dash round the Internet and a decent mug of coffee? You’re expecting The Sunday Independent, where journalists on being hired are (one might imagine!) subjected to bright lights and lads with sleeves rolled up and ordered to swear away any allegiances they might have had to ‘Lefty’ causes or ‘hippies’ they once knew, to produce investigative journalism? The Sindo is about entertainment, for the most part.
“calling the horrors of the Inquisition down on a priest’s head in Listowel for the ‘crime’ of commiserating with a man up on a rape charge”
I find the amalgam you make of disconnected events quite curious. This is not a logical juxtaposition. They are not related events.I would think that most decent people would dissapprove of coverups of child abuse whether by novelists or relatives of politicians and see them as outside the pale.
There are plenty calling for answers. Whatever your annoyances about some journalists about some issues, I don’t think this excuses an act of tacit approval of a convicted rapist.
On the rare times I see the Sunday I. there are at least 3/4 columnists with a particular hatred of the Provos.Anyone who expects a left line from the Sunday I. must be kidding themselves. The baron will not tolerate much of that sort of thing.
I see little evidence of the Adams story going away. It will run until answers are provided.
Meanwhile, the main editorial in today’s Irish edition of the Sunday Times beats even the Sindo for fatuousness. Its ‘logic’ is that , because of the Christmas break, we’re in a new year now and therefore public service unions should abandon any attempt to oppose pay cuts and, well, surrender. Defending your pay and conditions is so last year.
The concluding sentence is: ‘the bar is closed; it’s time for the unions to leave the premises.’ I fear it’s Mr Frank FitzGibbon who’s had one too many.
That bit by Fanning about Belgium and WWII must surely count
as a “Godwin’s Law” moment ?
Starkadder, you’ve been watching QI…
Meanwhile over at the IT this morning (http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0118/1224262564535.html) such gems as:
“Left-wing politics has the monopoly on shouty protests because of a lack of intellectual rigour”
“Why don’t rightists smash up icons of leftism such as trade union offices?”
“But at least when the left are singing they’re not doing damage.”
Time to bury the SP / SWP debate perhaps (not that it hasn’t been genuinely educational at times), and the Adams debate (it’s all been said at this stage), and get back commenting upon the left / right economic argument?
Is it time to start an “Irish Times Stupid Opinion Piece of the Week”?
One extraordinary thing about the tone of the irish economic right is that it’s not like, say, Britain in 1979. The trade unions are not powerful and nor is there a political party in office which is funded by them. There is no powerful Left with hundreds of thousands of activists. So there really is a sense in which this is like the bloke standing in the street shouting at passers-by who aren’t even there.
Now one cynical view is that all the shouting ans screaming is because these are people who do not want a debate about economic direction because they’re not at all confident that they’ll win it, and hence they want to pre-empt it by shouting down the alternatives. No doubt this is true to a degree. But I wonder whether it isn’t, too, the reaction of people who have been so used to getting their own way for such a long time that the possibility of debate simply seems like effrontery.
EJH,
“people who have been so used to getting their own way for such a long time that the possibility of debate simply seems like effrontery.”
That’s part of it for sure, it’s almost an Orwellian 1984 situation where the thought processes have been formed in a rightist mould for at least a generation (i.e since the Reagan/Tatcher era), so anything outside that narrow scope is simply seen as irrational, antiquated, alien.
On the IT article, once I’d caught my breath after reading it and recovered from the shock, I wondered if maybe the guy has a bit of a point about the “lack of intellectual rigour” of Leftist arguments. There was a discussion here on CLR before christmas on a similar-ish theme, where Michael Taft was being lauded as one of the few voices in the wilderness who was fighting the fight using economic arguments rather than passion and rhetoric. (can’t easily find a link to that discussion unfortunately).
((incidentally, on a total tangent here I know, but that lack of easy cross-referencing was a comment made on CLR by Roy Johnston which lodged in my mind, with the comment that the lack of indexing of the often valuable discussions and debates leads to a loss of value, in that it’s harder to build upon previous arguments and accumulate momentum in that way))