Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week

A flavour of this week’s fare comes with this story, which explains why unions are superfluous to getting your rights due to the existing employment laws. Sure. It’s then followed up with a story from Louise McBride pointing to various instances where unions have failed to reverse the decisions of government or companies, as part of the following “question”.

If your union means nothing more to you than boring meetings and a magazine which comes in the post every so often (which you fall asleep reading), it could be time to put that few hundred euro you pay to your union each year back into your pocket.

I’m amazed to see the anti-union propaganda take such a crude and silly turn. But I shouldn’t be.

Brendan O’Connor seems deeply affected by the failure of Brian Lenihan to win the Fianna Fáil leadership.

Someone mentioned to me the other day that he saw Brian Lenihan on TV after the result of the Fianna Fail leadership contest and he thought, “That’s a man who is slipping off into the mists of history”. And it was kind of sad, and you found yourself thinking, as you did with Katy French, or Gerry Ryan or George Lee: Is that how that story turned out? Is that how that ended?

I’m fairly sure that the overwhelming majority of people can’t wait to see the back of him. At least for now, as there may be a Mandleson-like return at some point in the future. Or perhaps that should be Haughey-like.

The man who just won’t go away, Michael McDowell, is back, implicitly touting himself for a role in the formation of a new “centre-right” party. It makes you wonder if he considers himself centre-right where the actual right lies.

Which brings me to the reflection that it is only after the FG-Labour coalition takes office that the conditions will be right for a new centre-right party to emerge. There clearly will then be not merely “a gap in the market” but “a market in the gap” as well.

Still can’t resist invoking the magic power of the word “market”, can he? Old habits die hard.

Eoghan Harris uses the fact that Chris Andrews support Michael Martin to suggest that Fianna Fáil is in danger of a swing to the left, one which will endanger, it seems, the state of Israel.

As Holocaust Memorial Day fell last week, I have a question. Why, in a world of struggling peoples, are Andrews and his supporters in Flotilla Fail so focused on one people, and so aggressive toward the state of Israel — a state set up by Jews who escaped Hitler’s mass murder?

Andrews and Flotilla Fianna Fail sum up Martin’s primary problem. In a country crying out for a centrist coalition, pledged to keep taxes and public spending down, Flotilla Fail presents itself as yet another populist version of the Labour Party and Sinn Fein, both in fiscal and foreign policy.

Nah, I can’t follow the thinking here either.