Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week June 19, 2011
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
The Sunday Independent continues to address the real problems affecting real people – see this article on how to insure your half a million euro ring and Jack B. Yeats painting worth 100,000.
And here’s what passes for serious political analysis from Brendan O’Connor.
So whether Noonan is spoofing, or not, doesn’t matter. As long as he sticks to his guns now, the dynamic between us and the evil empire will be changed utterly. We’re back folks, doing what we’re best at. Because as we all know, even without a single decent card in his hand, an Irishman can beat any man at poker.
Marc Coleman is ranting about public sector pay again.
Last Tuesday night, Brendan Keenan and I paid tribute to Brian Lenihan on Newstalk. In the course of the discussion, we touched on the bank bailout. Both of us agreed that despite the awfulness of its cost, it is a one-off cost when compared to the ongoing crisis in our public finances.
And a “one-off cost” can’t be on such a scale as to wreck government finances for generations? Perhaps he should read Conor McCabe’s Sins of the Father to see precisely how sacrificing the public interest in favour or speculators is one-off in so far as it has lasted from roughly 1922 to 2011.
One theme today has been the travails of the middle class. Seemingly this means anyone with a mortgage (and half a million euro bits of property to insure of course). Fortunately these oppressed masses have a fearless voice to speak for them. Namely, Brendan O’Connor.
The serf class in this country, who bear the brunt of the plague that has enveloped us, are the ones in the middle. They are the ones reaping the whirlwind, paying for it all, the ones whose lives have changed most as a result of all this. And they are the ones who are at boiling point.
They look above and below them, and it makes them angry. While the ones in the middle are good people, and while they have hearts, and while they believe there are deserving poor and vulnerable out there, they also see that many of the people they subsidise are not the deserving poor. Yet the ones in the middle have to watch while these — call them the undeserving poor — pretty much live life as they always did. None of the undeserving poor has to worry about losing their house or paying a mortgage. They don’t have to worry about health insurance going up or about additional medical bills when serious illness bites. They don’t have to worry about pay cuts or losing their jobs either. Many of them don’t even seem to have to worry about how many kids they have, because they know they will be accommodated. They have their rights.
Nothing about the people at the bottom paying to keep the people at the top in the style to which they are accustomeed. That, however, would be to address the reality of the situation. And the Sindo is never the place to go to for that.
I’m not sure whether that’s funny, because it’s pure Network, or scary, because it’s pure fascism.
(Which reminds me, I’m sure I saw reference recently to a book on the theme of Network and the rise of the American radical Right, but I can’t find it, Network not being a helpful search term here. Can anybody help me out?)
Dominic Sandbrook’s Mad As Hell is the book you’re looking for. He’s a bit of a right winger himself Sandbrook however he’s written a series of very thorough and entertaining histories of England in the fifties, sixties and seventies. I’d disagree with stuff in State of Emergency, on 1970-1974, for example but it’s a terrific read. Have Mad As Hell but haven’t read it yet. A book covering the same type of ground from a left wing perspective is Stayin Alive: The Last Days of the American working class by Jefferson Cowie. I have read that and it’s magnificent. Well worth getting.
Thanks Eamonn, that’d be it
I don’t think we’re committing a Godwin here in pointing out the similarity in rhetoric between the nationalist propaganda which had a element of truth (in respect to unpayable reparations) in the late 20s in Germany and this kind of stuff. ‘They’ are breeding like rabbits, don’t you know.
Pure MittelIrlandischevolkspolitikpropaganda.
Including Brendan O’Connor in the “stupid statement of the week” is unfair on the other Sindo writers. He simply can’t be beaten.
After all, this is the genius who wrote this: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/the-smart-ballsy-guys-are-buying-up-property-right-now-1047118.html
Nobody is denying US torpedoed plan to save the Irish State €20bn — Only Gene Kerrigan is asking
http://tomasoflatharta.com/2011/06/19/nobody-is-denying-us-torpedoed-plan-to-save-the-irish-state-e20bn-only-gene-kerrigan/