Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week

No need to worry about what to get friends and relatives for Christmas, Roisin Burke has that covered for us. We’ll start not with the stupid statements, but with one (from an entirely predictable source) that is plain and simple an attack on the Irish democracy of which the Sindo purports to be the chief defender.

In some countries, plebiscites are the very elixir of constitutional health. But in Ireland, too many of our referendums have been sordid and confused affairs where weak governments have asked the ignorant to decide the unknowable using the incomprehensible.

Weak governments; an ignorant population; politics being too complicated for ordinary people who should leave it to the people who can actually understand it. I wonder where that sort of logic can lead.

Meanwhile, John Drennan has picked what for him is the emblematic feature of Celtic Tiger madness. Not corrupt politicians, not uninhibited speculation, not even the evil trade unions. The worst aspect has, apparently, been the tribunals.

Should we ever get around to deciding to choose a folly to best epitomise the excess of the Celtic Tiger era (indeed Enda might even have a referendum on it) we need not look to the deserted shell of Anglo’s proposed HQ, or the Docklands glass-bottle site or the wild and free piebald horses grazing in undisturbed bliss on the derelict site of the Bertie Bowl.

Nothing, you see, captures the essence of how our poor State was run over the last few years more than this self-important, ineffectual, gargantuan, gestating, fiscal hydra which may, even when it finally delivers do more harm than good.

So the emblem is the tribunals and not the problems created by the economic-political elite that caused them in the first place. Note too the sideswipe at the possibility of a referendum.

When it comes to a referendum, John Crown is spectacularly off-message, defying his stupid colleagues with a call for a referendum. And making me laugh while he was at it (although his proposals for political reform are less funny).

We do have a historical precedent for the parliamentary transfer of sovereignty. It was rather hard to get it back. Let us decide this time.

Meanwhile, back at the stupidity, Brendan O’Connor reveals the real reason that the EU wants the Republic to be part of it.

You see, the Europeans want us in. Whatever about us being slightly troublesome financially at the moment, symbolically, they like us in there because they feel we represent the great English-speaking liberal democracy kind of tradition.

Sure.

I enjoy a bit of overheated rhetoric as much as the next person. But really, the little Englander mentality that has been displayed by the Sindo since Germany became still more the mistress of us all is beginning to get beyond a joke. Step forward James Fitzsimons

Bowing to the superiority of its EU paymasters, Ireland has been relegated to the status of little more than a concentration camp.

As long as the people in the concentration camp don’t get a referendum, we might speculate that some of his colleagues wouldn’t mind all that much if that were true.