Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week

With Garibaldy away for a few weeks there’s no lack of things to consider.

Let’s being with Marc Coleman who started as he meant to continue:

ADMIRATION for a genocidal maniac (Lenin) aside, Enda Kenny’s speech last Sunday was quite a good one.

And continue he did:

But perhaps Enda’s Lenin quote signals a shift to the left in Government. It was after all Lenin who gloated how he had “liquidated” Russia’s middle classes and farmers. Compared to Lenin’s approach of mass killing, rape and starvation, the left these days prefers more financial methods of “dealing with” the middle classes. But protecting the pay, perks, pensions and increments of its favoured Croke Park cadres remains its top priority. And they can be ruthless: a former DIT lecturer who worked in Tanzania, Joan Burton favoured her erstwhile colleagues in DIT preserving their pay and pensions in the last budget while cutting aid to Tanzania.

Then there’s old reliable (and mentioned in despatches in the Phoenix during the week) John-Paul McCarthy who writing about the Taoiseach’s ‘tribute to Michael Collins’ noted:

Former inspector Gerry O’Carroll put some flesh on these old bones in the Evening Herald.

O’Carroll wanted us to spare a thought for the almost 500 Irishmen in the old RIC and Dublin Metropolitan Police who were murdered on Collins’s orders, Joyce’s “genial giants” whose fate it was to prove that treason was a matter of dates.

But it’s not all political with a capital ‘P’. Here’s Emer O’Kelly who, under the line ‘Emer O’Kelly advises caution when drawing real-life conclusions from medical research on parenthood ‘, sadly doesn’t quite take that advice to heart. Talking about research that “suggests that babies born to older mothers (40 and upwards) do better in their early years than do the children of very young mothers. The other, published online in the journal Nature, suggests that children born to older fathers (over 40) have a two per cent greater chance of developing autism or schizophrenia in later life than those born to men in their 20s: not enormously high perhaps, but significant” she writes:

Marrying the two together would seem to suggest that toy-boy relationships produce the strongest, most emotionally stable and mentally healthy babies. And that is so frivolous a conclusion that we should perhaps be careful of extrapolating too much from statistics.

Er…

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