Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week March 18, 2012
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
The Sindo continues to innovate, with the words ourself used by Brendan O’Connor, and themself used by Niamh Horan in a piece about the jailing of the million-euro tax evader Paul Begley best described as sympathetic. Or maybe sickening. Maybe the sub-editor had the week off.
Speaking of convicted tax evader Paul Begley, James Fitzsimons characterises him thus
A decent man was sentenced to six years in jail to get the message through to tax cheats that you cannot buy your way out of trouble. His family was devastated when they heard the sentence.
I wonder what makes him decent – being a tax cheat, or being a businessman who is a tax cheat?
The Gallagher plot has widened from RTÉ and the provos (or to adopt the Sindo’s language, the hush puppies and the real thing), to RTÉ, the provos and the Labour Party (or to adopt the Sindo’s language, the pinko trot terrorist anti-capitalist tax-raising middle class oppressing, enterprise throttling conspiracy of ressentiment [that one’s just for Eoghan Harris and his quotes-from-big-name-spouting-so-I-can-sound-clever-when-talking-rubbish acolytes]). Jody Corcoran has been watching the debate repeatedly (the new editor is a harsh boss it seems)
In fact, the camera was on Gallagher for 18 minutes longer than it was on the candidate least in the spotlight, the other independent candidate, Mary Davis.
Yet Michael D Higgins, the only candidate with a realistic, although outside, prospect of stopping Gallagher’s momentum towards the Aras, was allowed to sail serenely through the 90 minutes, and to appear quite presidential in doing so.
One might of course argue that the absence of a direct question to Michael D. from the audience was biased against him and not for him, given that it excluded him from an important aspect of the debate. Wasn’t the leader of FF recently complaining that his party were not allowed to talk sufficiently by RTÉ. But why would you consider that when you have a lost president to lament?
Speaking of RTÉ, Emer O’Kelly uses her insight as a former employee to let us know how it really operates.
There are RTE commandments. Unionists shouldn’t have any rights. All American democrats are liberal saints (Leo Varadkar was right about that), particularly Bill Clinton. All American Republicans are devils, despite George
W Bush being publicly on the side of religion, and being against abortion, which the majority of people in Ireland also claim to be fiercely against. You should always appear to be secretly sneering at the British Royal Family. English Conservatives are all posh crooks underneath.
Sneering is not the word that springs to mind when considering coverage of the recent visit of the UK’s head of state.
I particularly enjoyed O’Kelly’s line, “Roman Catholicism in Ireland has always included a level of anti-clericalism”.
*coughs*
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Speaking of RTÉ, Emer O’Kelly uses her insight as a former employee to let us know how it really operates.
I’m impressed about how Emer O’Kelly bravely carried off the appearance of being at ease with – nay, proud of – being part of the RTÉ gravy train while inside her journalistic integrity was being crushed by such a dictatorial Big Brother regime. She had me fooled.
How long did she suffer in (well-paid) silence?
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And let’s not forget her courageous return to the belly of the beast late last year for the ‘Now it’s personal’ slot where she lambasted a preoccupation of her choice… er, no not RTÉ and all its pomps but… women who work in the home with children.
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What would happen if we put her in a room with the lad who writes for Alive.
Would we find a higgs boson when they blew up
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😉
Heh heh. I figure thats an experiment worth trying!
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“I wonder what makes him decent – being a tax cheat, or being a businessman who is a tax cheat?”
Whatever about what makes the criminal ‘decent’, the press reporting at the time of his sentencing was clear enough on who made him decent: the judge described him as a decent man at sentencing.
The Criminal Court of Appeal recently dealt with the issue of the length of sentences for serious financial offences against the state (tax and welfare fraud). It changed sentencing policy for those kinds of offences. Here’s an extract from an Irish Times article on that change of sentencing policy.
(I know the welfare case that changed the sentencing policy involved a number of offences, including the fraud against the welfare system and forgery of passports, but it does seem odd to me that a fraud of a quarter of a million gets a nine-year sentence, but a tax fraud of over a million gets a six year sentence. Class bias, perchance?)
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