Political corruption and Joe Sixpack.

national | public consultation / irish social forum | opinion/analysis Friday October 06, 2006 20:01 by paddyweb

How Joe was living while while the Fianna Fail 'Neros' were fiddling.

I'm just an ordinary Joe Sixpack at the lower regions of the great Celtic Tiger...near the anus...on low wages, living in a council house, almost 60 years of age, not in the best of health and very concerned about the future.
I remember a time when this country was in dire economic straights and a huge number of people like myself, who were trying to raise families on peanuts, had to resort to working in the black economy...i.e. doing menial nixers for almost nothing while drawing unemployment as decent jobs were non-existant.
I remember our Prime Minister at the time Charles J Haughey telling us how it was necessary to tighten our belts as this would facilitate an improvement in the country's fortunes.
I vividly remember the 'Gestapo' from the Dept. of Social Welfare coming to my run-down council house accusing me of ripping off the state when it was obvious that I owned/had nothing.
I remember how they stopped my Unemployment Assistance and made me go 'cap in hand' to the well heeled and well dressed civil servants in the Dept. begging to be reinstated.
But, inspite all of this, my wife and I succeeded in bringing up four fabulous daughters who are now working, it seems, as 'cannon fodder' for today's version of the same regime...Namely, our anaemic politicians having their pockets lined with wads of cash and who are only the puppets of the wealthy and influencial.
Perhaps this was always the way the system worked, but there was an effort made to maintain a balance. Our present government seem to have lost track of this concept. There is no balance...all the spoils seem to go to the financial winners. Much of it goes into off-shore accounts where no tax is paid and no benefit accrues to the country as a whole. In fact some of the wealthiest people in the country pay no or very little tax one way or the other.
Yesterday our Prime Minister/Taoiseach Bertie Ahern stood up for two hours in the Dail and told lies like he was in a competition after someone found out the inevitable truth and published it in The Irish Times. His brass neck performance on RTE television was nothing short of pathetic.
You see, back in the 1990's, when Fianna Fail were discovered to be a nest of crooks headed by Charles J Haughey and included, Ray Burke, Liam Lawlor, Padraig Flynn and lots of lesser crooks, Bertie 'Shifty' Ahern was the secretary of the Fianna Fail Party. In other words, our present leader was in the thick of it and told the Flood Tribunal that he didn't know what went on, even though he was signing blank cheques for Chief crook Haughey to buy Charvet shirts and other hollow trinkets to impress galoots with money.
Questions: If he didn't know what was going on, how did this country elect a fool for a leader? And if he did know, why didn't he do his duty by standing up and exposing the whole debacle?
OK...back to real world...Here's what really happened:
Our Shifty was in on the fiddle with the rest back in the 1990's but, through good fortune and other means, managed to be less tainted than the rest and because of this was able to tie up nearly all the loose ends over a period of years...wonder how much it cost him? Unfortunately, there were a few loose ends that time caught up with and hence he was asked to explain.
Just one of the lies that Shifty expected us to believe was that for a number of years because of his marrital breakup he had no bank account of his own.
Two things wrong here: Where did he keep the £50,000 that he said he had saved? And was it not a bit odd that he was the only Minister for Finance in the whole world who didn't have a bank account?
Don't forget, this man was the Irish Minister of Finance at the time on a salary that was many multiples of what people like me were getting and for some strange reason was deemed by his pals to be in dire straights...COME ON!!!
So far he hasn't given a credible explanation for this scenario.
Of course, his marriage problems, to a great extent, dovetailed nicely into the time frame of the height of the sculduggery...very convenient.
Right now this regime is presiding over a country where rampant crime is strengthening it's grip every day...people are afraid to walk the streets in some areas. But you will not see these problems in the upmarket areas like Dublin 4 e.g.
Our hospitals are third world standard as can be seen http://www.patientstogether.com and, because of our government's preoccupation with covering up one scandal or another and pretending to be doing something about the situation by setting up tribunals which are merely shams to enable the pals of Fianna Fail...the legal profession...to enrich themselves beyond their dreams at the tax payers expense, our politicians are abdicating themselves from the responsibilities for which they were elected.
The blatent example of this is our great leaders propensity for watching galoot football games in Manchester and collecting a wad of cash on the way home when he should have been helping to provide a level playing pitch for the citizens of this country in the best economic climate that we ever had and not further enhancing the coffers of the privileged.
Someone once said that 'We get the politicians we deserve'...no country deserves the low standard that the Irish nation has to put up with.