WHY would the news of an imminent Central Bank forecast fill a reasonably sane man with foreboding?
YOU have no idea how lucky you are.
MY wife and I went to a funeral last week.
SUDDENLY, just before Christmas, and all because I wrote some stuff about public service pay increments, I started getting letters from trade union leaders.
BEING a taxpayer is no fun, we all know that.
WELL, Happy New Year to ye all!
I DON’T know whether I want to say Bah Humbug, or a heartfelt Happy Christmas.
DEAR Taoiseach and Tánaiste, You were elected to be different.
YOU could spend your life in despair, couldn’t you? Certainly the papers and the news this past week would encourage nothing but negative thoughts.
A LONG, long time ago, when you and I were young, I wrote a column here about the myths and mantras of Irish politics.
The line is from Casablanca, of course, and that movie was about a time when the world was even crazier than it is now.
DEAR Taoiseach, I listened with great care to your speech at the Inauguration ceremony last week, and I have to say I was impressed. It was a powerful and moving ceremony in many ways, and it was impossible to come away from it without feeling a surge of hope in our capacity as a country.
I HAVE a suggestion to make. It won’t be very popular, and won’t win too many friends. But it’s essential that we do something that can make a real difference.
I SUPPOSE one of my claims to fame, from now on, is that I’m not like my beloved Irish rugby team.
SINN Féin will decide who the next President of Ireland will be.
“THE real function of a fiscal council is to speak truth to power, to remind governments of harsh economic facts they may not want to hear, when they least want to hear them — at budget and election time. How will the Coalition Government respond in deed to the bold advice given by the newly established Irish Fiscal Advisory Council?”
WHEN I sat down to write this column, it was intended to be about Mary Davis — and most of it will be.
TWO phrases that I heard recently have been going around and around in my head.
IT’S not often the death of an elderly man, someone you barely knew, pulls you up short.
WHAT a historic weekend.
DEAR Eamon, I’ve been half-wondering when it would happen.
THE gimlet eye of a canon lawyer. Read the “Response of the Holy See to the Government of Ireland” — the Vatican’s response to the criticism levelled at them by Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore — and that’s all you’ll see.
WE all know Charles Edward Trevelyan, created a Baronet in 1874 for his services to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.
I WAS severely taken to task by a Mr Matt Harper, in a letter to the editor, over the article I wrote here last week.
MY esteemed colleague Terry Prone made the point in this space yesterday that the hardest question to answer, in the face of the riots that engulfed Britain last week, is why.
SOME time ago I brought a visitor from Holland, an educationalist, to visit a school here.
I WANTED to write two letters over the weekend — although I suppose nowadays you’d be more likely to send two e-mails.
“THIS is the Republic of Ireland 2011. A republic of laws, of rights and responsibilities; of proper civic order; where the delinquency and arrogance of a particular version, of a particular kind of “morality”, will no longer be tolerated or ignored.”
ABRAHAM Lincoln was plagued with bad generals.
THERE’S a mystery about the closure of Accident and Emergency services at Roscommon General Hospital.
BUTCHERS or gardeners — which are they?
DEAR Minister Quinn, Let me congratulate you first of all, if that’s not impertinent, on the great start you’ve made in the Department of Education.
SOMEBODY asked me on Sunday was I disappointed not to have won the Labour nomination for the Presidential election.
SO, 100 days in, how is the new government doing?
I’M still seething, nearly a week later.
THIS media fuss about “trouble in the government” over Joint Labour Committees is daft.
A RANGE of experiences this past weekend began to make me wonder if there is something different going on in Ireland.
ON SUNDAY I was at a ceremony in Arbour Hill commemorating James Connolly, a man who believed with all his heart that a free country had to exist for a free people. It was a moving ceremony, with a fine speech by Eamon Gilmore.
YOUR Majesty, Before I get on to saying that you’re welcome, I should probably admit that I did a bit of research into the proper mode of address for an open letter to the British queen.
I REMEMBER travelling through Northern Ireland, indeed passing through the town of Omagh, on the national day of mourning held in Ireland in the wake of 9/11.
HE’S a cute fellow, that Colm McCarthy.
INCLUSION Ireland is 50 years old this year.
ISN’T that some legacy the government inherited?
IT’S clear already, isn’t it, that it’s going to take quite a while to change the big things.
IT seems there is a problem with public service pay.
DID the Archbishop of Dublin throw down the gauntlet to the Government last week?
DEAR Joan
I dropped you a note last week, because I was delighted, for all sorts of reasons, that you had been appointed Minister for Social Protection.
ONE word in particular kept popping into my head at the Labour Party Conference on Sunday afternoon.
THE turbulence in Egypt and Libya, which is now spreading throughout the middle East, has some playing out to do. It is bound to have international repercussions, and it’s impossible to see the shape of all of them.
I’VE been travelling a lot over the past few days.
WE don’t need a televised debate — or two, or three — to tell us who’s likely to make a better Taoiseach.
I’VE never begrudged paying taxes — until now. It was a friend and colleague of mine who said that, as she looked at the shipwreck that used to be her pay-slip.
ACCORDING to the last census there are 4,239,838 of us living in this republic.
I READ at the weekend that the Minister for Health had spent part of her holidays over Christmas in a luxury hotel in Thailand.
WELL, that was a year to say good riddance to, wasn’t it? The year we lost our independence.
EACH year at this time my faithful readers are invited to behold the same Shakespearean scene. Three witches, hideous to behold, their cackling voices grating on the ear, gathered around a fire in the depths of the forest. As we draw nearer, we see them dropping unmentionable animal parts into a boiling, bubbling pot.
LOOK, the truth is that I get a kick out of it, even if no one else does.
Ernest Blythe was the Fine Gael (or Cumann na nGael) Minister for Finance in 1923.
DEAR President,
If you’ll forgive me for saying so, aren’t we living in extraordinary constitutional times?
CAN I make a modest suggestion.
DEAR David and Jack, I hope you don’t mind if I take the liberty of writing you an open letter.
FLEETS of limousines rolling into Farmleigh to discuss other people’s hardship. Gated communities for failed developers. Huge pension funds for disgraced bankers. New phrases we all have to learn because we think they’ll tell us something about our fate – phrases like bond markets or bond spreads. And hard cheese for poor people.
OUR future may be slipping away from us.
IT is being widely rumoured that the Government is preparing for civil disturbances in the aftermath of the budget.
HOMELESSNESS. Poverty. Hunger. Cold. Fear. Isolation. Illness – both physical and mental.
IT’S almost like the silly season was still going on.
I’M tempted to ring the Labour party and leave them a message.
THE gardaí are going to have to get their act together.
IT might seem a bit arrogant to say so, considering I want to be part of it, but I honestly believe Ireland needs, and must have, a presidential election next year.
IT might seem a bit arrogant to say so, considering I want to be part of it, but I honestly believe Ireland needs, and must have, a presidential election next year.
MY missus and I fell out over the choice of interior.
DID you find yourself listening to the radio with a grin on your face the other day?
IT was Ronald Reagan, I think, who tried to laugh off the earlier stages of his Alzheimer’s disease by saying “the great thing about this condition is that you meet new people every day”. Sounds funny, doesn’t it. But when you’re actually in a position to witness the destruction of a once fine mind, somehow the humour disappears.
UNILEVER is one of the largest companies of its kind in the world and it has a significant impact on the lives of everyone of us.
NIGHT after night, you can hear the witch doctors, dancing around the fires, rattling those bones.
YOU should have seen Carrick-on-Shannon at the weekend.
I’VE written a few columns recently about the things that don’t work in our health system.
I WAS trying to figure out why Taoiseach Brian Cowen called Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny a fool for trying to raise the crisis facing thousands of people with an intellectual disability. Was it because the Taoiseach really believes there is no such crisis?
YOU know that noise Homer Simpson makes?
TWO opinion polls last week.
SO, that’s over, then. Enda won.
OH DEAR, oh dear, oh dear.
THE General Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe.
WHERE, one would have to wonder, did this flurry of ideological activity, with no mandate, come from?
“AS a childcare manager ... I was tasked with receiving all notifications of suspected child abuse and ensuring appropriate action.
OVER August 28-29, 1990 an extraordinary debate took place in the Dáil. Even the fact that it was taking place at all was amazing because it would normally take the outbreak of war to recall the Dáil in August.
THERE’S a prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg.
SO, isn’t it about time we faced the truth about the HSE?
I DON’T usually do this, but that was one strange week, and I wanted to tell you about it.
THAT was a powerful speech Eamonn Gilmore gave on Saturday night.
GOOD enough for them, a lot of people seem to be saying.
BACK in 2001 our then Tánaiste Mary Harney had this to say: “The liberal, pro-competition, open market political outlook is present in the European Union.
HAVE you ever wondered what would drive you on to the streets?
I DON’T know quite why I was waiting anxiously for Pope Benedict’s letter to the Irish people.
FOR most people, managing a crisis in their lives can be a full-time job – and sometimes it can bring people to breaking point.
SURELY the child protection crisis is as important as any the health service has ever faced in the past?
SO there is now a plan to end one of Ireland’s greatest scandals.
I THINK we need to be very clear about a couple of things.
But there are several very pressing reasons why it must be built. Abusers, and those who covered up abuse to protect institutions, must be constantly reminded of what they have done.
WHAT’S the opposite of regeneration?
WHY is it every time the role and freedom of the media is discussed, the voice of the ordinary citizen is never heard?
I HAVE to tell you something.
I TOOK an additional few days off over Christmas and I think it must be affecting me.
WHAT actually happened?
EACH year at this time, I see it as my duty to tell you what’s going to happen next year.
WELL now, who went up in your estimation this year? And who went down?
IT may not really have sunk in yet.
AT the end of the year 2000 the pay and pensions bill for the public service was about €9 billion.
LILYBAEUM no longer exists.
SO, are we going to be as angry as this on budget night? Or are we going to show them that our country deserves better?
I THINK if I were a public servant today, I’d be mad as hell.
IT was 1960s music that was playing at the end of the protest march the other day. Protest songs, Bob Dylan, that sort of thing. I’m comfortable with that sort of music myself – it makes me feel nostalgic, in fact. But I couldn’t help wondering whether it said more about the organisers of the march than it did about the protesters. Somehow, it all seemed a little out of date.
HE wasn’t in good humour.
I WAS watching the news the other night and saw someone I’d never seen on television before.
ON Saturday, I went to an education conference where Garret FitzGerald spoke about the decline of moral authority in Ireland.
DAN O’BRIEN is probably one of the people that Bertie Ahern thought would be better off committing suicide.
IS it just me or has the whole world gone mad?
DEAR Eamon, I hope you don’t mind my writing you this letter.
DO you know how much €90 billion is?
I WAS listening to David McWilliams on Ryan Tubridy’s radio show the other day.
NO MATTER what the experts might tell you, the country isn’t in bad health.
HELLO, how are you old chap?
I USED to think Shillelagh was a placename invented for American movies.
WE’VE had a few weeks of sheer panic.
DURING the week I advised everyone to stop talking about the report prepared by Colm McCarthy and his colleagues, and to read it instead. I’ve taken my own advice — I’ve read the report in both volumes and as much as possible of the commentary about it.
I believe that’s tragic. Actually, it’s also hugely dangerous. The more respect for parliament is allowed to be corroded, the closer we all get to a slippery slope – and it’s the slippery slope, believe it or not, that leads to effective dictatorship.
I MET Senator David Norris last week on the final episode of Questions & Answers.
THANK God for the website www.irelandforeurope.ie. At last an organisation of people who really want to go out and work for the Lisbon Treaty and they look like they’re going to do it with imagination and a bit of flair.
ANOTHER winter of discontent?
WHY is there suddenly all this talk about changing the constitution where children are concerned?
THE people who abused children in our industrial schools were “the dregs of society in a certain sense”.
I HOPE tens of thousands of people march tomorrow week.
I DROVE to Clonmel on Sunday for the finals of an under-nines and under-10s football tournament. It was organised by Clonmel FC and brought together young footballers from the six Munster counties. They (and the rest of us) had a brilliant afternoon and we were made to feel really welcome by the Clonmel team.
OVER the next week or so, we will see another couple of reports that will confirm, once again, how children really don’t matter in Ireland.
THIS George Lee phenomenon is dangerous. I don’t mean the man himself, of course.
WASN’T it Queen Elizabeth who first used the phrase “annus horribilis” to refer back to a particularly bad period in her long reign?
WHEN you’re hot, you’re hot.
LISTENING to Joe Duffy’s Liveline programme the other day, you’d really wonder what’s going on in the country.
THE Government that stole Christmas. And stole it, what’s more, from thousands of children and families who need it most and can afford it least.
I HOPE you get a good night’s sleep tonight. I have an awful feeling this is going to be a bad day, and that not a lot of good will come of it.
ENFIELD isn’t far from Mullingar. It was a meeting in Enfield last Christmas that sowed the seeds of Ireland’s Grand Slam in rugby.
FOUR cabinet meetings in a week. Members of the government snowed under with paper.
WHY don’t we admit it? Instead of talking all sorts of gobbledegook about mental health and how much we care, why don’t we admit it is so low down on the list of national priorities it would take some sort of disastrous epidemic for us to begin to take it seriously. We will publish reports, evaluations, strategies, policy documents and manifestos until everyone is fed up talking about it.
IT’S time that all the leading economists in Ireland were locked up.
FRESH thinking and a winning mentality. That’s what I heard the Taoiseach call for on Saturday night.
I SAW Ceann Comhairle John O’Donoghue on the news the other night, talking about the members of the Oireachtas feeling pain and yet being determined to give a lead.
MUCH as I don’t want to admit it, I don’t always play golf brilliantly.
EIGHT days compared to eight months. Eight days of hope, of energy, of a palpable sense of new direction.
A GROUP of senior bankers have gone to see the Minister for Finance.
AT the end of June 1938 the world was moving inexorably towards war.
OUR country is facing an emergency.
EACH year at this time, a small but select band of us gathers around ancient fires in a hidden part of the forest.
AND then the ghost dropped him, and the Taoiseach was plummeting towards earth, down, down.
WHAT are we to believe? The question is posed by the appearance of two conflicting reports, and one disturbing incident, all in the last seven days or so.
BOY, was my local shop on the ball on Sunday morning.
MARY Harney has been unfairly treated over this hairdo business.
WE need to be taken by the scruff of the neck. We need somebody telling us, in calm and measured terms, and in simple English, what needs to be done. And first of all, we need to be told what the hell is going on. Truthfully, clearly, simply.
THEY’RE caught in a trap. Just like the old Elvis Presley song. And it’s a trap of their own making. It’s caused by lack of imagination, lack of preparedness, and an unwillingness to listen.
IT was one of the scariest nights of my life. It was February 18, 1987, and my livelihood was hanging by a thread.
I WAS at a party the other night. Lovely affair, generous host and hostess, plenty of food and drink (we were taking a taxi home). And not, by any means, a left-wing group, although they were all utterly charming.
HOW did the Government manage to bring in a budget of such fundamental unfairness? How was it possible to get it so badly wrong that the authority of government itself has been perhaps fatally undermined?
I’m not advocating that we should abandon the pension reserve fund to pay for day-to-day expenditure.
THROUGHOUT our country there has never been fear like there is right now.
SO we’ve bailed out the banking sector. Yes, it had to be done. But look at the risk involved.
SO, capitalism is in crisis. The Americans have had the most extraordinary week when a crisis in the financial markets got mixed up in the presidential election.
WHAT a week of irony. The Progressive Democrats finally decided to fold up their tents and at the same time the world’s leading exponents of the free market all begged and pleaded for state intervention.
IT WOULD be reassuring, wouldn’t it, to be certain that convicted sex offenders were being monitored.
I WAS upbraided in the street by a fairly senior civil servant last week. He was polite, of course, as all senior civil servants are. But he made it pretty clear he thought I was talking through a certain part of my anatomy when it came to public spending.
DO you know what the “conference rate” is? It’s one of the categories of travelling expenses paid to civil servants while they’re abroad.
SEPTEMBER 15. That’s the deadline the Taoiseach and the Minister for Finance have given all their colleagues.
DO you remember Dave? Dave was an ordinary guy, a good citizen. He was plucked from obscurity because of his uncanny resemblance to the president of the United States.
THE word on the street is that the Government has decided, without even really discussing the matter, that a referendum on children’s rights would be too controversial. After Lisbon, they are afraid of the risk involved.
I ONCE worked for Denis Larkin. The son of the great Jim Larkin, and brother of Young Jim, also regarded as a great trade union leader, Denis was the least highly rated of the three.
IN Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, the Emperor of Japan managed to produce the most streamlined government in the world.
I HAVE never met Padraig Harrington. Well, that’s not entirely true. He once, last year, held a door open for me, and when I passed him without realising who it was, he said, “you’d think a better class of doorman would be worth acknowledging”.
I MET a man recently who has spent most of his career working on major capital projects. He’s been involved in building bridges, motorways, third-level colleges and housing estates. And he’s involved on the financial side of things, so he knows a fair bit about money and how it should be spent.
IF YOU want to see where the HSE gets its money from, it’s all there in the book of estimates. You can find it easily enough on the web — just click on www.finance.gov.ie, and look under ‘Financial and Economic Information’.
So why is it that so many other ESRI reports in recent times go largely ignored?
I HOPE you remember that you read it here first. Last March, I told you the cutbacks were beginning. I warned you it would start with stealth cutbacks in the hope you wouldn’t really notice. But as the slowdown in the economy begins to bite, the appetite for cuts within the system will grow.
WE’RE lucky. As of last November, there were slightly more than 490 million people living in the EU.
I MET a Health Service Executive (HSE) manager at a conference the other day. It wouldn’t be in his interests for me to tell you who he was or where he came from, but he was frustrated. Very frustrated, in fact.
I WANT to tell you about drive-by poverty. It’s a new solution to the problem of poverty, a way of hiding it away so it doesn’t become visible. That way, you see, we don’t have to worry about it.
MY WIFE made one of her occasional forays to IKEA in Belfast last week. Great value to be had up there, especially with the current rate of exchange, and the quality they produce for the price is quite remarkable.
Here are some of the words that don’t appear at all in the treaty: euthanasia, family planning, abortion, contraception or divorce.
DEAR Taoiseach-in-waiting, not long to go now. At 2.30pm tomorrow, the house will be called to order and nominations will be put in place for the office of taoiseach. There may be some wrangling about the procedures, which would be normal enough.
HERE’S an arresting sentence (possibly in more ways than one): “Our fundamental aim, in all that we do, is to make it easy for people who want to do business with us and to make it difficult for those who don’t.”
I GOT one of those emails during the week. You know the kind — the round-robin, forwarded by a friend to everyone on her email list, that’s supposed to make you smile. And it did, until I read the sting in the tail.
IS it just me or is anyone else getting a bit tired of the endless round of celebrations of the only true peacemakers?
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