Corruption everyhere from Greystones to Mayo

national | miscellaneous | opinion/analysis Thursday March 12, 2009 18:04 by Peter Brady - Concerned Citizens Action Committee Bray and Greystones

Who can we trust in authority?

The corruption in our society has gone out of control. We must unite together against this and say NO.
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Dear Citizens and Friends,

As we are all well aware by now, our country as we know it today is in a very bad way financially which was caused by nothing else only sheer greed and corruption. Which was brought about by a cartel of corrupt individuals who should be put in jail for a maximum of 25years and for their assets to be seized. It is a living disgrace and scandal that the Irish people are left picking up the tab for their corrupt actions.

We all know as law abiding Irish citizens that we have to keep within the laws of the state-we do this every day when we pay for our taxes, when we pay for the tax on our cars, when we pay for our gas and ESB bills, when we pay for the mortages on our homes that the so called banks tricked us into taking out with them on the backs of the so called celtic tiger in the creation of the so called 'jobs' which are now lost to the system. We do this every day because we are law abiding citizens but as soon as we default on any of these responsibilities we are receiving letters of warning through the post either from the tax man, ESB, Bord Gais and the banks threatening repossession.We all know only too well that if we are slow on paying the television licence we will find ourselves in court very fast with a heavy fine and jail sentence.

But when it comes down to these corrupt individuals the very same system of law just lets them walk away at our expense with no accountability for their corrupt actions. How long are we as a nation going to stand idly by and put up with this carry on of corruption in the political system, corruption in the financial institutions, corruption in the training and employment authority, corruption in the church with some of our priests which was covered up and we are glad now is being exposed by the decent members of the church, corruption in the planning process in which the county managers and their officials who have operated behind closed doors with developers and speculators planning their next project with the exchange of the good old brown envelope over the objections of the people.

This needs to be changed and take the power away from these individuals because this has left the door wide open for corruption to exist when the county managers in the local authorities and his executive have the say over the elected body. This is unacceptable. The system is so corrupt that the Irish people have no confidence or faith lelf in the authorities of the country-they cannot trust them any more which is a very dangerous situation to occur in any society. We say it is time to clean up the corruption by putting words into actions by bringing in emergency power legislation in going after these individuals who robbed the Irish people of their savings and this can be done through Europol and interpol and let us use the European laws to tack these corrupt individuals down.

It is long overdue for the institutions of the Irish state to start showing the Irish people a bit of respect so their points of view and their democratic rights as Irish citizens are taken into account because we know only too well the people of Ireland are being ignorded.
We see this all the time in the planning process when we have communities like Greystones who were hung out to dry by one of the institutions of the state An Bord Pleanala. WHEN THE PEOPLE OF THIS COMMUNITY SAID NO IN WHICH THIS AGENCY WENT AGAINST THE DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS AND THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE IN WHICH THEY FAVOURED 300MILLION EUROS OVER THEIR DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS. This is morally wrong. So when this is allowed to happen no wonder we have the scandal in the financial institutions. It undermines democracy and the will of the people in which the power is taken away from the Irish people by moving us towards a fascist dictatorship which is no different to past experiences when they tried to introduce the Blueshirts into this county in the 1930's and they were told where to go! We say NO as we are democrats and will oppose new forms of quasi-fascism in the form of neoliberalism.

A country is a healthy place when you have true democracy in it when the people and the community have a say in their own planning process which is non-existent at the moment and when you have communities held up to ransome in which they are threatened and told by the local authority that we will make sure that you will not get planning permission for an extension onto your house if you object to our project-THIS IS A FASCIST DICTATORSHIP.

In conclusion, we hope that the Minister for the Environment and the leader of the Green Party through his fine speech on the 7th of March 2009 at his Party Conference in Wexford that he hopes to bring about that real change that we so badly need for our planning system which was taken over by rogue developers. The planning process is a joke. We will all hold our breaths that the Minister for Environment will do something regarding cleaning it up but we all know that the party whom he is in government with needs the planning process to remain the way it is for their friends and donors to their party-THE DEVELOPERS.We wish him and his party the best of luck in their endeavors.

Thank-you for taking the time to read this statement Mr Peter Brady the Concerned Citizens Action Committee of Bray and Graystones.