Fine Gael will destroy whats left of the state

national | politics / elections | opinion/analysis Sunday February 13, 2011 14:01 by ordinary citizen

fine gael are mammys boys

These times we live in require people with initiative in positions of power. People who can come at a problem from different angles and don’t necessarily play by the rules.

Fine Gael are mammies boys

These times we live in require people with initiative in positions of power. People who can come at a problem from different angles and don’t necessarily play by the rules.

A friend, who was studying a Business Degree, told me that when the lecturer walked in on the first day he pointed to all the students sitting in the front and said that these people would get nice jobs maybe live in the suburbs and drive Volvos and then pointed to the guys in the back row and said “but these guys will be your bosses”
His logic was that entrepreneurial spirit, which is the cornerstone of capitalism, is often possessed by those a little wild, a little against the grain. Of course some of these people might decide to use their rebelliousness for the common good and be the types who might be found reading an article like this. Many of the rest, who have no moral backbone, will excel in the modern financial markets where greed is the only real parameter for success.

This neo-liberal economic system we are a part of rewards those who are the opposite, who possess bucket loads of arrogance. This attitude is promoted by shows like “The Apprentice” hosted and participated by people who may be good business people but not much else when it comes to the general good of society as a whole. I highly doubt you will see many of them out helping run a juvenile football team on a Saturday morning.
Ireland is a country full of Mammies boys and girls, people the listeners of Joe Duffy would be proud of. The type who sit in the front of the class and don’t make waves. They can go all the way to high up in Government, especially as Civil Servants, gradually rising up the pay scale showing as little initiative as possible.
Now Fianna Fail have been the best Mammies boys for years with Joe Duffy listeners voting them in even if the hospitals were not working properly. Now after FF messed up so badly the Joe Duffy listeners are looking more boredom but with the word “change” really meaning more of the same but with different faces. They have just waited around until their hour came, not through any special skills or talents, just waiting long enough for the other mammies boys to show how completely unimaginative and unable they are to deal with anything that is not the norm.

Take Brian Lenihen he was head prefect in Belvedere College, studied Law in Trinity and then Cambridge. Any Irish mammy would have been proud of him. When he was Minister for Justice he probably did a better job than most who would not be experts in the field. Then came the reshuffle when Cowen became leader and he was made head of Irish finances.
In countries like Germany it is expected that you have some qualification in the ministry you take over and the list electoral system they have allows experts to get in that might not be the best salespeople going door to door as is necessary to be elected here. The whole reshuffle in Ireland is about putting friends in positions of power like Cowens friend Mary Coughlan being given the Tainiste post while Michael Martin was given Health by Bertie who would have rightly seen him as a threat. Then there is the crazy geographical necessity of having ministers from different parts of the country as can be seen in Martin’s reshuffle and on Fine Gael’s side as well. This is not how you run a business but it is an acceptable way to run a country?
So we had an expert in Law, who never really had followed the road set out before him and taken very little initiative in his life, in charge when the biggest crisis the state has ever been in hit. The banks had been using up to five times the national income and it hit the wall. Millions were paid to experts which said that giving a bank guarantee could destroy the country but when a person is not used to having to think out of the box mistakes can happen and Ireland is on the road to bankruptcy because of his incompetence.

This is not to say Fine Gael would have done much different, indeed they wanted a €7billion cut in the last budget when the government were still talking about 4 billion. My fear is that we are going to be facing a whole raft of problems due to too many mammies boys being in too many positions of power.
An energy crisis could see these muppets in suits jumping on what appears to be the easiest option but which in reality just passing a bigger mess onto the next generation as can be seen with Incineration which appears to be a quick fix after years of inaction on waste but by relying on it so much not allowing the possibility of recycling to get a chance. I hope that the Greens have done enough with regards to getting Alternative energy as a viable option, we are at 15% now. When the energy crisis hits and this could be very soon mammy’s boys will be looking for a quick fix and jump on the Nuclear option with Kevin Myers cheering them all the way.
Nuclear leaves waste for up to 5,000 years, if the Egyptians had nuclear power we would still be dealing with the waste now, one of the options put forward is to send it up to space this is the level of responsibility we are dealing with. One day in a distant planet a new life form could be born and just as it is about to reproduce a spaceship full of nuclear waste falls from the sky to stop that future alien life form to ever get going.
The future is of course of little interest to mammies boys as they are just looking to make as much as they can before they get out and retire. The PR people from giant Incinerator and Nuclear companies know that this is the type of moron they are dealing with and then, to add insult to injury, they throw in fines for not using enough of their system as is the case with the Poolbeg Incinerator.

The final and possibly the most important of all is the way mammies boys deal with the Economy, a beast moving at hyper speeds, run by companies who employ the smartest, the elite. Many of our politicians would not get near the door of an interview for one of these firms. What happened when the mammys boy, who went to all the Colleges he was meant to and eventually rose to the top through blandness and family name, had to deal with an impending bank collapse? He over reacted and gave a blanket guarantee that has bankrupted the state. In a similar situation Gordon Brown took control of these institutions and may even have made his country a profit in the long run.
Compare the difference of leaders after they left office, Gordon has a book out about the need for a safety net to be placed around the Market to control it, attacking a massive problem. What does our mammies boy Bertie, the Daniel O Donnell of politics, do when he retires, he shows how useless he is without the Civil Servants and his helpers and comes across as a dope on a TV commercial. I think it was the 2002 FF manifesto that had a spelling mistake on every page, which showed how incompetent these guys are without their Civil Servants.

This country is not going to be able to pay off its debts and the announcement that the banks may need more billions means that the need for over 5.8% growth coupled with just having taken 6 billion with another 9 billion required out of the economy is impossible. The only solution is to foreclose on our debts and start rebuilding our economy now and give it some chance of recovery.
If Fine Geal get in their plan is to sell off our profit making state assets like the ESB, Bord Gais, probably our water and maybe even our An Post. This will put a couple of billion into the state for the short term but leave us with little room for manoeuvre in the future with regard to having a say in how the companies are being run as happened in the last government when the Greens were able to direct the ESB into investing in alternative energy.
The state and therefore the people through elections, have as little influence as possible with the private sector taking control of everything is a pillar of neo-liberal economics that both FF and Fine Gael follow. This model exploded in 2008 when states all over the world had to swoop in and rescue the markets when they were about to die. They have of course continued to urinate on us after this because they are using the same parameters for constant growth that got us into this mess in the first place.

The gap between those who are following this old model and those calling for more state involvement is growing wider every day. Obama tried to pump money into the economy to create jobs while billionaires finance the Tea Party and its aims of returning to nineteenth government while glossing over the chaos this would leave society in. Journalists like Matt Cooper have been good mammys boys in the past and have suited neo-liberal economics off by heart and they too are pumping the crazy notion of giving control of our energy supply and other core services over to people who just want to make a quick buck.
Privatisation of services means paying more for a poorer quality service that was once run decently and with very few hick ups. The lack of investment in rail safety in trains in the UK could well have caused untold deaths after it had been sold off. We would have had broadband faster if Eircom had still been in state control and meant we would have created more jobs earlier in our IT sector but FF wanted to sell it to have a nice lump to but off the electorate in 2002 and pay doctors four times what they normally get for old people with medical cards, a deal done with the Fine Geal spokesperson on health.
Again Aer Lingus was sold to allow a give away budget just before the 2007 election. I have no doubt that if the Greens were not in power the ESB would have given FF a nice few billion to make it appear we are not in such a mess. Of course Europe and the Treaties we have signed up to behind the promises of billions in grants has made this the rule but we could always tell them where to go. Right wing politicians like following these rules as the more state services they get rid of the less responsibility they have and they will get less blame if something goes wrong.
The thing that anger me the most is the chance that our forestry service and the roughly 7% landmass of Ireland it owns could be sold. The foundations of this go back to the land league in the nineteenth century when Irish people first got rights back to their land. Bertie is working for a Swiss company whose job it is to spend the 250billion the Chinese government wants to invest in natural resources instead of shares in the stock market. Now there will probably never be any link between the potential sale of a huge chunk of this country to China and our former Taoiseach but don’t be surprised if in the future you will see signs at our forest entrances; “No entry private property of the Chinese state or will we have to pay to enter to get some fresh air.

I feel like Michael Moore must have when he made his decision to stop pushing Ralph Nadar when he suddenly realised that Bush could actually do it and beat Gore. As FF lower their vote FG are getting closer to only needing a few independents to have a majority. The population knows FF are useless it will be the old and rich who will get them to close to 20% but it is those who are looking for change who are being sucked into the spin that Fine Gael and often Newstalk Fm are pushing. I saw Shell to Sea have a picture mocking Eamon Ryan with him holding a Shell to Sea poster before he got into power. This is living in the past, he will be fighting for the last seat in his constituency against Shane Ross who will be one of the independents who will go in with Fine Gael if they get near a majority, without needing another party to keep them restrained at some level.
The tide is rising for the Left as more and more people see the blatant truth that the only solution is to tackle the rich - the ones in the back of the class with no morals. This may not happen this election but is a real possibility almost an inevitability brought about by a system that has been set up to benefit an increasingly smaller percentage of the population, while leaving the rest with less and less security and stability in their lives. Lets hope that our government still had some control over states assets when the dam finally breaks and there is a left majority in this country.

Ref “A Well respected Man” - the Kinks