Category Archives: Politics

“I can’t have a Garda member sitting in every living room in the country” – Garda Commissioner

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Drink

In an interview with the Irish Times‘  Conor Lally yesterday Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy, said: “I can’t have a Garda member sitting in every living room in the country.”

Government policy against alcohol consumption has led to this.

Anti-alcohol moves in recent years have been short sighted. Measures including making alcohol more expensive, shorting closing hours, and imposing massive price hikes on late licences, have all made drinking at home more attractive. The anti-drink laws also fuelled the trend of people drinking before they go out as to spend less in pubs where the cost of drink is far greater.

The affect is brushing the problem under the carpet. Under the carpet, as such, there are no bouncers, there is no CCTV, and the nearest Garda is likely further away. You can also drink as much as you have. The anti-drink lobby and TDs who went along with them have a lot to answer for.

Banning drinking in public is another example of using the wrong tool. I’ve heard TDs and councillors saying it’s to tackle under-age drinking, others saying it’s to stop public order offences… were those not covered by other laws? The majority of EU states manage to live without such bans.

So much for progress.

Different views on possible public transport cuts

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On NewsTalk two guests, who are on taking about two different items are also asked about purposed public transport cuts…

First, defending the cuts, there’s the Green Party senator Dan Boyle.  Very strangely Boyle defends the cuts by saying the cuts will likely be on off peak, after 8pm. If Dan used public transport any time recently he’d know that service levels at this time are already low. Cutting frequency at this time adds weight to pro-car arguments that “public transport is not  frequency enough when I travel” or “it does not suit X or Y journeys I take”.

Meanwhile, in the unlikely defence of public transport is AA spokesman Conor Faughnan. I say unlikely, as AA being a motoring organisation, but the AA are acutely aware how overused the car is in Ireland. Faughnan outlines how talking about cuts is a step back when public transport, according to him, only carries 20 percent of Dublin commuter compared to closer to 80 percent in other EU states.

Ireland as a nation has yet to grasp how dominate the car is.

Boyle also mentioned the soon-to-be released Government plan on sustainable transport. Fair enough, we’ll see what that contains, in the meanwhile the Greens need to stop defending the undefendable. Have they not noticed the backlash of a good number of people who think they have failed to implement green policies already?

Six-step guide to ‘justifying atrocities’, no hypocrites please

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Fintan O’Toole gave a “Six-step guide to ‘justifying atrocities‘” in the Irish Times yesterday, the question is who is he talking about at the end of the article, here:

The only restriction on the use of this six-step programme is that it is best not used by those who have criticised such devices in the past. If, for example, you spent many years exposing the sickening hypocrisy and evasion of the IRA in relation to its atrocities against civilians during the Troubles, it is probably best not to deploy the same linguistic manoeuvres in defence of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. In such circumstances, if you can’t be consistent, it is probably best to be silent.

Or more so, what he is saying sounds ok up until you remember most people who fit the above description have always seen state murder as nothing to write home about. With these people there was always a ” sickening hypocrisy.” Some were just blind to it.

Never learning lessons

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(Via Memex) From the Register comes some good comment Dell and Limerick, even if some of it has probably been mentioned already.

But these lessons are not new for Ireland. The scale is new. But in a way it’s not. It might be argued that the equivalent of the affect of Dell leaving Limerick has been seen in small and large towns across Ireland. Our boom years, if anything, allowed the normal mantra of not learning lessons to go widely unnoticed.

Elsewhere, while I’m not quite sure how correct he is, Bernie Goldbach talks of a possibly “entrepreneurial culture” which might grow out of the closure. He says:

Many editors fail to point to the start-up culture engendered by large businesses and that’s true in Dell’s case as well. I believe a nascent entrepreneurial culture sits in the remnants of Dell’s closure

In the post before this Goldbach talks of the importance of support for start-ups, and what he says here is more true now when banks are apparently slow to lend.

That Sean Dunne New York Times article

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A colourful New York Times article on Irish property developer Sean Dunne being talked about in the media and on the interweb in the last few days can be found here on the Times’ website (or here on the International Herald Tribune’s website), and here’s the start of it:

IT’S 3 a.m. at Doheny & Nesbitt, a favorite watering hole of Dublin’s political and business elite, and the property tycoon Sean Dunne stoops to retrieve a penny from the pub’s grimy floor.

One would think that Mr. Dunne, Ireland’s best-known building developer, would be in bed at this hour. It’s a weeknight, after all, and he has meetings that begin before first light.

What’s more, the Irish economy, pummeled by the most severe housing bust in Europe, has collapsed. And the gossip around town is that Mr. Dunne, whose brazen deal-making and Donald Trump-like lifestyle epitomized the country’s euphoric boom, might be going bankrupt.

But, no matter, a penny is a penny.

“I am never, never too proud to pick a penny up from the floor,” Mr. Dunne said. He is on perhaps his fifth pint of Guinness, capping a rollicking night of Champagne cocktails, followed by a wine-soaked dinner — yet his thick brogue is clear of even the faintest slurring.

Robert Fisk on Obama talking nonsense

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Robert Fisk on Obama talking nonsense, and on broken promises of the past and future, as on Independent.ie:

If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point. Let’s kick off with the man who is not going to change the Middle East — Barack Obama — who last week, with predictably, became ‘Time’s’ “person of the year”. But buried in a long and immensely tedious interview inside the magazine, Obama devotes just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that’s been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority.”

“Building on progress?” What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel’s monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there’s “progress” to build on?

A brief day in court

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Interesting post by the Swords Express boss on their brief day in court after setting with the Minister for Transport…

So, my solicitors and I spent a day in Court with Swords Express, the public transport company I started to provide decent, fast transport to the people of Ireland’s biggest town last year. You only go to Court when there is something really big at stake, and you only go to Court with the government if you think you are very likely to get a favorable outcome. The costs involved are tremendous. The government has limitless resources and is not afraid to bring them to bear. Even for our one-day event and even though no evidence was heard in Court and the State decided to settle on the day, the costs will be into six figures, money which the taxpayer will end up having to pay.