There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that the numbers of people and the waiting times in A&E wards around the country is a national scandal. The nurses organization have regularly tracked the numbers over the years and anytime a Health Minister tells us that it is improving, the nurses hit back with the latest real figures, which always seem to be a new record for the HSE. The gap between the official version and the reality is enormous.

Shamed into seeming to do something about homelessness, the Government estimate of the homeless figure was hugely at variance with the actual numbers on the ground, provided by the various charities at the coalface. Then the Gardai got in on the act by reporting that one and a half million breath tests were carried out by them on motorists nationwide in one year. They were still clapping themselves on the back for this when it emerged that a million of those tests never actually took place. It would be a surreal comedy if the stakes were not so high.

Today, in the time honored tradition we learned that a third of homes officially built since 2011 weren’t actually built at all. The Government proudly announced they’d built them and received the plaudits for so doing, only for the CSO to then announce that they were never built at all. “Some 85,154 new houses and apartments were calculated to have been built from 2011 to 2017, but the true number was 53,566, just 63% of what was believed.”

There’s lies, damned lies and statistics and then there is the actual reality. All the spin and bullshit they can shovel at it won’t disguise the complete absence of 31,588 new builds that the Government swore to us had been completed because they never were. The magnitude of the difference between reality and the empty political announcements cannot be explained away as errors because the margin of error in each case is far too high. So I conclude that it can only be lies, told in the full knowledge that were lies. It is cheating on a grand scale by the very people I predict will be coming looking for your vote sooner rather than later.

Oh, and they’ll have their ‘facts’ as to why you should vote for them, supported by their own lying statistics. Let’s all get real.