THE GAFFES OF LEO

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Little Leo is spending a fortune on his own personal media handling unit and yet he is still opening his mouth wide and placing his foot firmly in it.

So, Senator Catherine Noone alleged a male colleague repeatedly speaks down to her, dismisses her views and treats her in a misogynistic way and made her feel uncomfortable”. In response to her contribution Mr Varadkar said he would not “stand over any bullying or sexism towards colleagues”. You can take it then that Leo won’t ‘stand over’ people being spoken down to or having their views dismissed or being made feel uncomfortable. All very commendable so far.

But on the same day in response to the ‘Versatis’ scandal, he has insisted pain relief patches must be curtailed because of addiction concerns and over-subscribing by doctors. For those of you who don’t know, Leo is a fully qualified doctor so he knows that every prescription has side effects and he knows also that that any pain reliever has the potential to be addictive depending on the intensity of the pain to be relieved. So his statement amounts to a crock of shit or even deceit perhaps. But he is certainly guilty of speaking down to the 25,000 suffering patients involved, he has ignored their views and stated experiences completely and he has left them damned uncomfortable indeed.

The other major ongoing scandal, this time around the PTSB job-lot sale of mortgages in difficulty to preying vulture funds, attracted comment from little Leo also. Some of these embattled mortgage holders actually wrote to him and his response was as condescending as it was ill informed. He re-directed them to, “The Abhaile service launched in 2016 is a national mortgage arrears resolution service, the aim is to help mortgage holders in arrears to find the best solution and keep them in their own homes.” However, none other than the Master of the High Court has publicly called Leo’s reply, “A sick joke.” Speaking on RTE radio he claimed Abhaile is “Merely a voucher for €200 worth of legal advice before you go into the circuit court,” and we could add to that, “in order to have your home repossessed and your family turfed out in the street.” Leo’s lack of concern and contempt for the ordinary people is indeed thinly concealed.

In a speedy rearguard action, Leo’s handlers pushed the two-faced Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe before the cameras to say that, “It will protect jobs and the economy.” He added that, “The future health of PTSB, the third largest bank in the country, is “vital” to the economy, with deposits of over €17bn and 2,000 staff.” For sure Pascal and both we, and the 14,000 mortgage holders affected by this, and the 25,000 pain suffers denied their Versatis drug, actually put that €17bn up for the PTSB when it should have been shut down and its Directors jailed for fraud. Then the Department of Finance says it cannot interfere with commercial banks and how they sell their loans, despite the fact PTSB is 75% State-owned. It’s odd because that self same department can interfere with you any time they like, can’t they?

You get the feeling though that Leo’s nervous handlers may have become a little frantic at his high-handed dismissive public attitude and felt the need to confuse the issues or just stall for time because today the arrogant Leo was back to say that there is still time to prevent Permanent TSB from selling 20,000 distressed mortgages to vulture funds despite claiming the Government has no legal right to block the deal. He said the Government “very much stands on the side of people trying to pay their debts.” Does he think we are all fucking idiots?

Neither Leo nor Pascal, nor any of their front bench risk losing their beds tonight or any other night, to a vulture fund. None of them will go to those beds in screaming agony either, unable to sleep during the graveyard watch. The 25,000 pain suffers will lie staring in tears at the ceiling while the 20,000 future victims of the ravenous vulture funds will also stare in depression at their own ceilings while they still have them and sadly, little Leo will ‘stand over’ all of that because he just appears not to understand or care. You see, he is, in reality, ‘standing over’ people being spoken down to or having their views dismissed or being made feel uncomfortable. He is demonstrating contempt, deviousness and a callous cruelty for the very people he swore to represent and protect.

Bring on a General Election, sooner rather than later!

 

P.S. One day later and the story rolls on….

“Taoiseach’s views on pain killer patches ‘beyond comprehension’: doctor.”

EVIL THOUGHTS I HARBOUR.

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There is a short river walk near me that optimistically calls itself the “Millennium Park.” I go there a couple of times a day to walk the dog, or maybe it’s the other way around.

Actually, river life is quite fascinating and I have seen otters on the riverbank and we even have a seal in our river and he and I have given each other the hairy eyeball some mornings. You’re never far from a rat of course, the rabbits are in abundance and hard at it too and the bird life is as varied as it is delightful. With clear skies in the early morning the jet trails from the States to Europe and back again, criss-cross the skies. Ships up to five hundred feet in length can pass you any morning and air traffic from Cork Airport often does its turns eastward to Heathrow over your head while you stroll along watching to see if the dog is taking a shit anywhere someone could step in it.

All very idillic I hear you think and it is except for the inevitable dozy holes to spoil it. You see, because it is a stretch of city river, the local authorities thoughtfully provide lifebuoys along the river’s banks for the possible unfortunates. They are in bright orange heavy plastic containers, wrapped in long ropes, (The life buoys, not the unfortunates), so that if you were to encounter some poor soul struggling in the water, you could literally throw out a lifeline. And yet there are home-grown langers whose night on the piss in town would not be complete without opening one of these bright orange containers and fucking the contents  into the river for no reason other than to tickle their own innate stupidity.

A few weeks back i was frantically waving at a small speedboat to rescue one such life buoy I saw floating near the bank on my side. In fairness to the guy, he detoured, picked it up and assured me he was from the local boat club and would return it to its rightful owner. Last week I saw one, tantalisingly out of reach, just float by me but later that morning at high tide, one of the other dog walkers I know, fished it out and lay it by a bollard for Council workers to retrieve. Three days later it was gone but I was to learn  later that some gormless fuck had simply tossed it back in when nobody was looking.

Which brings me to my evil thoughts.

Seething with righteous indignation as I stroll, I imagine in my mind’s eye the dopey empty space who thinks he’s a genius, firstly throwing the life buoy in and then minutes later, falling in himself. I have a vision which I relish as I walk along. The dope in the river is calling, “Help, Help,” and naturally full of concern initially, I rush down to the nearest orange container, only to find it empty. “Some fucking absolute prick has taken the life buoy,” I shout to the now drowning waste of space in the river. “What?” is his plaintive cry back to me. Then, and only then, in my mind’s eye at any rate, does the full crass ignorance of his make-up, dawn on him. The full nastiness of his whole useless persona comes home to roost where it belongs. And as a result of his drowning, the Council populate the riverbank with even more of these wonderful life saving devices. This morning early, I saw two such orange floaters sailing aimlessly down the central channel and out to sea and the evil thoughts returned with a vengeance.

But some way or other, those evil thoughts sustain me and give me relief!

ELECTRIC BULLSHIT

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Shane Ross really is a tit! The blustering idiot is stamping around at present, shouting at anyone who will listen, that road deaths are squarely down to speeding and alcohol. Never mind that 2017 had the lowest death rate on Irish roads ever. Shane seems not to know that an accident is an event that happens by chance and that it is without apparent or deliberate cause. That’s the definition of the word accident actually. We don’t all head out in our motorised metal boxes each morning to play dodgems on the highway Shane!

Last year, the insufferable Shane introduced a raft of incentives for people to switch to electric cars. Currently there are 900 charging points around the country for the 3,500 electric cars that have been bought. What readers may not know however is that, “The ESB established the network five years ago with the help of funding from the CRU Innovation Fund and Europe and has been maintaining it since through a charge on the bills of every ESB customer, making charging a car free to the owner. But the CRU consultation ended in October, concluding that the network should be sold off by auction — a process likely to take a number of years — and in the meantime the practice of collecting money from all ESB customers should end and electric car owners should start paying at charging points.” I bet you didn’t know that you were subsidising the electricity of 3,500 electric car owners. “Go on ya’ good thing!”

When the funding for Irish Water dried up, (pun,pun), the brains in Leinster House diverted motor tax money, (€950m a year), to prop up the ailing quango. But there’s a catch-22 emerging for Shane. If the motoring public do begin to buy more of these electric cars, (as he dearly wants them to do), the Irish Examiner reports that we may see a €4bn loss from petrol, diesel taxes.

Last year the State extorted from motorists €820m in VRT, €626m in excise duties on petrol, €1440m in excise on diesel, €54m in carbon tax on petrol and €178m in carbon tax on diesel on top of the €950m in road tax.

The Examiner article explores how such a shortfall could be offset by newer taxes of a sort. According to them, “Among the options under consideration is distance pricing that would charge by the kilometre driven, as well as congestion charges for the busiest routes, each using number plate recognition technology or in-car units to track and record motorists as they drive.” Straight away I see a problem. As the article reports, “Emissions from transport grew 3.7% last year and the Government is offering grants, minimal motor tax rates, VRT reliefs and free battery charging at public charge points to encourage motorists to adopt electric with a view to eradicating petrol and diesel from new cars entirely within 12 years. However, while Climate Change Minister Denis Naughten is tasked with pushing electric, Finance Minister Paschal Donohue is determined to protect revenues, so many of the incentives to go electric could be short-lived. The Department of Finance is well aware of the threat to exchequer receipts posed by the potential large-scale adoption of electric vehicles as the vehicle of choice for private motorists,” Mr Donohue’s department said.

OK, In english that means the individual members of the political parties in power currently see it as an advantage for their careers if Johnny-citizen does what he’s told and gets rid of the perfectly good carbon-based family car in favour of one of these electric laddies. They are willing to bribe Johnny-citizen with his own money to do so in fact and a whole pile of us will inevitably fall for it. When the great weight of diesel/petrol cars begins to shift in an electric direction, buy prices will shoot up because of demand. Values for diesel/petrol cars will plummet and where do you trade one in anyway? But as this move begins to take effect, we are supposed to have a dual outcome.

Firstly, our carbon emissions are supposed to fall, right? But second, the cash cow of carbon-based fuel excise will also fall. But then again, demand for electricity must inevitably rise also. However, the Department of Finance can currently rely on fuel excise duties. Take those away and they’ll panic. There is almost bound to be an, I don’t know, an “Electron Consumption Tax,” (ECT), introduced on the basis, I suppose, of the user-pays principle and charged per electron also. After all, you consumed that plate of electricity, you pay for it, right? Maybe because the electric car is so quiet, which means you won’t hear the damn thing coming, perhaps they’ll have a, “Dangerous Silence Tax,” or something. Certainly batteries are problematic to dispose of and I can see a huge fine, ahem, tax, for even owning one of these dangerous polluting devices, especially since you will probably have twelve of them in your electric machine to spark it into life. Then there are emissions and the whole car tax regime at present. Your shiny new electric jalopy will emit shag-all so what tax bracket is that? Do you seriously believe it’s zero? Who’ll pay for Irish Water?

And the irony of all of it is that we still mostly generate electricity in this country through the burning of fossil fuels.

Gas, isn’t it?

SENSELESS WASTE

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Some time ago, I had reason to stay overnight in Malahide, North Dublin City. The drive into town the next morning took about an hour, a distance of fifteen kilometers.

But the bus from Malahide to the city takes 30 minutes. This is because of the provision of a bus lane on this wide three-laned road, (either way), and it runs for almost the full length of the journey. Sitting stationary in your car in one of the other two jammed up lanes, you watch jealously as yet another double-decker whizzes by and disappears off into the distance. Big wide multi-lane roads lend themselves to bus lanes and they are a fabulous idea there.

On the other hand, the distance from my home in Mayfield to Cork City Centre is five kilometers. For most of it, it is barely a single lane in either direction. In one part of it, cars are allowed to park down one side which leaves a single lane road for use in both directions. However, there is one stretch of that road that widens for approximately point-four of a kilometer, about long enough for a bus to find third gear. You guessed it, they made that one tiny part a shagging bus lane!!!

Even in that point-four of a kilometer of wide road, there are two bus stops. The bus lane does not even cut a single second from the bus journey time to the city. How is this remotely possible that public money is shelled out on a venture that makes no sense before you even begin? It is not as if there could have been much doubt about the outcome even before the surveyors arrived. This pathetically short bus lane was never going to achieve the objective for which it was designed. It could not possibly shorten journey times for its bus passengers. It was a waste of taxpayer’s money, pure and simple.

But what it did do was to confuse the fuck out of us motorists. Where once the white line used to run down the centre of the road, now on the journey into town, oncoming traffic had nowhere to go but across that white line and into your face. They actually took one half of the wide section of road for a sole bus and the other half was split between outgoing and incoming traffic AND the parked cars. It is positively dangerous and a helluva challenge if you’ve never driven up here before.

Of course, you will never find out how much this unnecessary and dangerous mistake cost the taxpayer to put in place. When you factor in the professional fees involved, the work teams and equipment to paint the lines, the signage that was erected and cemented into the footpaths and the hours of administrative sweat it cost, you are probably looking at a quarter of a million quid and all of that to achieve no positive outcome. What absolutely gormless twit in Cork Corporation was behind this wasteful stupidity? Well, you’ll never find that out either. Bureaucracy doesn’t do transparency, it talks about it instead. Bureaucracy doesn’t do accountability either, lest the whole shower of them end up out of a job and forever unemployable.

I often think about this when “Book of estimates” time rolls around and the City Fathers are obliged to make public what they need from us money-wise to run the place next year. I have no doubt that, ‘Mayfield bus-lane style mistakes,’ are made all over the city every year, possibly running to millions of wasted euros annually. There is that other elephant in the room as well and that is, if you didn’t spend all of last year’s budget, then next year’s goes DOWN by that amount. Imagine that. If you saved the taxpayer money last year you’ll be penalized for it next year. Maybe that’s why Mayfield got its shiny new bus lane one year. Unspent budget money lying around threatening the gravy train due after Christmas.

Don’t laugh though because that is the incredible reality of public service in Ireland today.