GODFREY’S GOSPELAccording to Michael Godfrey
IF IN DOUBT leave it out. That appears to have been the message from the people regarding the change to the constitution, which would have given more powers of enquiry to the houses of the Oireachtas.
Isn’t it a pity the same philosophy isn’t adopted by our politicians when it comes to paying back our European colleagues?
For weeks, we were all being made aware of the fact that Greece was about to fail in its loan commitments to European banks. The very future of the euro was brought into question. It was all a matter of how Greece could be saved, preventing Italy and Spain heading the same way as Ireland and stop the bond holders bringing the world economy into another recession.
In the end, the Greeks achieved a 50% write off, and a huge pot of gold set aside to fight any other difficulty which might arise. And all the time we are told by the Euro mandrins how great we are because of the hairshirt lifestyle some of us have adopted and our willingness to pay back untold millions to bond holders, which was run up by our reckless banks.
While patients continue to wait on trolleys, special needs assistants’ hours are cut to the bone, and the mother of all severe budgets is about to be landed on us, our government takes pride in telling us how great we are because we can write a cheque for one billion euro to pay back some of the money to unsecured bond holders - something they said would not happen less than a year ago when contesting the general election.
True, individual government ministers don’t appear to be putting their big feet in it as often as the former administration but, the longer they are in power, the more familiar they appear.
Recently, our justice minister had the neck to say that eight previous attorneys general were all wrong when it came to the constitutional referendum - not one, but all eight of them! He and others in government obviously thought that we were all so sickened by the huge fees paid to barristers and solicitors in the past that we would believe anything we were told.
But those days are gone. Finance minister Michael Noonan now says we have to pay the bond holders no matter what, even though he was totally against such an idea before he took office. Health minister James Reilly was forever on former minister Mary Harney’s case for wasting money, running up huge bills for trips abroad and so forth, but now it seems as though he is also getting a taste for the good life - if his recent trip to China is anything to go by.
There may be an upturn in exports and we may be slowly working our way out of trouble but, in truth, I doubt if our politicians can take credit for that. Instead, praise goes to those who are trying to live on social welfare payments (which are now in danger of being cut even more), the elderly, workers going that extra bit to help their employers, and companies who have struggled to stay in business, with little or no help from the very banks they helped to bail out.
There has been an awful lot of talk since last February, but very little action. All our politicians seem capable of doing is blaming each other. On the one hand, you have Fine Gael and Labour blaming their predecessors for leaving this country in a mess, with Fianna Fail retorting about their failure to deliver on preelection promises. All the while, money flows out of government coffers to refinance the banks or pay bond holders. Ask them is there any way they can come up with a solution to pay hard-pressed householders and they will tell you sorry, no.
They should wake up and smell the coffee. Fine Gael did atrociously in the presidential election and, but for a gaffe by Sean Gallagher and a helping hand from Sinn Fein, Michael D - as good and all as he will be as our next president - would have also lost out.
As the referendum showed, the voter no longer accepts without question what comes out of the mouths of our politicians. And they can easily be voted out of office.