Isn’t it amazing how the absence of just one word appears to have landed taoiseach Enda Kenny in the proverbial?
Also wouldn’t you think that the longest-serving TD in the country would have known that every word he would say at an international conference would be carried back home, especially when it was dealing with the state of our economy. It just goes to show that everyone can make a mistake and, at times, people say something without meaning to insult an entire nation.
To be fair to the man, I imagine he really meant to add the word ‘some’ into the dreaded sentence. After all, he has always maintained that it was a small section of society which landed us in the dreadful mess in which we now find ourselves.
Roll on the weekend and with the help of his party colleagues the amount of anger being expressed had begun to die down.
While the general public was not responsible for the madness of the property boom, it could be said that we all probably spent a little more than we should.
That could have been by simply dining out once or twice a month, buying an overly-expensive present for someone, taking that extra week’s holiday or the odd weekend away ... nothing mad, but when all things were considered, maybe just a few things were really outside of our budget.
Collectively, it all adds up and now, as a nation, we are broke.
However, the thought of having to pay back €3 billion a year to cover the debt of Anglo is something which has every one of us up in arms, and what really got people annoyed with Mr Kenny last week.
It has been extremely painful to come up with that amount of money in savings over the past two years and it will get even more painful before it gets better.
That is what is frightening the living daylights out of people.
They see the public service falling apart because of a lack of resources; they see young people leaving the country in their thousands; and they fear that one day they will be that elderly person living alone who will have to do without home help.
This recession has been going on for more than three years now and all we hear is how much more still has to be done.
It reminds me of the slogan once used by Fianna Fáil A lot done – more to do some years ago.
God help us if the more to do part is really about cutting, cutting and cutting.
If they take out much more, there will be very little left for anyone. Certainly, there won’t be anything to drive people on to invest in this economy and create much-needed jobs, which is really the only answer to the problem.
On the subject of jobs, it really must be a disincentive for someone on social welfare to be offered a position on a FÁS training course only to find themselves €15 better off.
I know there has been a lot of talk about putting the talents of those on social welfare to better use, but surely we should not insult them either. FÁS has come in for a lot of criticism in the past – most of it wrongly, in my view – but to try and save in excess of €300 million by demeaning the programmes they are trying to operate is not the answer to the problem.
Every organisation will have problems. FÁS had a problem at the top of its command structure, which gave the entire operation a bad reputation, but I think everyone would agree that some tremendous programmes are run by that organisation.
In the past, many towns and villages had very worthwhile programmes carried out, which were funded by FÁS. The same can happen again, but if people believe they are being exploited, can you really blame them if they choose to opt out?