The report, a massive work that has taken nine years to compile, documents the enormous scale of the abuses – every type imaginable – inflicted on both boys and girls by the, supposedly Christian, people responsible for their education and welfare. It documents the awareness of the abuses, some might say collusion, of both the Irish State and the Catholic Church. What the report does not document, thanks to a High Court ruling in 2004, is the names of the guilty parties.

Much has been written and broadcast about the report, by people far more qualified to comment than I am. Indeed, the abuses are not really news. These appalling abuses have been widely recognised for some considerable time, but the report brings together many of the stories of the victims and highlights the scale of the tragedy. It is important for all of us to be aware of what happened, in the hope that a blind eye is never again turned towards such dreadful crimes.

Read more about the abuses committed by the Catholic Church in Ireland by clicking this link.

Now that it’s all ‘official’ (rather than just decided?) I suppose we can all comment on it. The newspapers are, briefly, full of smiley, posey pictures; all the politicians and aspiring politicians crawl out of the slime to either congratulate the government on another brilliant scheme or berate them for wasting money on another half-baked idea.

As far as the national picture is concerned, looking at the positives, it’s great that the government is prepared to step in and fund the provision of broadband for everybody. On the negative side, the government have surely set the bar too low, in that: less than 2MB cannot really be considered broadband in the 21st century (forget the moans about bandwidth reducing when there are lots of users – all broadband is contended); the target of ‘covering the whole country’ is imprecise – in the UK they are specifying the supply of broadband ‘to every household’, which is quite different.

To illustrate the second criticism, consider Achill. The island, as far as the NBS is concerned, is split into two parts: one is on the ‘planned’ list, the other is on the ‘not included’ list. Why does one part of the island miss out? Well, there is already a 3 mast which, notionally, covers this part of the island. The reality, as anyone with the slightest experience of cellphone signals will realise, is that in some spots there is a great signal but move around the corner and there is none. Achill is not flat; hills get in the way, leaving ‘shadows’ where there is no signal. Then there are walls: most broadband users do not want to sit in the garden surfing the net, at least not in Ireland. So again, some houses and offices are fine, others get nothing. There is no reason to believe that the ‘planned’ part of Achill will fare any better.

Achill is not a special case: this picture will be repeated all over the country. Hence to say that the whole country will be covered by broadband, one way or another, is meaningless. You’ll find the usual ‘haves and have-nots’ thing between wired and wireless areas, and between good and bad signal areas. Let’s not pretend, either, that the proposed satellite coverage for areas where a cellular signal is impractical is the answer. As a satellite ‘broadband’ user for several years, I can attest to the deeply unsatisfactory nature of this ‘solution’.

I have no doubt that, if I am one of the lucky ones, I will appreciate the improvements of cellular broadband over satellite broadband, but I will continue to look with envy at those a few miles up the road with their DSL lines.

If a person is elected to our national parliament as an independent candidate, i.e. not affiliated to any particular political party, it seems that they can claim and extra €41k a year on top of the €100k+ salary and expenses (which can, for TDs in more remote constituencies – like Mayo I assume, amount to a further €100k or so). This extra money is supposed to compensate for the fact that they are not backed by a ‘party machine’ and hence incur extra expenses.

So a TD could receive as much as €250k per year – that’s a quarter of a million euros of taxpayers money. Now hold on, I musn’t get side tracked here, the point of this post is not about the ridiculously large salaries these people are paid – even more if you get to be a minister of course – and the absurdly generous pension arrangements. No, this is about that ‘independent’s bonus’.

Let’s just throw in a bit of abbreviated background here, regarding Ms. Flynn. She used to work in a bank. According to a report on RTÉ, the state broadcaster, in the course of her work at the bank she would encourage people to evade tax. That’s evade, not avoid. It’s illegal. Well, she denied it of course and sued RTÉ for libel. She lost. Costs were awarded against her, to the tune of €2.4 million, she was thrown out of Fianna Fáil, her party, and became an independent. She was still an independent when she was re-elected in 2007 and so gets the little bonus. However, in 2008 she was allowed to rejoin the Fianna Fáil party because by then she had settled with RTÉ (by paying half the money she owed) but she continued to claim her independent’s bonus, which she’s entitled to do until the next election, apparently.

She reckons there’s nothing wrong with this and anyway the money is used for the benefit of her constituents.

As you can imagine, this has caused a bit of a stink. With the global financial crisis, the banks losing all our money, the economy in recession, businesses closing down, people losing their jobs and the government building up a debt of biblical proportions, you can see why some people might have a problem with Ms. Flynn claiming a bonus to which, morally at least, she is clearly not entitled. It’s OK though, the Taoiseach (prime minister, leader of the goverment) has had a word with her and she’s decided not to continue claiming the money after all. And she’s very upset at all the horrid things that people have been saying about her in recent days.

For the sake of fairness, I should point out that she is not the only TD accused of this sort of behaviour, so that’s all right then.

When will politicians learn? Will they ever learn? Or do they, if fact, know exactly what they are doing and just hope they can get away with it for long enough to feather the nest with exquisite Hungarian goose down? After all, corruption, fraud and generally dodgy behavior is hardly unknown in the world of politics. Our previous Taoiseach, the great Bertie Ahern, resigned because the questions about where he got his money were becoming a bit difficult to answer. [Interestingly, these questions were posed by a 'Tribunal of Inquiry' set up by the Bert to look into corruption in public life. Talk about 'hoisted by his own petard'.] The late Charles Haughey, another former Taoiseach, was really quite bent. Every country has similar exemplars. It would be very easy to wonder if there are any honest politicians, or is that an oxymoron?

Perhaps the real question is why, oh why, oh why, do we keep voting for these individuals? Maybe it’s because there isn’t any real choice.