Politicians live in a parallel universe that is inexorably drifting away from the reality that the rest of us know. In their universe it is, apparently, acceptable to make promises that they do not intend to keep, for that is the implication of the quote above. I accept that circumstances may change and plans may have to be altered in response to them, but this politician was not prepared to say so. Perhaps this was from a simple fear that an unhelpful soundbite may result. So why did he have to say anything?

I’ve deliberately not named the politician responsible for this quote, or even the party concerned, because it seems to me that most (if not all) politicians, from all parties, exhibit this behaviour. Their media appearances are tightly focussed on saying what they want to say, regardless of the question posed, with the use of potential soundbites to the fore. Interviewers, meanwhile, are mainly concerned with tripping up the interviewee. So it becomes a battle of semantics, of word play.

The end result, for me at least, is that no real information is imparted and little or no respect earned. Is it any wonder that there is a universal lack of trust in the political classes?

As I understand it, President Obama wants to make it possible for everyone to receive medical care regardless of their means. A noble ideal, but someone still has to pay for it. In other words, taxes. This has caused a bit of a ruckus in the US, with the loud voices at either end of the political spectrum grabbing the headlines: down with taxes/don’t kill my baby; you know the sort of thing. Naturally there are also the (somewhat more subtle) corporates, lobbyists, pressure groups and so on, feeding money and (mis)information to those doing the shouting.

Daring Fireball has a couple of amusing (kind of) anecdotes:

From an Investor’s Business Daily editorial ¹ arguing against the current U.S. health care reform proposals:

“The U.K.’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) basically figures out who deserves treatment by using a cost-utility analysis based on the “quality adjusted life year.” One year in perfect health gets you one point. Deductions are taken for blindness, for being in a wheelchair and so on. The more points you have, the more your life is considered worth saving, and the likelier you are to get care.”

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

Stephen Hawking was born and has lived his entire life in the U.K.

and

Anti-health-care-reform activist, reportedly injured in a fight at a town hall meeting last week, is collecting donations to pay his medical bills because he was recently laid off and lost his health insurance. [more]

I read both of these with a sense of wonder and despair. The inaccuracy and hypocrisy shown is astonishing and made me wonder if many US citizens are taken in by this stuff. I suppose there must be quite a few, or it wouldn’t be worth publishing. And yes, I have seen Fox News.

Society, community, nation: surely these terms imply some kind of structure of care, of support for those who (hopefully temporarily) cannot support themselves? It would be easy to believe that those who have the resources are simply unwilling to share and that the flip side of ‘land of opportunity’ is ‘tough luck if you don’t succeed’. Systems such as those in Britain and Ireland may be far from perfect but they at least attempt to be humane.

I started to think about The American Ideal (or my understanding of it); how it has been corrupted and where, ultimately, it will take the USA. Immediately my mind conjured up images of anarchy; a sort of ‘Mad Max’ post-apocalyptic scenario where it’s every person for themselves and the only law comes from the barrel of a gun.

I can only hope I am very wrong, and as I said I am only seeing this through the eyes of the media.

1. since edited, removing refernces to Stephen Hawking ↑

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.

According to a report in the Mayo News, councillors disagreed about a proposal to honour the brothers, whose mother is from Charlestown, with a Civic reception. Despite the objections, the Council agreed to invite the brothers to an event in the east Mayo town which, according to one councillor, would be “claiming these sons of emigrants back.”

It is not known if Liam & Noel would be interested in such an event.

Seems a bit presumptuous to me; just because someone is part Irish it is assumed that they would want to be ‘claimed back.’

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.

The irregularities have come to light as part of the ongoing Tribunal of Inquiry into (primarily) planning corruption in Dublin. This Tribunal was, ironically, set up by ‘The Bert’ himself in 1997 when either he must have believed his unofficial nickname, ‘The Teflon Taoiseach’ or he never thought it would get as far as investigating him. Basically a lot of money has been discovered in Bertie’s pockets, safes, bank accounts and so on and our man is unable to give satisfactory explanations of where the money came from.

Bertie has, bit by bit, been telling us that the money came from a combination of his salary, gifts and loans from friends when he’s been a bit short, and political donations. His story seems to be full of holes; kind of surprising for an accountant. Google him, or the Mahon Tribunal, and you’ll find reams of information about it so I won’t go into the details. Suffice to say that it all looks pretty suspicious to me. And to the press. And to the Revenue Commissioners. In fact, no-one believes him. He will not last long, though he seems determined to prolong his own agony.

My point in writing about this is that even his most vocal friends, who also appear not to believe him, now seem to be trotting out the argument that it’s not just Bertie who is corrupt, but in fact everyone is corrupt and so why should we pick on our poor leader? It’s not right to single him out when any of us, in his position, would have done the same. It’s just so unfair that the press and opposition parties are hounding him, insisting that his affairs should be transparent, black and white.

So there you have it. We should not expect our most senior politician to be honest. It’s fine for him to be ‘on the take’ just like everyone else in this great little country.

I was brought up to believe that just because your friend puts his hand in the fire doesn’t mean you should too. Does this not equally apply to the cookie jar? If some fella robs a bank, should we all go out and rob one too?

What kind of lesson are we teaching the young (and not so young) if we adopt this kind of attitude? What hope is there for society and the rule of law? If this is how it will be then perhaps we should welcome global warming and the destruction of the human race!