Hooray! At last some good news.The PDs wound themselves up tonight, after winding up the rest of us for years. Obviously they couldn't face the hammering they were going to get next year in the locals.Good feckin riddance to some seriously toxic rubbish.What a rogue's gallery of chancers, gombeens, blusterers, pocketliners and ne'er-do-wells. I don't know how they ever had the audacity to pitch themselves as Fianna Fail's mudguard when they were the most damaging gombeen opportunists of all.I note they leave just as the economic meltdown they helped create gets properly underway.Chickenshit bastards that they are, they won't even try cleaning up the mess they made.Can we now, pretty, pretty please, kick that lump Harney out of health before there are no public hospitals left, and...
History will not record that Louth Fianna Fail councillor Tommy Murphy dealt Bertie the first cut.Nor will history record that Progressive Democrat senator and leader candidate Fiona O'Malley dealt Bertie that first cut.Despite the belated scramble by the abject Green Party leader, Minister for Environment John Gormley to slide a knife into Ahern, history will not record that he dealt the Taoiseach the first blow.No, the first of the thousand cuts that kill Bertie's Taoiseachship came from Minister for Health, Mary Harney.Let me be clear. I do not like Mary Harney or her policies in the Department of Health. She has presided, literally, over a repudiation of responsibility that verges on criminal and has undoubtedly contributed to circumstances in the Irish health service which have cost...
After years of fulminating against the Irish health service, I finally put my money where my mouth is.For a long time, I have headed across the border to the North anytime I needed a check up, some primary care, or some minor emergency treatment. Who wouldn't, given the opportunity, since the British NHS is actually free? No fifty quid to see a doc, no fifty quid to get into A+E. Free to those who need it.Not to mention shorter A+E queues, cleaner hospitals, more English-speaking staff, fewer flesh-eating bugs, etc, etc.But I have needed a small operation on my toe for some years now. It wasn't the sort of thing you would get done quickly in the Irish health service, as I wasn't actually bleeding to death and don't have a VHI Plan E insurance card.But increasingly, it was impeding my...
But I'm proud of Baby Ian. Not because he's been diddling the taxpayer over his office expenses (150 seater office, Ian? WTF?) or because he was blatantly lobbying to privatise the Giant's Causeway into the hands of his pal, private developer Seymour Sweeney.Nope. I'm proud of Ian Junior because he has singlehandedly resurrected a political practice I feared had been abandoned forever on the island of Ireland. That of resigning when you've been caught doing wrong.Okay, he hasn't (and won't) admit he's done wrong. And he only resigned to protect his da, who also has a series of hard office-related questions to answer.But it is entirely refreshing to see an Irish politician having the relative decency of falling on their sword when caught out.I do hope the denizens of Leinster House will...
It's a little shocking to my ears, having spent my childhood in the bosom of the British NHS, to listen to how Americans are responding to Hilary Clinton's plan for universal health entitlements.She's been roundly lambasted by the Republicans for her 'Hilaryaid' proposals, which sound nothing more than the mildest, weakest version of what most Western Europeans would consider a fundamental human right.While Barack continues to witter pointlessly about bringing 'change', without ever specifying what change he's bringing (loose change, perhaps?), at least La Clinton has put an actual concrete proposal on the table for discussion.And to me, that discussion has been frightening.If you were to listen to Mitt Romney or Huckabee, you'd think that she was proposing Communist totalitarianism. The...
Of course, Mary Harney should quit as Minister for Health with immediate effect. Her performance in the role has been little short of diabolical.But it is worth recalling, as 97 more women fret about their cancer results, that there is a concept often cited by our Teflon Taoiseach known as collective cabinet responsibility.They're all responsible for this mess we call a health service. All of them. Some of them are particularly responsible. Some of them, you could say, are more responsible than others.On this list from the Department of Health, you can see that the two front runners to replace Bertie Ahern as Fianna Fail leader (and de facto Taoiseach of the nation) are BOTH former health ministers.It is worth remembering how Micheal Martin, as health minister, commissioned over 200...
Gwen loves life by the shore. Whether its her lakeside apartment, or the harbour views from her second home in England, or indeed the clifftop Italian hotels, five star naturally, in which she likes to holiday, Gwen loves to have water nearby.I'd love to post a picture of Gwen Baker in one of her spectacular Venetian masks or swanning around in a stunning Mediterranean villa, so you could truly appreciate just how much she enjoys her life.I'm not allowed to, though. I'd link to some pics of Gwen, but she's taken them all down off the web. She's taken down her CV too. This is also a pity, because if it were online I could link to it and then you could see for yourself why she and her fantabulous lifestyle should be of interest to every taxpayer in Ireland.Gwen, an American lady of a...
The Green Party were once thought to be too 'flakey' for government. Their insistence on principled stands on issues that mattered to them meant that prior to the rainbow government, no one would consider them as coalition partners.They ran in the recent election on a series of principled stands, and their leader vowed not to enter government with Fianna Fail after the election.As a result, they garnered many votes from Fine Gael and Labour voters who were intent on seeing Fianna Fail removed from office.But after ten days of negotiations, during which they were mightily screwed by the Fianna Fail negotiating team, the Greens settled to go into government with them.What's worse is that they sold out every one of their principled stands in order to gain access to government. What's worse...
Let's pass, for a moment, on the fact that I was watching the 'Late, Late Show' on a Friday night. I shouldn't have been, and I'm truly sorry. I am deeply penitent and can promise you that it will never happen again.Especially after tonight's episode of 'Pat the Plank Patronises the Plebs' transpired to be a Eurovision special.Yup, an entire two hours (that felt like two years) devoted to deciding what musical suicide note was going to be this year's official Irish entry to the continent's campest competition.(Sorry, Alternative Miss Ireland, but your contestants look like a load of marines on the march compared to the rarefied campness of the Eurovision Song Contest.)So, firstly some obscure trad band from Sligo who tend to sing in Irish had been appointed as this year's sacrificial...
In
pat kenny,
late late show,
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athens,
girls aloud,
john waters,
camp,
song contest,
Eurovision,
mary harney
Mary Harney, Europe's least healthy looking health minister, has really done it this time.Not content with presiding over the further erosion of the Irish health system and selling off what bits she can to her developer pals, she must now watch in free marketeer horror as BUPA pulls out of Ireland today.That's 300 jobs down the Swanee, half a million punters without health insurance and a big load of egg on the Minister's face, given her espousal of competition in the marketplace.Thanks to a bonkers ruling in court the other week that BUPA should give a million quid a week to the dominant force in the marketplace VHI, this result was inevitable. Expect Vivas to follow shortly.This health minister is a liability. Can someone please put her out to pasture......