Really Bertie? Really?

lucozader wrote: »

hopefully Bertie and his culture of lying, brown envelopes,waffling, blind obedience to FF cronies no matter how corrupt and backhanders are gone forever.

This is exceedingly unlikely. For starters, when it appeared that Fianna Fáil was finished in office, Fine Gael rolled back very quickly from its ban on corporate donations. Earlier this year, the Irish public was treated to a Fine Gael fundraiser where Fine Gael expressly refused to name the people who "donated" money to the Fine Gael party. What is Fine Gael afraid of?

Fine Gael is now trying to amass a war chest by securing as much money as possible from as many donors as possible. And it appears it's not keen at all upon naming those businesses and people who do donate to the Fine Gael party.

Given the donations made to the Fine Gael party from one Denis O'Brien (paid, revealingly, from a Norwegian company at a Fine Gael fundraiser in New York and undeclared by the Fine Gael party - fuller story here) when it was last in government and charged with granting a mobile phone license, which O'Brien ultimately received, why should any rational person be surprised that Fine Gael is absolutely no different to Fianna Fáil when it comes to being bought off by business people and anybody else who wants a stroke pulled?

Oh, and watch this referendum to abolish the Seanad which has still not happened despite another Fine Gael promise - what are the odds that Fine Gael will call it when its popularity level is at its lowest so that people will reject it and the politicians can continue having Seanadh Éireann as a jobs for the boys/girls club and as a massive source of Fine Gael party funds (for every Seanad member a party has it receives additional funding)?

Fine Gael: the new Fianna Fáil

The media has of course been utterly negligent. The media does, of course, need to be investigated for its lack of questioning of powerful figures and its slavish promotion, for short-term self-interests, of the property boom. Its almost collective suppression of dissenting voices on the economy when it was clear to many that what we were having was a massive bubble is an enormous indictment of the lack of contribution the media makes to improving our society. How many journalists offered an alternative voice? George Lee and who else? The overwhelming majority of journalists and their "economic experts" (Austin Hughes, Jim Power, Pat McArdle...) all promoted this nonsense that the Irish economy would have a "soft landing". Dissenting voices were rarely printed. :mad:

Irish journalists now are much more concerned with commenting on society, than investigating wrongs committed against society. The media is full of mouthpieces and shitehawks, with public interest investigative journalists of the calibre of Carl O'Brien being the exception.

Journalists being bought off by a wide range of powerful parties, interests and organisations has long denuded the overwhelming number of journalists the right to claim moral superiority over other sections of society. Yet they incessantly bleat that "freedom of speech" mantra, and some in the public gallery support them. They are as much interested in "freedom of speech" as the barristers on €6000 per day are interested in "justice and fair play". The fact that public interest investigative journalism is all but dead in Ireland is the biggest testimony of all to the abject failure that is the Irish journalistic profession in 2011. That it was a newspaper, the Sunday Independent, which was central in driving the Chuck Feeney-funded Centre for Public Inquiry from Ireland says enough about the established Irish media's dislike and fear of public interest investigative journalism.


Having said all of that, Bertie Ahern is among the last people in western Europe in a position to tell us the bleeding obvious about the Irish media. The man is a crook by any rational standard. A snake and a slithery bastard in a league of his own with his numerous pensions, the money he apparently "won on the races" and the (at least one) house gifted to him by a property developer. In his own right alone, justice demands that that individual be tried and inevitably imprisoned for many years.

/end rant.

he really is coming out with some 24 carat ****e these days,
made me a bit sick when I read what he said.