Berserker wrote: » Well, people on SW are getting an Xmas bonus for doing nothing.
Little CuChulainn wrote: » You should have seen Coolock. The protestors had the bright idea of blocking the Irish Water vehicles from leaving an estate. Irish Water guys just locked up the vehicles and left. Queue a load of protestors complaining about not being able to get their vehicles out of the estate because the IW vehicles were blocking the exit after being abandoned.
Will Saturday's water rally be the day when sitting ducks who forked out for austerity finally stand up to be counted? Will Saturday's water rally be the day when sitting ducks who forked out for austerity finally stand up to be counted? Protesters march on the streets of Dublin during a demonstration against water charges. Photo: PA John Waters29 October 2014 02:30 AM I think people are becoming dimly aware that, once water charges kick in, we'll all be back there in everything to do with water, although I don't think most people are as yet conscious of what an existential change this is going to be. Most of us - apart from those who have so much money that none of this stuff matters - will be on high alert every time we turn a tap, fill a kettle or hear water flowing. So, 50 years later, after all the talk of modernity and progress, we're back where we were when I were a lad. Here's a couple of catchy election slogans: 'Forward to the past, with Enda the Waterboy'; 'Let them drink Perrier!' And this courtesy of a Taoiseach who looked me in the eye in the House Hotel in Spanish Arch, Galway City, on a very rainy Saturday afternoon in February 2011 and assured me that he'd stand up for his people in Europe. This is the same Enda Kenny who, when he declined to participate in a televised leaders' debate during that election, was able to get away with declaring that the empty chair in the studio would symbolise the people who'd had to emigrate from Ireland in the previous two years. We believed in his sincerity because we wanted to, or because we couldn't bear to face the fact that our choices were so stark. We trusted him because he was, we believed, a 'nice guy'. But Enda has used his nice, hale-fellow persona as a cover for sticking the boot ever harder and deeper into the groin of his own people, exploiting the generalised sense of human powerlessness to execute the bidding of our enslavers in Europe, allowing the working people of this country to be robbed repeatedly to make Ireland the best small county in the world for globe-trotting tax-avoiders to do business in. The damage of these past 43 months will be felt for a long time. I don't mean just economic damage, but the deep psychic harm inflicted on regular working people, who, because they were sitting ducks, had to sit and take it. I'm talking about the type of thing I came across in Roscrea a couple of months ago, when I went to cover public protests that followed a summer outbreak of youth suicides arising from the creepy activities of drug-pushers. One of the things I stumbled upon was the way teenagers in the town had seemed to pick up the despair of their parents - as though literally across the breakfast table - and thus became reduced in their resistance to the drug vultures. This is the true cost of what is euphemistically called "austerity", that weasel word that sucks the life out of people because it suggests that their suffering is somehow natural and unavoidable. Still, I really think we would have gone on taking it, had they not sought to push their luck. Strangled with direct taxes, the USC scam, the PRSI rip-off, the great pension swindle and the roof-over-your-head fiddle, we might have sat there another while had they not taken us for total schmucks. Petrified in fear of the knock of one of our newly jackbooted sheriffs at the front door, we might have maintained our bewildered silence had they not hit on what they must have thought was the greatest scam of the lot. The introduction of water charges was the bridge too far. The Taoiseach advising us how to manipulate the brass while brushing our teeth was totally taking the p**s. There's something about water - maybe some lingering memory of the water hitting our heads in baptism. Maybe, in spite of the combined efforts of a tarnished church leadership and a cynical secular elite, there's still some remnant of religion left. Or maybe it has simply to do with the fact that two-thirds of the average human body is water. Maybe it was the idea that, to appease our masters in Berlin and Brussels, we are finally being charged for being made of the stuff we're made of. Water is not a "utility" - it's the essence of life itself. In the coming century, it will become what oil was to the century just past - one of the reasons the Government is so anxious to hive it off to its cronies before the sitting ducks begin to stir themselves. In the Sunday Independent this week, no less a personage than Bono sprung to the aid of the beleaguered Taoiseach, telling us what a fine fellow Enda is on account of saving Ireland from the lashing economic rain. He also applauded the Labour Party, saying the poor dears hadn't been given enough credit for "pulling the country out of recession". Asked if he worried that Labour would be in trouble in the next election, he said: "I don't know, but I fear that people might not understand just what an Armageddon we were facing, and how these two parties did very well." Methinks the Irish people are beginning to understand things only too well. I have in the past defended U2's right to manage their tax affairs to maximize profitability, but I cannot defend their right to talk scutter. The previous Sunday, in an interview with the Observer, Bono said that Ireland's tax policies have "brought our country the only prosperity we've known", allowing Ireland to benefit from more hospitals and firemen and teachers. "We don't have natural resources," he told the British public, "[so] we have to be able to attract people." Actually, we have resources coming out of our ears - it's just that our political leaders have this tendency to give them away for nothing to mutinational fly-by-nighters who throw us a few ould jobs to keep us quiet. And one of these resources is, yes, water, which Bono's new-found friend Enda wants to give away for a song. In the West of Ireland, where both Enda and I come from, it rains roughly three days out of five. Dublin, it's true, is blessed with just half that number of wet days. Maybe Bono needs to get out a little more. It was noticeable that, over the past six years of the so-called "economic crisis", alcohol was virtually the only thing Irish politicians did not encumber with taxation. It suited their game to buy off public disquiet with cheap booze that anaesthetised the population and kept them stupefied. But now they're proposing to tax the cup of tea people take with their dry toast of a morning, it's time for the sitting ducks to sober up and be counted. This Saturday, I confidently expect, will be a turning point, when the Irish people, in their diffident and slightly apologetic way, will finally rise up and say: "Enough!" Disquiet about the imposition of water charges and the plain-sight iniquity of Irish Water has for some time been gathering steam. But, even yet, the political establishment has not awoken to the smell of free Irish Rosie. Indentured and toothless, the Irish people have for some time now allowed themselves to be bullied into silence by journalistic cliches like "the water doesn't get to your house for free". We know in our desiccated guts that this is a leaky lie, that we already pay taxes for public services which include the provision of piped water. The only thing we really need to understand about the privatisation of Irish water is that our political slave-whippers know they have exhausted the limits of conventional taxation and seek another way of sucking us dry. Round figures, the 50pc of working people's income currently being grabbed by the Government is distributed more or less equally between (1) paying debts accumulated because our elected government undemocratically paid out on losing bets placed by grown-up speculators on Irish economic fortunes; (2) propping up an unsustainable social welfare system designed to maintain the grateful constituencies of cynical politicians posing as philanthropists, and (3) sustaining the grotesque and bloated bureaucracy otherwise known as "the State". When the Troika arrived, some of us nurtured delicate hopes that that unholy trinity might persuade our politicians to tackle these national abominations; instead, it appears, they proposed scraping a few more grammes of flesh from the bones of those who'd been paying for everything all along, and Enda, after a brief scuffle with his conscience, said "Fine!". Irish Water is an elaborate charade to camouflage the act of another pocket being dipped in the sitting duck's only suit of clothes. The meters are part of this charade - a grotesquely expensive initiative to give a patina of legitimacy to a new phase in the robbing of working Irish people. The scary truth is that our political class is now so craven and so desperate that nothing scraped together or squirrelled away by any citizen who actually earned his wealth is safe from governmental grasping. But Saturday, rain or shine, looks like it might be a good day for sitting ducks. Quack, quack, my friends. Quackety-quack.
Satriale wrote: » Roll on Saturday, you cant come quick enough.
yipeeeee wrote: » Why do people think ends and co want to take our money and see us unhappy? There has to be a reason, do they hate us and want to see us suffer? Do people think they enjoy us all hating them so much.
VinLieger wrote: » Also note these are same union's behind the right to water group, they are literally playing both side's against the middle
cajonlardo wrote: » I'm calling you on this.. Where exactly in Coolock and when? If they'd blocked me I'd move their vehicle myself and I don't know anyone else who wouldn't. I'm in Coolock a lot and was paying attention to the protests but can't remember anything like this happening. I did see I.W vans blocking the footpath in Bray on the approach to a 3 schools and forcing all the Kids to walk into traffic on the main road. I have also seen them drive an unregistered vehicle down a footpath across a Bike lane and directly at children cycling on the lane. The poor kids panicked and rode onto the road in front of a lorry. Strange to say, the Gardai had no problem with their lawbreaking and no problem with several of their vehicles being driven on public roads without tax and insurance displayed. Who is going to employ thm when the contract expires? Great C.V there Charlie - Oh, you worked installing meters. Next....
StarshipPooper wrote: » I saw an Irish Water van kick a puppy once.
Joshua J wrote: » They don't care if you're happy or not. They don't care if you suffer or not. They don't care if you hate them. Understand?.
yipeeeee wrote: » So why are they doing it? Is it that they are doing their job and are willing to be hated if it helps the country in the long run.
eeepaulo wrote: » Is it that they are CREATING their job
Joshua J wrote: » I don't know if you're messing or not. Are you being serious?. Do you believe that big Phil, Enda et al really care about the country and are being martyrs for our sins?.
yipeeeee wrote: » Well tell me why you think they want us to suffer?
Joshua J wrote: » They don't want us to suffer, per se, but suffering is a by-product of what they want. Understand?.
yipeeeee wrote: » Well what is it they want? To do a job they were given?
Creative Juices wrote: » Where do I find information on the Galway protest?
Joshua J wrote: » You've got some thinking to do bud. Be good.
yipeeeee wrote: » Why can no one give me an answer? What is the reason they are imposing these charges that makes them so evil. I'm actually trying to see it from both sides.
eeepaulo wrote: » I dont think the politicians hate us, i think that they are utterly indifferent to the vast majority of people in this country. Dont ask me to explain our politicians behaviourhttp://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/decade-lost-as-children-in-ireland-bear-brunt-of-recession-1.1979612
eeepaulo wrote: » I dont think the politicians hate us, i think that they are utterly indifferent to the vast majority of people in this country.
Joshua J wrote: » Get your own answers. Don't wait for someone to spoon feed you, think for yourself. Try and remember the past, the bailouts, corruption both locally and globally, European Unions ever in-crouching influence, monstrous financial institutions too big to fail, commodities etc etc. Now put yourself in Enda's shoes and ask yourself why you're doing it. Look at the big picture not just IW as a small and separate issue.
![Photo of [Deleted User]](https://wb.vanillicon.com/v2/b9d7cf56a75eee6d7dd35aa28294f673.svg)
