Judges won’t take voluntary cuts; politicians won’t take voluntary cuts, while everyone else is taking involuntary cuts right on the kisser.
Politicians of every hue take to the airwaves. From our remove, they’re freakily removed from reality, their soundbites giving new meaning to twitter. The truth is “unpatriotic”. Cuts are “savings”. Shameless political self-preservation is sudden-onset “responsibility”.
Bankrupting bankers are untouchable, the Minister for Finance telling an apoplectic Vincent Browne that these international men of mystery have contracts, you know.
So had the rest of us. This is not Kafka. This is a parish-pump farce. One that reveals a deep, dangerous fracture in Irish life. People listen to the estranged politicians, look at their wreckage of their lives and wonder if they’re living in The Matrix.
This is serious. Deadly serious. We’re not just losing money here. Too often, we’re losing our minds, our lives. Scared parents wander the house at night, watching the children sleeping, wondering how long they’ll be able to keep their job, their head, their home.
Distracted men (usually) are doing away with themselves in sheds, hotels, rivers, lakes. Small, devastating exits. The ultimate personal response to political and financial treason. Yes, we’re still dying for Ireland. And the megabankers are still on the golf course, blind to the fates of mortals. A perverse acquittal granted them by the State.
Miriam O’Callaghan, Irish Times
Parish pump farce? Political and financial treason? State protection for the bankers.
So why aren’t the people on the streets? What has to happen before Irish people realise that they live in a failed political entity?
What has to happen to make them realise that that failed political entity has to be torn down and destroyed before we can start afresh?