The Late Late Toy Show

There's only one thing I find more distressing than the decimation of our country's economy and the half-assed response by the gombeen's in charge:

Billy Barry Kids.

The Late Late Toy Show has been around for decades and for just as long Billy Barry Kids have been scaring the crap out of children and adults alike with their freakish facial expressions and dance routines far too adult to possibly be appropriate.

Of course the phrase 'Billy Barry Kids' is now a generic term in Ireland for 'stage school kids with pushy parents' and it's no longer just the aforementioned stage school that's in on the act.

They even have children from Offaly on the show this year (I blame that on Cowen too.)

Or as the local hack has described them "Offaly Diva's."

Congratulations on that ground breaking story there Bernstein, I can't understand why you wouldn't put your name on it.

Am I the only one who finds the parents of stage kids more than a little disturbing?

Why the need for all the jazz hands, glitter and manic smiling from your children? Do you have something to prove or something to hide?

At least Ryan's doing a good job with the show....

Brian Cowen: "A waste of time"

From one comical Brian to another.

I missed our glorious leader Brian Cowen telling the nation last week that the Freedom of Information Act is a "waste of time" but thankfully the Sunday Independent ran the quote again over the weekend.

Would that be the same Act that helped journalists of the year Shane Ross and Nick Webb to discover the shameful waste of public money that has been going on for years in Fás?

Or the Act that allowed Ken Foxe to uncover John O'Donoghue's shameful waste of public money while at the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism and while in the office of Ceann Comhairle?

Are you starting to see a ('shameful waste') pattern here?

Just to make sure that there's no confusion, or any danger of my misrepresenting Brian Cowen's intent here's the full quote;

"I have no problem whatsoever with the legitimate use of the Freedom of Information Act...

However, the idea of the department trawling every question that comes in from people who, perhaps, regard the departments of State as a source for generating information was not within the contemplation of the Freedom of Information Act and, to be honest, is abuse of the process."

So Brian has no problem with the Freedom of Information Act as long as people don't use it as a "source for generating information..."

What exactly is the Freedom of Information Act for then?

It seems to have slipped Brian Cowen's mind (again) that we live in a democracy, a Republic nonetheless, where the government and the civil service are supposed to serve the people.

Are we supposed to believe that it's not in the public interest to find out what great journalism found out about Fás, O'Donoghue and others through the Freedom of Information Act?

Here's a thought Brian; go FOI yourself.

Comical Brian

If you only listen to those in government, you would get a very different picture on the economy than is painted here and in many other critical, curmudgeonly corners.

'The economy is fine' they would say. 'NAMA will save us all', they would say. 'It's all the fault of Bear Sterns', they would say.

Frankly, it all sounds a little too much like a Kevin McAleer sketch from the early 1990's, but I have a different comedian in mind when it comes to the sort of tales being told about Brian Lenihan's grand NAMA plan. But more on that anon.

The latest quarterly Daft.ie property report makes for interesting reading. Now that every man, woman and child in the country is in the property business courtesy of Brian Lenihan's grand scheme, we should all be keeping a close eye on it.

After all the good people at Daft (daft people?) have done a far better job of keeping track of the medium term trends in the housing market than their massively, massively overvalued competitors at myhome.ie, or anyone else with a vested interest in the property market.

Nobody's perfect, but in July 2007 their report did point out that the buy-to-let property market was being inflated by foreign workers and that "they are unlikely to settle in the country, meaning their demand for housing is temporary in nature and Spartan in quality."

The commentary noted that prices in the property market were going down and that "we are not likely to see a return of buoyant housing markets any time soon."

Not exactly ground breaking in hindsight, but remember this was shortly after the Irish Times shelled out €50 million for a property website (ha!) and the vultures in the property business were still busy trying to convince us all that we needed to spend a few hundred grand to live in a shoe box apartment in some backward commuter town.

So while emigration by foreign workers is keeping our unemployment level artificially low when the real story of our economy's collapse is far worse than is being admitted to (as did emigration in the 1980's) it also means that rents are at a 10 year low.

Great if you're a renter, but a little unfortunate if you're a taxpayer, as our economic and therefore social future is bet on what Daft's economist Ronan Lyons describes as, "rents and yields remaining high between now and 2020.”

Brian Lenihan's prediction that NAMA, the world's largest property management company is going to make a €5.5 billion profit for the Irish taxpayer in a little over a decade (when he will be comfortably retired on his massive government minister's pension) now seems even more preposterous than it originally did.

According to Minister Lenihan, the whole plan will work out grand as rents are going to take in oodles and oodles of cash to cover the interest they will be paying on the loans, and then some.

What's Comical Brian going to tell us next? That the banks are perfectly capitalised and that they aren't going to need any more of our money? After all, lending to small Irish businesses by the banks does seem to be continuing unabated. Oh, wait...

Or perhaps he'll tell us that the banks are grateful for the taxpayer's support through these tough times and have mended their ways and are happy to take reduced wages until they have worked off their debt to the Irish people? Hmmm...

According to the Financial Times Brian Lenihan is Europe's worst Finance Minister: I think they have it wrong, he's just the funniest

Now, did you hear the one about the American tanks? Well...

Lions Led by Donkeys

Despite what a lot of commentators are trying to spin in some of the Sunday papers and elsewhere, Unions are not in and of themselves terrible things.

However, as with anything over the last decade what started out as a good idea for the betterment of many has turned into a bad idea for the betterment of the few.

The national day of protest last Friday was an interesting if somewhat surreal occurrence, and one designed for the benefit of the union leaders and not the union members.

It wasn't a strike, as the unions didn't want to give the government the opportunity of saying that the unions were 'grinding the country to a halt.'

(Although to be fair to the unions, this government is doing a pretty good job of that by themselves.)

The result was that union members were put in a pretty invidious position of telling employers that, while they weren't on strike, they wouldn't be in work for half of the day.

How the Union leaders didn't realise the position this put working people in is a pretty good illustration of how far removed they have become from 'ordinary workers.'

Little wonder then that the turnout was far lower than it was for the last union 'strike'.

Despite the Union's claim that there were 70,000 people in Dublin, the Gardaí who are generally pretty good at estimating these things said that it was more like 30,000.

Why didn't the unions hold their 'Day of Protest' on a Saturday and offer more members and non-members the chance to turn-up?

It wouldn't have made any difference to the people they were trying to reach as the lovely lads and lasses in Leinster House are off on one of their many, many, many paid holidays (paid for it should be pointed out, by you and I.)

There were plenty of people there that had real, justifiable reasons to be angry.

Dublin Corporation workers were out in force and unlike many in the civil service, if you're a binman or in one of the lower paid clerical grades, you get the triple whammy of a thankless job, low wages and a terrible pension.

So it's no wonder that many union members feel hard done by, even if others in the union brotherhood have been coining it over the last decade.

You only have to look at the leaders at the national day of protest.

While David Begg, Jack O'Connor and Peter McLoone cry 'strike!' and point fingers at the government and the banks, the truth is that these union leaders have as little in common with their members as those they criticise.

The average industrial wage is approximately €37,000 per annum, while the average union leader's wage is many times this multiple.

And the current crop of Union leaders have been closer to the machinations of power than they have ever been since the foundation of the state and must bear some responsibility for the sorry state the economy (and by extension, the country's citizens) are in.

They owe their own members and the rest of the nation an apology (as does our 'centre right' government.) Do you need some convincing?

David Begg has been on the board of the central bank for over a decade, chairing the banks internal audit committee. Yes, the internal audit committee, that wasn't a typo!

This makes it very hard to take the union leaders seriously when they (quite rightly) rail against 'fat cat' bankers and the damage that they have done to the country.

When you look at the exponential waste present in Fás over the past decade it's not surprising either that union 'leaders' were on the board there too.

Thanks for keeping an eye on taxpayers money there guys! I'm glad you were around to make sure all was above board.

The National Partnership strategy of the past 10 years has been heralded, mostly by the unions and the government parties it has to be said, as the source of all that is good for what ails us.

But the truth is that the largest beneficiaries of 'partnership' and 'bench-marking' over the past decade have been TD's and very high level civil servants.

The General Secretaries in the civil service earned over €180,000 per annum last year. This is the same level which so many union leaders base their own salaries on.

Handy that.

If you're a lower grade civil servant or someone in a low paid job in the public sector the union's have done a lot less than they should have over this past decade.

None of this is to suggest impropriety by the union leaders; as was the case with John O'Donoghue, when it comes to putting the finger on what the problem is with what they've done they simply do not get it.

In O'Donoghue's trite resignation speech, layered as it was with sanctimonious self-pity, he turned the issue of his blatant disrespect of both the taxpayer and the Republic in squandering taxpayers (not 'the states') money on it's head.

Rather than facing up to this he defended himself against allegations that he was feathering his own nest and inferred that this was what Eamonn Gilmore had insinuated. This was never the issue.

Now union leaders are justifying their inflated wages by saying that their taking a wage reduction would lead to the Celtic Tiger Cowboy's in IBEC arguing for lower rates for workers.

By that logic, why not just award themselves a raise?

Union leaders should never have taken positions on Fás or the Central Bank. By doing so they stripped their Union's of impartial leadership and have contributed to the sorry situation in which we find ourselves.

Put simply, they let Bertie and others hoodwink them into positions where they were not credible advocates for their members and against the injustices that have prevailed over the past decade.

They went from being campaigners to collaborators.

Ireland has suffered from a lack of leadership over the past decade, some could reasonably argue for far longer than that.

Without a doubt the worst culprits have been FF and the PD's, who have crippled this country morally, culturally and economically. I sincerely hope the electorate will never forget that, though past experience shows a country with a short memory.

We shouldn't forget however our current union leaders were near the fore of the march last Friday which paraded past the GPO, where Connolly fought, and past the statue of Larkin exhorting the Irish people to arise.

They are as fit to follow in their footsteps as our current government are to follow in the footsteps of Collin's, of Emmet or of Tone.

If we don't get some leadership out of this generation soon the young people of Ireland need to get off their asses and make a change. They could hardly do any worse than this shower.