We’ve gone and done it again.  Yes, we’ve dropped the soap in the prison showers once more, bent over to pick it up and suffered the usual consequences.  I’ll try not to be crude, but Ireland does seem to spend an awful lot of time these days in being shafted.  Indeed, we’re rather the laughing stock of surrounding countries.

So, Greece is getting a bit of a leg up from Europe.  Indeed, it may actually lead to their debts being wiped out.  We, on the other hand, who are perpetually patronised, patted on the head, condescended to and told how much our ‘partners’ appreciate us taking the pain, well, we it would appear are getting nothing.

Or is that true?  There’s certainly some deal going on but how on earth are we to know?  Our elected representatives won’t tell us. We’re just little people to them.  We’re scum.  The only time that we’re important is when they need a few votes and even then Fine Gael and Labour are not going to be too bothered.  Why should they be?  They know that they won’t be in power come the next election; but they don’t give a toss because their life-long pensions and their golden parachutes are taken care of. They’ve screwed as much as is humanly possible on expenses out of the public purse and no doubt have managed to squirrel away a few nuts on the side as well. Many of these pigs now have half their family with their noses stuck in the trough along with them, all grunting away together.

I know that these swine have nothing but contempt for me and those like me, but that’s OK.  I feel exactly the same way about them.  I would put nothing past them.  I would think there to be no underhanded deal that any of them would get into if they thought that it would put one single more euro into their greasy pockets.

I detest and despise them as much as they detest and despise us for having voted for them in the first place.

Literal Death Warrants

It’ll be two years tomorrow—28^th November—that we got the famous €85 billion bailout.  We knew that the consequences of this would be grim indeed.  I thought then that it was a death warrant, but I didn’t know that it would be literally that as we saw suicide rates rise and rise.  Ironically the appalling Bertie Ahern had previously wondered why Irish people who doubted the success of the economy under his fine leadership didn’t “go off and commit suicide.”  I wonder does he ever regret that remark.  Oh, he may regret that it came back to haunt him, but I doubt that he regrets the hurt it caused.  Like many another gouger he may attend church every week—by his own admission he’s a great man for the Beatitudes, so he is—but there’s not much about him or any of them that could be called Christian.

So we’ve been good little boys and girls and we have taken pay cut after pay cut and we haven’t complained, except in the pub over a pint.  Greece went out there, burned cars, smashed windows and were filled with disgust at what had happened to them and they are now considered “a special case”.

As he trundled his well-fed backside into talks in Brussels—how important they feel when they mouth that old bilge—Minister for Finance Michael Noonan talked about the soon-to-be deal for Greece but made it clear that we needn’t get excited about it.

“This is a special and particular case.  There isn’t a crossover into Ireland’s affairs.”

Last year Dublin Socialist Joe Higgins was a bit closer to the truth of things when he said:  “Far from being a bailout, your IMF/EU intervention in Ireland is a mechanism to make vassals of Irish taxpayers to the European banks.  You are destroying our services and the living standards of our people.”

You know, it’s a pity that Joe is so bloody strident and talks like some of my Commie school buddies did about a thousand frigging years ago.  It’s a pity because he often makes sense.

It’s really astonishing how naive and bloody virginal we were even a short few years back.  We thought that Bankers knew better than the rest of us when in fact they have proved to be brainless wonders that should be studied by selected scientists.  We listened to economists and thought that they were smart people and not chancers, who quite often were in the pay of our political masters; and of course, like those masters they still—even now—talk down to us.  We thought that bent politicians were the exception rather than the norm.  We almost deserve what they’ve done to us, because we continue to allow it.

Actor Gabriel Byrne came in for harsh criticism only a couple of weeks ago for telling the truth concerning the ludicrous “Gathering” that we’re putting on next year.  He actually had the cheek to suggest that any money from it would likely end up in the pockets of the Usual Suspects. [Sorry, Gabriel; couldn’t resist that.]  And lo and behold!  Who gets the €168,000 job of organising it but former Fianna Gael boss and millionaire Jim Miley?

As I’ve said before, they don’t even bother to hide their contempt for us anymore.

Michael Martin started making noises—useless, empty headed and ultimately insulting noises—about how €11,000 should be taken from the pensions of the likes of Ahern, Brian Cowen and other graspers.  Big deal.   Eleven thousand from pensions that are over €150,000 a year; and that’s before you hit the speaker’s circuit of facile, gormless, useless speeches that characters like these pocket even more from.

And now Greece gets the hand up for causing a lot of trouble and we continue to be patronised as stupid gobshites.

At least Enda Kenny must be happy with our continued cringing compliance.  He’s made the cover of Time magazine and he’s the European Man of the Year, so after he is booted out of power he can look forward to a long and useless life on the After Dinner Speech circuit.  And all he had to do was be a traitor; all he had to do was bow his head whenever one of his betters like Angela Merkel were in the room; all he had to do was not to care that thousands of his fellow Irish dread Christmas and indeed that many would prefer the grave to continuing to live under a government that doesn’t give a shit about them.

And next week we face into our third ‘austerity budget’.

And we’re back where we began:  in the prison showers, bending over the soap again.