Top Issue 1-2024

6 February 2012

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Straight Talking

BY RODDY COLLINS

Enda Kenny: Playing for Team Ireland?

IS ENDA KENNY playing for Team Ireland when he’s away? I manage soccer teams. When I’m being interviewed in that capacity, I always try and represent them well in public. Enda Kenny didn’t.

When he was away in Switzerland at the World Economic Forum, the Taoiseach was representing Ireland and the Irish people. So where does he get off telling the world that at home people “went mad borrowing”. The prime minister of Ireland didn’t say ‘some’ people, or even ‘a few’ people — he said ‘people’, with a statement so sweeping that it covered all of us.

A young woman I know is taking care of her mentally-ill brother. He lives in a private flat that should be shut down on fire regulations alone. I saw ‘Aoife’ standing waiting for a bus a few days ago on the Navan Road, a bag of linen and a Hoover beside her. I stopped and gave her a lift to her brother’s. It turns out she didn’t have her car because it was in the garage getting fixed. Someone had driven into the side of her car, causing €400 damage. She made her first claim on her insurance for nearly 20 years. In return for her loyalty, this huge company jacked her insurance up from €500 to €1,800 a year because she used the service she was paying them for. In her brother’s case, she’s been minding her brother for about ten years but she wasn’t aware she was entitled to claim allowances to help support him until relatively recently and she’s waiting on that. In the meantime, the brother (who’s paid all his taxes when he was working) is being made to jump through all sorts of red tape hoops about allowances for clothing. No one had told her of their rights. She and her brother don’t have tax consultants or accountants telling them how to work the system.

Aoife is saving the state money, time and resources. Aoife is doing the best she can. She has never ‘gone made borrowing’. She had never turned anyone over for a quick quid. There were no banks queuing up to lend them money

A lot of the people Enda Kenny and Bertie Ahern hang around with or idolised may have gone mad borrowing; Aoife didn’t — and nor did most of the ‘people’, Enda Kenny casually disrespected either.

We have a man as Taoiseach who’s supposed to fighting our corner as the Irish people but he’s not doing it.

Maybe Eamon Gilmore forgot to pack Enda’s green jersey before he went away.

 

Mad

I TELL you what is mad, though.

Paying €1.25billion unsecured bondholders from the old Anglo Irish bank with taxpayers’ money on 31 January — that’s mad.

Lining the taxpayer up to shell out another €3.1billion at the end of March and €3.1billion on every 31 March until 2023 — that’s mad.

And Enda Kenny and Eamon Glimore, Fine Gael and the Labour Party are the people standing over it.

 

Wired for sound

I CAN SEE where the Government is coming from in suggesting a new Broadcasting Charge to replace the TV Licence because of the advent of so many new ways of accessing RTÉ through PCs, iPads, iPhones and all the other smartphones.

What I don’t get, though, is why I have to pay for some TV and radio hosts to be paid anything between a quarter of a million and half a million a year to be hostile to, misrepresent or exclude Sinn Féin. And especially as Sinn Féin is the real opposition voice with an alternative view now that Labour seems to have given up the ghost.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy good TV and radio with hard talk and hard questions, where politicians are made to defend their corner, and I’m not looking for an easy ride for Mary Lou McDonald, Pearse Doherty, Gerry Adams and the like but why do some talk-show heads seem so lop-sided in their approach to Sinn Féin that verges on hostile sometimes?

Didn’t RTÉ get rid of Eoghan Harris and Section 31?

 

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