Property ladder

FIANNA FÁIL’S housing policy in the 1990s was much better than Sinn Féin’s, according to what Bertie Ahern testified to the Mahon Tribunal into political bribery and planning corruption last Friday.
Having trouble buying your dream home? Short of £30,000? Then just let your local Fianna Fáil cumann know, they’ll spontaneously have a little look in the petty cash, pull out 30k and hand it to you. And you can pay it back whenever you want (or when a tribunal starts snooping into your ex-partner’s financial affairs – whichever is sooner).
Bertie said that, in 1993, his local FF cumann gave his then partner, Celia Larkin, £30,000 (three-quarters of a home purchase price) so that the house in which three of Celia’s elderly relatives were living could be secured for them after the owner died. A very noble deed. It’s also a novel way for Fianna Fáil to deal with the housing crisis. Trouble is, it was a once-only offer. The tribunal came calling, the debt was suddenly hastily repaid (with interest) only a few weeks ago and the Bank of Bertie is now closed.
I wonder what the chances are of my local Sinn Féin cumann slipping me 800 grand to buy a house for my dear old mammy in Dalkey. I mean, if Fianna Fáil could do it, it must be fair.

Family affair

DUP Gregory Campbell gets on well with the landlord of his Assembly constituency office, who he pays £12,000 a year in rent to. It’s his missus.
The East Derry MP isn’t allowed to keep it in the family under Westminster rules but he is under Assembly rules.
Ian Paisley Jnr, who was being paid by his daddy as a Westminster researcher while treble jobbing as an MLA and junior minister in the Assembly, has been paying rent to a company owned by his father-in-law.
It seems that DUP figures like to keep it in the family.

Boxer rebellions over

PARLIAMENTARY punch-ups in Taiwan’s legislature may be a thing of the past now that the breakaway Chinese island’s ruling party has declared a ceasefire.
Whenever the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) couldn’t get its own way, dozens of its MPs would jump on the opposition Nationalist Party members and give them a few digs. Now the ruling party has acknowledged that scenes of up to 50 MPs dragging each other across benches being regularly flashed on TV screens all over the world for the past 20 years haven’t exactly enhanced tiny Taiwan’s image. A more pertinent reason for the peace move might have to do with the electoral pasting the DPP got in the last election. “It is impossible to fight now because our numbers in parliament are so small,” one DPP leader conceded.
Some observers suspect that many of the hard-hitting displays were stage-managed for the benefit for the media – a bit like Green Party indignation over Fianna Fáil shenanigans, I suppose.

Slipped disc

WAS cuddly RTÉ DJ Ronan Collins displaying a political prejudice when he played a listener’s request for The Strawbs’ 1973 track, Part of the Union.
Although the trade union movement ironically adopted it as an unofficial anthem because it was written as an anti-union song, Ronan suggested the lyrics might be relevant today.
Now I’m a union man
Amazed at what I am
I say what I think
That the company stinks
Yes, I’m a union man.
When we meet in the local hall
I’ll be voting with them all
With a hell of a shout
It’s, ‘Out, brothers, out!’
And the rise of the factory’s fall.
(Chorus)
Oh you don’t get me, I’m part of the union
You don’t get me, I’m part of the union
You don’t get me, I’m part of the union
Till the day I die, till the day I die.
As a union man I’m wise
To the lies of the company spies
And I don’t get fooled
By the factory rules
‘Cause I always read between the lines.
And I always get my way
If I strike for higher pay
When I show my card
To the Scotland Yard
This what I say.
(Chorus)
Before the union did appear
My life was half as clear
Now I’ve got the power
To the working hour
And every other day of the year.
So though I’m a working man
I can ruin the government’s plan
Though I’m not too hard
The sight of my card
Makes me some kind of superman.
(Chorus)

I like Ronan Collins (yes, I’m of that age) so I do hope he wasn’t being partisan. I would also hope he’s part of a union.

Young fogey

SPEAKING of age, the Sunday Independent’s pale imitation of yours truly (even copying the Fifth Column title) took a swipe at our piece last week on Young Fine Gael’s soft porn poster campaign in the last European referendum, the Nice Treaty.
The Bertie Ahern fanzine denounced us as “Ógra Shinn Féin eejits”!
I wonder how many Ógra young wans would admit to liking Ronan Collins.