Top Issue 1-2024

6 December 2010

Resize: A A A Print

Bankers cleaning up while cleaners pay the price

I  WAS in work at half-seven on Monday morning. The first person I met was a Polish woman who comes in at some ungodly hour to clean the place from where the great and good will issue their decrees on behalf of the IMF and the bondholders.
Last week, they decided, in the ‘national interest’ of course, that this woman and the other cleaners ought to sacrifice €40 a week in order to pay the gambling debts of their loser friends.
I am fecking angry over what is going on.
We all perhaps grow somewhat cynical and world weary as we grow older. It is part of life and perhaps even a necessary defence mechanism. I know that if I still invested as much emotional capital in the Dubs, for example, as I did when I was younger that I would be a candidate for a mental health sectioning order. (Perhaps I am anyway.)
In the middle of this potential disaster, this national treachery, I can recall exactly what brought me to where I am today.
I feel just as I did during the Hunger Strikes and as an apprentice welder when we went on strike to have the right to join a trade union. This was at a time, incidentally, when the Blueshirts and Labour were taking something like a third of my paltry wages in tax and PRSI!  A time when the ‘elite’ were hiding their money in overseas bank accounts.
Now that self-same elite through its compulsive losing gambling streak has lost everything.
A Government that was sneering at anyone who had the temerity to suggest using some of the National Pension Reserve Fund as a part of a stimulus package to promote growth and jobs has now decided, or been told, to put the whole lot of it into the incinerator that is the Irish banking debt.
Another thing that you acquire over the years is a certain amount of resilience. You learn to cope with the good and the bad and most of us muddle through. Now I am worried.
What sort of horrors potentially are going to form the backdrop to Ciara’s teenage years?
What awful catastrophe potentially faces the Irish people?
For, make no mistake, what has happened over the past while - and indeed each new day seems to bring more revelations that you would have been laughed at had you attempted to fictionalise them –  has brought this state and potentially the whole island to the brink of an abyss.
Not too many political parties can claim to have this as their legacy. Fianna Fáil, if they survive, will. Of course, they could also drag the rest of us down with them.
So no sport today, my chums. But, as it says on the tin, it is seriously more than a game.

Follow us on Facebook

An Phoblacht on Twitter

An Phoblacht Podcast

An Phoblacht podcast advert2

Uncomfortable Conversations 

uncomfortable Conversations book2

An initiative for dialogue 

for reconciliation 

— — — — — — —

Contributions from key figures in the churches, academia and wider civic society as well as senior republican figures

GUE-NGL Latest Edition ad

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland