Irish politics discussion thread

I have heard that there is a terrifyingly macho and boorish culture among the uniformed rank and file Gardai, and that anyone who is not like that spends all their time trying to get away from them into more specialised work.

this is otm. my brother is a detective. hes alright i suppose. although the gardai are one big boys club really.

hard to think of any positive dealings i've had with the gardai...and can think of plenty of negative ones. almost everyone has a bad story to tell.

this is the only time i ever had a lol with a garda

Horror!

"how close were you to him?"

"i probably pissed on him gard"

have had plenty of good, one or two bad as a witness

big couple of days on the property/nama/banking front

so

Public sector paycuts
Semistate and other publicly owned infrasructure to be sold on the cheap.

For what?

The first, well fair enough, it's a separate issue.

But the sale of infrastructural assets to cover private bank losses just bewilders me.

Gonna quit it all and do a thesis on the ramifications of the removal of the bank guarantee vs what we're actually doing.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2011/0423/1224295312306.html

you whinging lying whinging motherfucker why are we still being afflicted with your verbs and nouns etc

I'd take his verbs and nouns if we could get rid of everything else he's done.

lenihan was forced by minatory leprechauns to give carte blanche to bondholders in the world's worst banks

minortory surely

Real IRA spokesman in 'too fucking thick to memorise a speech' shocker.

you know those beatles (and millions of other band or 'thing') t-shirts that say "john and paul and ringo and george" etc...

me and my friend have decided to make one that says "charlie and albert and bertie and brian"...mail me for orders.

See if it's on the list first.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2011/0507/1224296372123.html?via=mr&sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4dc5462a30b0bbb0%2C0

every time i read kelly now i think of the dude homer replaced in the episode about refuse collection

National survival requires that Ireland walk away from the bailout. This in turn requires the Government to do two things: disengage from the banks, and bring its budget into balance immediately.

First the banks. While the ECB does not want to rescue the Irish banks, it cannot let them collapse either and start a wave of panic that sweeps across Europe. So, every time one of you expresses your approval of the Irish banks by moving your savings to a foreign-owned bank, the Irish bank goes and replaces your money with emergency borrowing from the ECB or the Irish Central Bank. Their current borrowings are €160 billion.

The original bailout plan was that the loan portfolios of Irish banks would be sold off to repay these borrowings. However, foreign banks know that many of these loans, mortgages especially, will eventually default, and were not interested. As a result, the ECB finds itself with the Irish banks wedged uncomfortably far up its fundament, and no way of dislodging them.

This allows Ireland to walk away from the banking system by returning the Nama assets to the banks, and withdrawing its promissory notes in the banks. The ECB can then learn the basic economic truth that if you lend €160 billion to insolvent banks backed by an insolvent state, you are no longer a creditor: you are the owner. At some stage the ECB can take out an eraser and, where “Emergency Loan” is written in the accounts of Irish banks, write “Capital” instead. When it chooses to do so is its problem, not ours.

At a stroke, the Irish Government can halve its debt to a survivable €110 billion. The ECB can do nothing to the Irish banks in retaliation without triggering a catastrophic panic in Spain and across the rest of Europe. The only way Europe can respond is by cutting off funding to the Irish Government.

for a dude that was told to go commit suicide, he seems to have abit of fight in him yet imo

brilliant article. unfortunately the catty comments make it easy for yr average Irish political hack on politics.ie or twitter to ignore the substance, but there's some great turns of phrase in there imo, especially this:
"Back when the euro was being planned in the mid-1990s, it never occurred to anyone that cautious, stodgy banks like AIB and Bank of Ireland, run by faintly dim former rugby players, could ever borrow tens of billions overseas, and lose it all on dodgy property loans."

last part of it never occurred to anyone tbf

1000 messages to get from ff re-elected to here.

160 million euros per message, that

fuckin terrible

i imagine kelly is being a /little/ glib, but the pretence of sustainability has been the worst thing about the irish recession / debt crisis from the start, and i think he's probably pretty close to the truth

he's close enough, alright, but his proposed solution is definitely just trash talk at this stage.

His last few articles offered no solutions at all, and were duly criticised on that score, so he prob just tacked this one on as a 'fuck you eat this for a solution'

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2011/0516/1224297038705.html

at what stage does this stuff become too much? i'm not against the queen's visit, but i've a few friends work in abbey st/parnell st area and this shit's been unbearable for the past few days.

i can't offer an alternative or anything, mind.

i'm against it, not from a "800 years ah for god's sake" viewpoint but I just don't see what point we have in inviting that fat spoiled robot to our country. Waste of time and money, nobody is pleased about it are they?

heh plenty of them from your neck of the woods are standing to attention, if the IT letters page etc are any read on it.

but i agree with your first sentiment. if it's that big a deal as necessitates all of the furore for ordinary people, then it's by default 'too soon'.

i had the same feelings on GWB's visit a few years back, closing down the fucking midlands for that cunt to get a few photo ops, ugh

God bless em, they do a great job.

the royals, the gardai (local or otherwise) or sinn feiners?

To be honest, I was just referencing a Viz comic t-shirt, which had that caption and a picture of the Royal Family.

are there irish people who are enthused about this? wtf?

i'd figured summat like that alright

michael

http://clonmelonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Martin-Mansergh.png

dont want to get all Ding Dong Denny O´Reilly but I did cringe when I heard that she is going to be visiting Croke Park

yeah i think a lot of ppl would be quicker to question/criticise this whole thing but for fear of being lumped in with 'that lot'

yeah i feel fairly strongly "fuck off" about this. people need to start hating the queen for being a freak who has never buttered a slice of toast, if not for irish republican reasons. detest the lot of them.

The monarchy's clearly a wholly unjustifiable institution but this trip has been arranged for symbolic reasons and the Queen coming over is going to have much more of an impact than David Cameron would. I guess that, at a time of rising Republican activity, the visit has been calculated to show the lunatic fringe that the rest of Ireland has moved on.

That magnanimity has to be reciprocated with something close to remorse though. I haven't seen much RTE in the last couple of days but the talk in the UK has all been of how Ireland's going to respond to her being there, not how the Queen's going to respond to being in Ireland. The Garden of Remebrance and Croke Park will give her an opportunity to address some of the things that have been done in her family's name - any significance of the trip is going to depend on whether she takes that opportunity.

is it very wrong of me to give a little lol when they found that bomb this morning

jesus, i dunno would it be wise for herself to get into history/politics, tbh.

Watershed moment has already occurred there, she won't top cameron after the bloody sunday report, and the govt bears more responsibility for anything done in the past 100 years anyway

Bomb details?

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/state-visits/viable-device-found-in-bus-as-gardai-on-high-alert-for-threats-2648563.html

a lot of people like to portray the monarchy as outside of politics now but it's still fully implicated in the policy and governance of the UK imo

ya but you're a flaming nutjob iirc

well yeah

http://cockroachbritainscockroachnews.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/learn-irish-and-stop-speaking-nazi-english-and-stinklish/

implication etc yeah, but realistically how much steering can the royals do or did they do wrt the irish question?

iirc my leavin cert history twas yer gladstones etc did all the running from 1870 onwards, which is when our curriculum started anyway.

I dunno had we any dealings with ye at all before that tbh

they have no discernable influence themselves, but they are employed in a tactical/polemical fashion when on their quadi-diplomatic gladhanding trips

i mean obv we fell out with ye over land in the 1600's but we're irish, you're the neighbours, it's what we do isnt it

ya i mean it's not like there was any enmity

wtf of course there was jesus

Just no more than usual

how are your neighbours atm anyway?

sending yr landlady round 400 years later is a bit petty tho imo

they are absentee tenants atm, which is a new twist on an old favourite

triffic bunch of lads