Thank You Fianna Fail

By Charley Brady

(This opinion piece was scheduled to appear in our 10/29 issue, but was replaced in that issue with a memorial to slain aid worker Gayle Williams)

Well, I never expected to write these words, and yet here they come: thank you to our Government, Fianna Fail.

I have spent so much time in various papers, and particularly since I began this column several months back, in trying to warn people about the kind of poisonous, reptilian lack of morals or decency that you represent.

Now you come along and with your venomous, heartless budget you have proved my point for me.

For that I thank you.

Did any of the big brains that sat around the table and congratulated themselves on saving around €100,000 million by taking the medical cards from those over 70 not have the self-awareness to see that you are taking money from the oldest and most vulnerable in society?

Yet while you bail out the bankers and the ignorant lickspittle speculators with their suits and their little pocket-hankies - the ones who played with other people's money and who got us into this mess in the first place - you manage to put the boot into the elderly instead. Well, what the hell, it's easier, is it not?

After all, you would think that they can't fight back, wouldn't you?

Kind of misjudged them, didn't you? This time they are fighting back. This time you're going to have to humiliate yourselves before the people that you have distanced from you by doing a U-Turn.

As you now know from the backlash that you're receiving that this time we simply don't walk away and mumble to each other.

This time there are actually people, and many of them are elderly, who are demonstrating outside your offices.

A country, it is often said, can be judged by how it treats the elderly. Well, you lot certainly gave us a wake-up call this time, didn't you?

If you good people in the States want to know how we treat the elderly in Ireland then just picture anyone - it could be your mother, father, grandparents - being held down on one arm by our fearless leader Brian Cowen, while our Finance Minister Brian

Lenihan holds the other arm down in order to let Health Minister Mary Harney and the rest of their cronies kick the ribs out from under you.

What do we care about them, after all? They are only the people who gave us our fortitude to deal with things when they were tough; who gave us our sense of moral values; who went without on so many occasions when they had nothing but they wanted us to have everything. Why should we care about them now?

Actually, you wonderful bunch of Fianna Failures, why don't we just speed up the process and just black bag them altogether. It would be a lot less messy and - hey, you guys will love this - be so much more cost-efficient.

Have you all forgotten any sense of decency? Because they were - or are - your parents also.

Don't like it? Sue me. These are my views, not the views of this newspaper.

And then that ridiculous joke Brian Lenihan, the over brained genius comes up with the idea that if you do not go ahead with his ideas then you are "unpatriotic".

You're saying what, Mr. Lenihan? UNPATRIOTIC?

These are people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s who spent their lives paying taxes, going without in the very many bad times that this country has seen and you have the cheek to tell them, at this time in their lives, that because you all spent the fabled "Celtic Tiger" money in ways that saw it go to off-shore accounts in the Cayman Islands or Jersey or ill-considered planning ventures and bent rezoning practices that

THEY are the ones who have to take the stick?

You really are pushing a not- so-funny joke to the limits, aren't you?

It's certainly true, what my mother used to say: You can have a vast amount of intelligence without having any brains.

But in this case I'm not even sure THAT is true. In this case, you bunch have just been in power too long.

Your arrogance and refusal to admit that you are wrong has crossed the line.

In "Frankenstein" there is a line where the good doctor, thirsty for knowledge, asks his older colleague, Doctor Pretorious: "How do you know when you have gone too far?" to which Pretorious responds: "When you've gone too far".

Well, I knew that you lot had gone too far today when I talked to various pensioners, many of them living on their own and confused and who didn't understand what this meant for them.

It would be no exaggeration to say that they were terrified for their future.

So take a bow, Mr.Lenihan and Mr. Cowen and Ms. Harney. You must be so proud of yourselves.

By the way, Finance Minister, I always like to see budget reports in my local hostelry.

It is fascinating to hear how the comments of the average Joes whom you have long ago forgotten cut through - can I say this? - bull that you and your friends come out with.

So there I was in Glynn's, sitting in my usual little corner when your grinning 'hail fellow well met' Mr. Lenihin's mug came on the screen.

As we waited with breath baited as you came out to tell us that we all must all become "patriots" while taking a sucker punch into the stomach (and it was a good punch, I'll give you that), out comes Mickey, a guy in his elder years but as sharp as a knife, to ask in befuddlement: "What in the name of all that's holy is Lenihan wearing on his head? Do that be some of that oul' black marker stuff that you use to decorate your head with or is it a wig or - bejayses, what is it exactly?"

The man was baffled, but from that moment Mr. Lenihan lost the crowd. I spent the rest of his vicious, malicious and downright stupid Budget speech worrying if the Finance Minister had metamorphosed over night into Terry Wogan's brother, and was, to tell the truth, scared that the unlikely-looking hair would fly off from his head and start giving a speech of it's own.

The plain fact, even as this out of touch crowd try to do the most massive U-Turn that anyone has seen since the Dawn Of Creation, is that we have an arrogant government in charge here who are putting the boot into the most vulnerable in society.

They now have the unique distinction in this country of absolutely terrorising men and women to whom this country owes more than we ever can ever repay them for.

And it is all for money. That's what we have become.

Let me tell you from my heart, Mr Lenihan and your boss, Mr. Cowan, that you should have picked on the bankers and the property developers who have been granted planning permission by FF and who have directly led to the majority of the Irish people being afraid of the water that they are drinking because of this hideous over-development, that they are the people that we owe this country to.

But as I indicated at the beginning of this article it's only the poorest that will suffer, not the bankers and the speculators. They are the ones that will suffer for this.

Take even a glance through the list of wealthiest people in Ireland and work out how many actually spend time here.

Well, that would mean paying tax, wouldn't it? We couldn't have that. Not that they would be such easy targets to pick on.

This is not going to go away, because I haven't even started on this inept and incompetent Government's cruel and appallingly brain-dead cuts on education.

But that will have to wait for next week. Hope to see you, same bat-time! Same bat-channel!