Brady's State of Trade Unions Address

Dear oh dear. The six-week long Christmas holidays don't seem to have had the soothing, desired effect on our unelected leader Brian Cowan that we had hoped it would have.

No sooner have he and his chums returned from their forty days off - days in which we saw literally thousands of jobs go sailing up the Swanee River (far, far away) - than our favourite mass of belligerence is back from his course at Charm School

Ireland Inc. to put we, the little people who didn't vote for him, in our place.

Brian Cowen was simply being asked in the Dáil to explain how the hell he is going to slash €2 billion from public spending. That's all. Isn't that what he's there for? To answer a few questions and show us why he is being paid more loot per year than the American President?

Check it out. He does get paid more. What a country.

Certainly, no one expected the spoiled, pampered Cowan to throw a very large hissy fit and to start screaming that: "As long as I am running this Government, I will run the Government as I see fit and based on my philosophy!"

Gee. That's us told off then.

There we were, in our innocent naivety, thinking that the Government was there to serve... well, we the people.

Not the other way around.

Still, nice to know that the man actually HAS a philosophy.

I'm not saying it would be my kind of philosophy - you know, Plato, Socrates, all of those ancient dudes who actually make you think, while giving you a sense of ethics and morals at the same time.

Yet at least this balloon-head has SOME kind of ethics, even if they're more appropriately conjoined with philosophers who wouldn't take another's view into account.

Nietzsche and his sister, anyone? Hitler and Stalin, anyone?

Brian? If you're studying these dopes then you've probably made a few mistakes. It would explain a lot, mind you.

Good Lord, if Herr Cowan had been eight stone lighter when he started frothing at the mouth and screaming at the people who were asking legitimate questions the other day then he would have been jumping up and down like Tom Cruise on a GOOD day, while shaking his big ham fists at the heavens.

Settle down, Brian. We know at this stage that you, Lenihan, Lenihan's wig and most of your mates are a bunch of self-indulgent clowns. You don't have to convince us.

You are only here as leader of this banana republic because your predecessor, good old Bertie Ahern, couldn't answer certain pertinent questions concerning his rather interesting financial shenanigans (i.e., dodgy through and through).

As you'll remember, Bertie had won a shed load of loot. On the horses, as he claimed. This was despite the fact that he is on record as saying that he doesn't gamble- well, only when he's visiting Britain, obviously.

So there you go: Britain is once again to blame for Ireland's woes. According to Ahern's 'logic' there would be no gambling in this squeaky- clean Republic if it weren't for Perfidious Albion.

Anyhow, most people here laughed so hard that they were almost tempted to vote for the Green Party.

Almost. Nobody can laugh that hard.

Then the voters remembered what a bunch of go-by-the-wall, "I'll sell the few principles I have to the highest bidder" creeps infest the Green Party and thus, quite sensibly, refrained from giving these characters the time of day.

However, due to good old- fashioned Irish duplicity we still got stuck with the self-serving chancers of the Green Party anyway, and went on to accept that we were landed with a right old piece of ripe gorgonzola in the form of Happy Brian Cowen.

Just as an aside, by the by, to John Gormley, mighty monarch of the Green Party: I despise you so much that my teeth ache.

You promised the moon and the stars and yet as soon as you held even a smidgeon of power (the microscopic bit that the Fianna Failures allowed you to have), you let your supporters down.

Thank the Green Party tree-hugging nature deities that I was never one of your bunch, but there were plenty of trusting idiots that you shafted.

Shame on you.

I hope that you're happy: there are some MORE people that will never trust you sea-bottom-feeders ever again.

We also got the other Brian, our jokingly called 'Finance Minister' Brian Lenihan and his astonishing painted-on wig.

I don't know about you, but I'm voting for the wig next time: there's no doubt it would do a better job than the pointy head that it fits over. I'm going to steal a line from Dustin the Turkey here and say that I know for a fact that Lenihan's hair is real because he still has the receipt for it.

Needless to say, there would be no Punch without Judy in this country and of course there would be no anger without the unions getting their oars in.

You know, to see what they can get out of it. And the unions can always turn someone's hurt to their advantage. Hell, that's what they are good at.

Of course there are many instances when unions are more than necessary, but in my less than humble view they're another bunch that lost the run of themselves a long time ago.

Back in 1986-7 a lot of us were hurting. This was in the days when I hadn't realised that you stand on your own two feet or become a slave to Union bosses. I was a fast learner, though.

We had been on strike, looking for better wages and better working conditions. I was working for the five star Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin at the time. Very nice, very fancy; but behind the scenes, well...

When we finally, reluctantly, having used up every alternative, went on strike the Forte group, who owned the kip, flew in Sicilian scab labour to do our jobs.

Flew them in, especially, and ensconced them in the hotel in order to break a legitimate and legal strike.

Lord Forte himself went on record as saying that he had reduced trade unionism in his 800 hotels world-wide to 3%.

So we weren't entirely happy to be putting it up to such a machine, but right is right so we went ahead anyway.

We froze our unmentionables off between October 86 and March 87. It was our own fault.

Idiots that we were, we trusted the Union - SIPTU - the same one whose president Jack O'Connor is now saying - today - that it is extremely important to 'spread the sacrifices'.

If you never believe another word that I say then please believe this: the only sacrifices made will be on the side of the workers.

The Union bosses will just bleed your idealism dry and then go on from strength to strength.

When we were on strike all those years ago there was one thing that you could be sure of. You would never get a straight answer from any of them.

Ask them a simple question and it turned out to be what might as well have been an entire rendition of the "Communist Manifesto".

You found that you had simply lost the will to live by the following week when they had finally ended their interminable monologues.

You had also forgotten what the original question had been. Guys like Martin King were very good at that.

The six-month strike that I was on with the Shelbourne Hotel will never leave me.

It's where I lost my virginity. Not in the sense that you think (that was well gone), but in the manner in which we were held out to dry. Nothing was ever the same for me after that very rude awakening.

When the Union was tired of us they asked a bishop - a bishop, can you believe it? -to take another vote from us.

This was in 1987 and this bunch of Christian goons, pre- child molesting days, still had some bizarre kind of respect.

Who now knows why?

Only 27 of us out of over 100 voted to stay where we were.

Not enough.

And all because a corrupt pseudo-Christian church told us to go back to work with nothing to show for six months on the bread-line.

It did make me a follower of Marx, mind you. No, not the Marx who never worked a day in his life; the real Marx: Groucho, who said that he would never become a member of any club that would have him as a member.

Bitter? Yeah, I suppose I am. Even after all this time.

Especially since I now see it happening all over again. The Unions here have been dead for years, but things being the way they are the O'Connors and the Kings of this world, who made a fortune for themselves on the back of trusting gobdaws like us, are back in action.

I believe I learned a lot over those six months.

I will never be a team player; I will always be an individual; and I'll never have anything to do with a single thing that any religion is involved in.

The strike did me a huge favour: I began to write part- time when I realised that I didn't have the stomach for doing what I was told to do.

So now, as I see the unions raise their over-fed heads once more, I hope that people, as they look things in the eye from the bottom side up, remember to just be themselves.

You don't owe these bloody sodbusters a damned thing. Remember that.

If anything, they owe you.

This has been President Brady's State of the Unions Address.

As always, I do hope to see you next week: Same bat-time! Same bat-channel!C

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net