Notes From The Rubber Room

By Charley Brady

You know something? It's been quite hard to get these missives from the Banana Republic out to you lately. Have you ever tried typing with your teeth while you're in a straightjacket?

But ever so gradually people are beginning to see that my ravings over the years have been made flesh. Hell, apart from the usual ramblings of headbangers who want to kill me because I have an opinion, I'm actually getting positive emails.

This is especially for you, Mike Bowen in Australia. Thank you. I'm so used at this stage to getting hate mail that I normally have a quick laugh at them and then delete.

Unfortunately that's what I did with yours before it dawned on my rather slow, Brian Cowen-like brain that you were giving me a compliment. My apologies and please get back onto me.

I guess I'm doing something wrong when people agree with me, but thank you none the less. And hope to hear from you again.

Maybe there is a God, after all. At least one with a sense of humour.

There we all were, waiting for the announcement from Brian Clown and his crony Big Brain Brian (The Wig) Lenihan at 4 pm on Tuesday 3rd.

Clown was about to announce just what he and his inept government were going to do in order to save the people of Ireland who certainly hadn't voted him in as leader of this great little nation.

We waited, sweat streaming from out our foreheads, wondering if he was going to put the lie to that great joke about the completely bankrupt Iceland:
Q: What's the difference between Iceland and Ireland?
A: One letter and six months.

Oh, how we laughed because we knew in our hearts that with gigantic intellects like Clown and The Wig we were in safe hands.

Well. Not quite, as it turned out.

While Big Brain and his interesting painted-on mop twiddled his thumbs on camera to the bemusement of all Brian Clown read us a manifesto that he and his equally dim cabinet had spent weeks on and yet, to we who are less intelligent than these miracles of nature, it simply seemed like something that had been scribbled on to the wallpaper by a three-year-old who had been given a set of crayons that he wasn't quite ready for.

Being the arrogant, manner-free goons that they are, they hadn't even given the opposition parties a copy. I suppose that when you've only scribbled it down that morning it's a bit hard to get yourself organised.

Anyway. The savings.

Take three per cent off people who are earning as little as €15,000 a year. That's a good idea, I think. Hell, why would they go after the speculators and developers and - God forbid - the bankers that gave them the funds that they used to bleed this country dry? No money in that, is there, Big Brains?

Oh, sorry. I forgot. These are friends of yours.

Too close to feathering your own nest cronyism, anyone?

Next up: a 7.2 per cent pension levy on staff nurses who earn €45,000 per annum before tax.

First of all, let's stop calling these things levys: it's just another tax. If you are going to screw people then do it in an honest way.

Ah, another paradox to keep us busy in these days of no jobs.

They're already paying €2,800 in their contributions so this will mean that a hike to €3,300 will be imposed. That's a really good idea as well. Let's get those bloody lazy nurses who we all know don't do a damned thing for this country and force them from the wards and into the streets - which I surely hope they do before they give you two Brians and your fellow masterminds a red bloody cent.

What's the point in going through all the ways in which you have attacked the lowest paid in this country because you simply can't summon the guts, for all of your belligerent bluster, to go after the people who have caused this?

Did you not say, Brian Clown, that you don't feel comfortable going for a drink in a normal bar anymore? That you are FORCED to now drink at home or in the Dáil Bar where the ordinary hill-billies can't bother you?

Who pays for the Dáil bar and its subsidised alcohol? Oh, I forgot for a moment there. It's the taxpayer, the people that you now shun.

The country is going down the tubes, so I don't even see how you have the time for such luxuries anyway.

Maybe you're just tired after your six-week Christmas break and your taxpayer-paid jaunt over to Japan.

When it comes to the Lisbon Treaty, you say that there's no need to read the thing because you know what's in it and then go on to add that there's equally no need to read "Oliver Twist" because you know what's in that as well.

It really is quite scary to have such a buffoon running the country. I suspect that your attention span only let you see the musical version of "Oliver". So you might be in for a bit of a shock if you ever get around to Dickens. He was the writer, in case you're scratching your head.

You are cutting the wages of people who have spent a lifetime contributing to Ireland, while all the while you condone the likes of your ridiculous looking Defence Minister Willie O'Dea and his ludicrous Groucho Marx moustache and Mary Coughlan in giving the country a €164,000 bill to fly them in the pampered style that they are used to, to Texas.

They could have gone commercial for just under a thousand each. That might have saved a little bit. Just a thought.

You and that other creep Harney, the worst Health Minister in the entire history of the universe are asking us to "feel the pain"?

What bloody planet are you lot on? We are the ones who are feeling the pain.

I spent the best part of today trying to get through to the Social Welfare Office in Augustine Street, Galway, on behalf of a woman who has come here from Northern Ireland to work. Why do they give out a phone number if they never answer it, for crying out loud?

She has been working here for the last three weeks for no pay because she can't get the PPS number that she needs. Well, that's not quite correct: she has it but the government body that she is asking to send that number haven't sent it out to her.

Which means that she is leaning into her ever-dwindling savings because of beurocratic big-wigs who couldn't find their own asses if they didn't have a road map.

There's more, so much more but I don't want your teeth to ache anymore than mine do at the moment.

I'll just say as calmly as I possibly can that the Social Welfare Offices here seem to be looking down their noses at the workers, now unemployed, who have paid taxes for year in, year out.

The best advice I could give her was to say: Pretend you're a junkie or someone who is in dire straits because they drank all their money last night and left it against a wall and you will have no problem at all in getting your hands on some loot.

Yes, Editor. I know: these are my views, so to anyone whom I have upset, sue me. Good luck to you.

This woman WANTS to pay tax in the Republic! How ironic that on the day after The Wig and The Clown tell us that they need loot, that they make it difficult for a hard-working woman to actually GIVE them money.

But then we live in a country where a politician's mother can sue the State because she took a fall on the way into the Dáil. She settled for an undisclosed sum, of course.

Where else but in a banana republic could it happen that the defendant - in this case, the people of Ireland - can't have access to what they are shelling out to a leading politician, Minister Mary Hanafin's mother. The circumstances under which she fell are also shielded from the public. Jesus wept.

We're not entitled to know, we have been told.

Crikey. If I'd known it was so easy to pick up undisclosed loot from the state that my mummy represented I would be doing a bit of sidewalk diving myself.

So, yes, I was more than happy to see the students get up off their asses yesterday and march to the Dáil. Even those of us who see them as over- indulged little loop-swingers were happy.

And this just in: builder John Guilfoyle has seen seven (count them) alien spacecraft hovering over County Clare. He now believes the country could be at risk of INVASION from alien creatures who want to take over Ireland.

Look on the bright side: at least they weren't hovering over the Dail because they certainly wouldn't have found signs of intelligent life down there.

In fact, this could be a good thing. Let's face it, if they did take over the country they couldn't make a worse jackass job of it than our current bunch are doing.

I'd like to continue this but the nurse has just told me that it's medication time again. Hopefully I'll see you here in the bat-cave next week.

Same bat-time! Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net