It's Time To Take The Gloves Off - But Would Ireland Even Care?

"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church."
- "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", James Joyce

By Charley Brady

When the emissaries of the State have no feeling at all for the people any more, not that they ever did, then common sense tells you that it is only right and proper to get rid of them.

When the State no longer cares or even deigns to listen to the people that they work for then surely the people should be booting their employees out.

To me, this doesn't seem too radical a notion. It's just the way that it should be. Sure, I could write this in a way that takes socio-political-economic-environmental factors into account - Hell, I'm not a bloody thick - but do you know something? I DON'T WANT TO.

I don't want to hear one more damned reasonable explanation as to how we little people should try to look at the bigger picture because we don't have the brains to understand what is going on up in the Ivory Towers of our corrupt, venal, grasping, gouging, rotten-to-the-core, thieving bastard s***-kicking amoral politicians who couldn't give a snot-rag for us as long as they keep coining it in, day in and night out.

I'm not interested in one more lecture from these jackal-born daemons in pin-striped suits, yapping at us as if we are too dim to think for ourselves.

Because here is what the swine would call the smaller picture: people are dying for no reason at all; homes are being repossessed; suicides are up and despair is well and truly in.

Why can we not DEMAND an election right now? How can we justify simply complaining and moaning into our pints while at the same time saying: "Do you want me to bend over or to get on my knees?"

From the early days of this column well over two years ago I have never stopped banging on and on about how much I despise these people. I bet it got tiresome at times. In those days that used to be detrimental to me but right is right and I never lost hope that at some stage Paddy and Morag Q. Sucker would actually be so fed up that they would just say: "I've had it with these thugs and their pocket hankies and their duplicity and their Old Boys' network."

Jesus wept. We give out about the Brits and their class system while at the same time there is no better man than the Irish fella to do the equivalent of tugging his bloody forelock if some scumbag of a local TD comes into the bar and buys a round for the house.

Once - just once - have I seen anyone refuse it. And what was she told? "Ah, go on. Sure where's the harm in it?"

The same lady was not for turning, so said politician left with one hell of a flea in his ear.

The Fighting Irish? Don't make me laugh. They're always game for a fight just as long as it's with each other after closing time.

Ask them to take on the boyos that keep them in their places and their bellies begin to rumble with an almost tangible dread that says to them that they might just be speaking out of turn.

Class system my ass. There's always been a class system here; it's just that nobody ever acknowledges it.

We're great at sneering at those who have a chance to change things. Joe Duffy, for example, gets a whale of a going over from our intellectual elite.

He has for many years run a very successful RTE radio show called "Liveline" and yes, it has often literally changed things and gotten things done. Things that the politicians weren't changing, that's for sure. He throws open the airwaves to anyone who has an issue that they wish to speak out on. Sometimes he gets it spectacularly wrong but when you're doing such a program five times a week that is bound to happen.

In general, though, he touches on nerves and when some people see him as a last port of call - because their elected representatives aren't going to - he handles them with compassion. Sometimes his listeners need someone to, oddly enough, just listen to them.

So he gets a tough time of it here because he has a hugely popular program that actually does some good. He's very much from a working class background and has huge empathy with the broken and the disenfranchised. That said, he can often have a very light and mischievous touch if the occasion warrants it.

He was once sneeringly described to me by an ignorant lout of a woman as "a professional Dubliner." Hilarious, as she was one herself; but that was in the days of that famous Celtic Tiger and she fully intended to put her roots behind her.

Sad, really. A person who denies their roots should never be taken seriously.

I like Duffy and I think that he does a hell of a lot of good. Seldom more so than last week when he just let a deeply hurt man speak about the absolutely unnecessary death of his son.

Luke Murtagh died last May in St. Vincent's Hospital, Dublin. He didn't die of the Cystic Fibrosis that the 22-year-old had been fighting all of his tragically short life. He died because he was admitted to a decent hospital that has received no help from this government of authorised grave-diggers.

He died because there is not one member of this government who, to my knowledge, actually gives a damn.

John Murtagh, his father, had the appalling choice to lie to his son last May or to tell him the truth when Luke asked him: "Am I dying?"

He told him the truth and two days later his son was dead, having fought for 22 years of a horrendously young life against a disease that didn't, in the end, kill him.

"It was unfair", said his father. "It was a cross-contamination that killed him in the end."

His son's body had begun to reject the liver transplant that he had received three months' prior to going into St. Vincent's Hospital in December 2009.

As he blasted Mary Harney and her HSE he said in this terribly emotional moment: "Those doctors knew what they were doing when they put CF patients into these wards with other patients. They are sentencing them to death.

"They killed my son".

Luke didn't die from what he had lived with for 22 years: he died from what he had been infected with in hospital. He died because this Third World country has no isolation facilities for Cystic Fibrosis sufferers. He died needlessly.

You see, Paddy and Morag Q. Sucker have been told, have been PROMISED for years - yes, years, for Christ's sake! - that we will have a proper CF unit opening very soon. Very, very soon.

Never having been one to trust the pond scum bottom feeders that we call politicians here in the Banana Republic, I never bought it for one second when the assurances began. To me an assurance from a politician equals just one more lie.

These particular lies began back in 2008. I was accused of being cynical at the time when I said: "Now that we have that assurance out of the way we can be damned certain that there will be no Cystic Fibrosis Unit open within the next couple of years."

Well, sure enough that turned out to be right.

By the time it came to the assurance that it would be open by 2010 I had given up on even being sarcastic about it.

Now that we are being lied to again by assurances that it will be open by 2012, I realise that there's just no point in arguing anymore with an Irish population of sheep who will bleat and bah while people die and will do feck all about it.

There's always much more important things to do than save lives. For heaven's sake, you t***pots, don't you see that Mary Harney just HAD to have that trip to New Zealand because she had a relative there to visit; or that Mary Hanafin just HAD to shell out €20,000 of the taxpayers' money in order to take her mammy away on a whole series of trips.

Sorry for the mother and all that, but go at your own damned expense!

The same with God-fearing planks of wood like Bertie "Cupboard" Ahern; Enda Kenny; Old John Cobbly and all. You just had to attend the funeral of Rome's previous cover- up merchant, Pope John Paul II because you're such devout bloody Catholics.

If you're such great Catholics take a hike over at your own expense. But no. Who do you charge for it? US! AGAIN!

If you're so holy pay your own damned way. (I am of course excluding the shameless toe-rag Bertie who never paid for a thing in his life. I'll bet that he didn't even pay for that cup of tea and those chocolate digestives that he had in his tacky cupboard during that tacky advertisement. It's sponger cake that rat should have been holding.)

While you creeps are out there travelling world wide, people are dying here as so appallingly illustrated by Luke Murtagh.

Another incredible example on the same show of how tough and articulate some people can be came from Keely Flavin, who is fourteen.

Keely is from Enniscorthy in County Wexford and she says:

"How many deaths will it take before they spend the money where it is most desperately needed?

"I have heard about the massive overspending and waste in Ireland, yet they cannot direct funds to this. We can't get up and march on the Dail - we are often too sick. We can't even get together because we will make each other sick."

This astonishing young and courageous (even though she would deny that) young woman goes on to say:

"I am terrified of what lies ahead in the adult hospitals. I have heard some scare stories and they would keep you awake at night. If I get MRSA I could die...

"But there's nothing anyone can do: that's where I will be going. I am going to fight a hospital stay as much as I can. For me, it will be a very last resort because I will only come out sicker than I went in. It just doesn't make sense to me... If I am ill enough to be hospitalised, the State is ready to put me in danger."

Keely, for the little it's worth it doesn't make much sense to we who are writing of it either. Nor to those who are reading of it. Not when you see the amount of money that these unthinking creatures are spending even at this moment on making their offices extra-plush or even more ludicrously, having men on overtime in order to build the tunnel from the Dail that will save those who are supposed to be our representatives from ever having to make eye contact with those who are supposed be their employers.

After all, Mary Harney and her cronies in the HSE had a "slush fund" of €2.3 million that they could use simply for foreign junkets; sorry - fact finding trips - to every part of the globe that you can imagine.

Here's a suggestion that is so obvious that it probably sounds stupid: if you want to find out the facts of what it must be like to live with Cystic Fibrosis, try asking questions just a wee bit closer to home. It's too late for you to ask questions from the dead but why not try sitting down with people like Keely. You won't do that in a hurry, though, will you?

Philip Watt, the CEO of Cystic Fibrosis Association Ireland, commented:

"What could be more important than saving people's lives? There have been too many false dawns already in building a competent national CF referral centre in Ireland."

Ah, you mean better than well, Philip, but: "What could be more important than saving people's lives"?

Now I know that you are being rhetorical because you know what is more important to Irish politicians. Not just the Fianna Failures, to ANY OF THEM.

There's not one of them that wouldn't feed their best friends to the wolves as long as it meant that they could continue to claim their expenses/swan around looking down on the people who voted for them/build enormous homes in the country and then keep the workmen waiting months and sometimes years in order to be paid.

These are not people who care who lives or dies in poverty or pain. These are reptiles that can stare unblinkingly at you, giving you the shudders, while telling you that you must vote for them because they have your interest at liver.

Sorry, that should have read "heart". I was just remembering the manner in which Charles J. Haughey stole from his "best friend" Brian Lenihan Seniors' liver transplant fund.

Ah, those must have seemed like the good old days when they thought that no one would ever find out.

Which leads nicely back to: WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO THE MONEY FOR THE HOSPITALS?

Billions of taxpayers' money has been poured into them in the 13 years since Cupboard Bertie took the reins; millions went into it from charities and yet THERE IS NOTHING TO SHOW FOR IT.

So: I'm asking seriously: where did all that loot go?

Jeez, we wonder why contributions to charities are drying up? I for one don't give money in order to add to the property portfolios of corrupt politicians. If I want to do that I might as well move to Mexico altogether.

Sorry, I forgot: I'm already living there, minus the sun and - oh yeah - the honesty. At least over there you know who the thieves are.

Here's an idea: just refuse to give to a charity until you know exactly what affiliations they have with certain corrupt Irish politicians. Trust me, alarm bells will go off when you hear particular names being bandied about.

In the meantime, if you want to read a nice user-friendly article that tells you how everything that is wrong with us is basically the fault of society and certain socio-economic factors then go read the Irish Times.

For me, I'm fed up with being Mr. Nice Guy and getting walked all over. It's time to take the gloves off; and yes, much good it will do but if enough of us keep asking the wrong questions then maybe at some point they will listen.

Not because they could care less, mind you; but at some point they'll remember that sooner or later there will be another election.

If my anger hasn't given me a heart attack in the meantime then I hope to see you all again next week.

Same bat-time!

Same bat-channel!

You can reach Charley at chasbrady7@eircom.net