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Imagine you are a tired solicitor. You are struggling in a rural practice, barely making ends meet. You are facing the prospect of closure as your local town sinks into decline. Your future is bleak.
Party Political Patronage
Archive for the ‘Party Political Patronage’ Category
Judges aren’t rotten, the appointment system is
There was a shock hook against the head in the Supreme Court 10 days ago. Normally, official Ireland might have expected the beaks on the bench to close ranks. On July 31 they confounded convention.
Ansbacker Returns to Haunt Official Ireland
Give us a break. Stifle the phoney outrage. We all knew that certain Fianna Fail TDs were as crooked as bent nails in the Sixties and Seventies.
Irish Water and CIE quangos are just tax collectors
It costs an arm and a leg to come within an ass’s roar of the National Transport Authority.
Try it. A call to the quango that rubber-stamped the bus and train fare increases last week put the fear of God into me.
Quango veteran Des is back in his old haunts
The scene: tomorrow at the department of Public Expenditure and Reform. A meeting between Public Expenditure Minister Brendan Howlin and ace Central Banker Des Geraghty.
Climb every mountain, until you find your own quango
My home telephone rang on Thursday evening. “Deputy,” declared the voice, “I got you elected. Time you put me on a quango.”
It was Eamon Dunphy.
“Whatever you want, Eamon!” I volunteered. “Pity I am not yet in power!”
I don’t know about art – but I know what I like
God knows why John McNulty was so eager to be a member of the board of IMMA. The quango – grandly dubbed the Irish Museum of Modern Art – is hardly the obvious place for a man who describes himself as a “businessman”.
Indeed, IMMA is a bit of mystery.
PAC Just Wants Answers to Troubling Questions
The former charity supremo’s escape from answering further questions has exposed a gaping hole that now needs to be filled.
On Friday evening on the dot of 5 o’clock there was a knock on my door in Leinster House. It was a porter wheeling a trolley, stuffed with files.
“Weekend reading,” he quipped, cheerfully.
He lifted the eight heavy files, put them on a table, winked and wished me a happy weekend.
I knew immediately what had landed. It was a midsummer missile from ex-Rehab boss Angela Kerins. She was serving all 13 members of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) with the evidence she believes is relevant in the case she has brought against us in the High Court.
Two Dinosaurs Together in the Death Throes
FANCY a bit of coffin dancing? Two of the most conservative forces in Ireland are tottering at the edge.
I shed few tears for the decline of Ireland’s biggest trade union, Siptu – but the covert pleasure at its impotence compares nothing with the joy that thunders through my veins when I sense the mortal, self-inflicted wounds being endured by its rival, employers’ group Ibec.
We’re in dangerous territory as Dail’s most powerful cabal keeps its secrets
The most powerful Dail committee always sits in secret. Decisions are handed down to the Dail, where necessary, but otherwise no whisper of its activities is meant to reach the outside world.
