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Stockbrokers are watching the Labour Party duel with a wry smile. They understand. Pretenders to thrones need to gild the lily. Coded messages about more spending are par for the political course. Once the Labour leadership ballot closes on July 4, the rhetoric may remain the same but little will have changed.
Joan is a bit of a loudmouth, but she has never resigned from anything. Alex is a loser, a pussycat in the middle of a muddle. It will be back to business as usual on July 5.
Is the Dail being sidelined by its committees? Recent political earthquakes have tightened tension between cabinet members and Oireachtas committees. The more arrogant cabinet ministers see Oireachtas committee members as their servants. The more enlightened servants see their role as holding their ministerial masters to account.
Was Brian Purcell, secretary of the Department of Justice, emissary or executioner?
From the moment that Purcell rang Martin Callinan’s front door bell last Monday night, the Garda Commissioner was a dead man walking. And Callinan must have known his fate the second he saw the face of the official in the hallway.
DANNY McCoy of the employers group Ibec was losing the run of himself. “Of course,” he declared at the big business bosses get-together last Wednesday, “we should go back to the Celtic Tiger. We should just be more sensible.
“The Celtic Tiger gave us a prosperity in which our living standards are immensely higher today than they were 10 years ago. This notion that we do not want to go back there is nonsense.”
This weekend public confidence in the gardai hangs in the balance. The politically appointed chiefs at the top of the force are under scrutiny. Critics thunder that our addiction to political patronage dictates that top gardai are joined at the hip to the Government.
If top-level promotions in the gardai are too political the position of judges is worse. While only top gardai are appointed by the Government, all judges are chosen by party politicians. The potential for political favouritism is unlimited. Unhappily, that potential has been fulfilled in the Four Courts. In spades.
TDs are queuing up for seats on the Oireachtas banking inquiry. Last week, Peter Mathews TD wrote to Sean Barrett, Ceann Chomhairle of the Dail, seeking support for his campaign for a seat on the inquiry. Peter reeled off his experience in chartered accountancy, his MBA and his long 20-year stint in ICCB bank.
Others are, more quietly, jockeying for the job.
PERHAPS Paul Kiely, the big beast from the Central Remedial Clinic, was watching Friday’s Late Late, Toy Show. Kiely earned €236,000 last year for looking after the needs of disabled kids. If he caught the programme, he would have seen eight-year-old Domhnall O Confhoala from Galway enjoying a moment of happiness.
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Did Charlie Haughey save the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC)? In 1987 Lady Valerie Goulding, CRC’s great founder, declared that “but for Charlie, we’d have no centre today”.
LAST Thursday morning George Bernard Shaw was groaning in his grave.
The socialist champion of the far left Fabian cause would have been horrified. The playwright who left a third of his royalties to Ireland’s National Gallery would be shaking with disbelief. The Stalinist sympathiser who loathed the free market would have had a right to feel betrayed.
DO you detect the hidden hand of the mandarins in the current Freedom of Information shenanigans?
Mandarins love secrecy. Freedom of Information is a dagger in their hearts, a citizens’ disease seen by them as promoted by populist politicians.
