So now we know what capital projects the government is cutting. Metro North, Grangegorman DIT campus and Thornton Hall prison. The National Children’s Hospital will be built with lottery money which seems appropriate, considering the risks we take when entering a hospital, but it will still be in the wrong place. In this, Bertie Ahern gets his way and manages to look after his former employers, the Sisters of Mercy in Eccles Street, for whom he worked as a book-keeper.
Note: Despite his vainglorious claims to the contrary, Bertie Ahern is not an accountant and did not attend the London School of Economics, except perhaps to deliver a pizza. This man, however, is drawing an annual pension of €152,000 as a reward for having destroyed the economy and condemned hundreds of thousands to emigration or poverty or both.
Metro North was a ludicrous, inflated idea that emerged fully formed from Bertie's ratlike, though minuscule, brain, designed to massage the voting inclinations of Dublin's northsiders. It offered no value to the rest of the country but was simply another Fianna Fáil stroke to guarantee reelection regardless of the cost for the rest of us. Thornton Hall was an equally misconceived vanity project, intended to replace the disgraceful Mountjoy prison, but growing instead into a huge money-swallower, with landowners in the vicinity being paid obscene sums to acquire the site for the State. A motorway was built to the site and an extraordinary underground road, now fit for nothing but a movie set.
Obviously, no consideration was given to the families of prisoners. How partners and children might get out there to visit was not taken into account, and therefore the scheme carried within itself a decision to punish the families of wrongdoers.
Michael McDowell carries much of the blame for that screw-up.
I have no views on the Grangegorman DIT campus, so that's that. Sorry. Nothing. Zip. Nada.
The DART underground is also dead, but do I give a flying fuck? I do not. Governments in this country seem to believe that infrastructure means Dublin, although of course they use my money for it. They even built the country's motorway network to service Dublin, designing the roads to radiate out of the capital like the spokes of a bicycle wheel. Why would I care if Dubliners have to get a bus instead of a flashy new underground train? I don't care. That's what everyone else in the country has to do.
On the spending side, they're going to build the children's hospital even though we now have final, incontrovertible evidence that it is not being constructed in the ideal location. According to today's papers, the chairman of the review board on the plans for the hospital, Jonathan Erskine, deleted a section of the report confirming that the ideal location for the hospital would be a rural one, which is something I've been saying here for the last six years. What's more, such a location was and is available. Instead of sick children getting better in an open environment with clean air and blue skies, they'll have to put up with inner-city smog, trafic congestion and noise, because the nuns own the site and Bertie promised them a hospital. Because Bertie owed them a favour or needed their silence on something. You decide which.
What have the nuns got on Bertie? That's what I'd love to know. He presented the current government with a fait accompli, lumbering them with a decision that was based entirely on self-interest and cynicism. More insanity. All Bock posts on this debacle are here. Read them and come back.
What can the current government do? I don't know. Little enough, I suspect, having been handed a huge ball of shit by Bertie and his acolytes like Cowen, who is, as you know, an absolute teetotaller at all times, but who suffers from congestion, the poor man.
Did I mention that Cowen guaranteed all Irish banks to the tune of €450 billion even though he didn't know what sort of trouble they were in? Just thought I'd mention that, and maybe also mention that you and your grandchildren will end up paying that bill, even though this doesn't directly relate to the terms of the post, but that's all right. If anyone complains, I'll change the title and that will be that.
They can change all the capital programmes they want, but the fact remains that most of them are politically motivated, devised by a corrupt and incompetent party, skewed to the benefit of one city and now irrelevant, since they were drawn up when the economy was 50% bigger than it is now, at a time when Ahern's cronies were growing rich on a fake property bubble.
We do not need this infrastructure.
Ahern was an uneducated fool. He is still an uneducated fool . The fact that Irish people voted for him in such numbers is a poor reflection on us, but I think his annual pension of €152,000 is a small price for keeping him away from the levers of power.
Now we must dismantle his uneducated, grandiose vision for building things we don't need. Thanks Bertie, you idiot.
Bock,
Funny little country. Forgive the following rant. I'm a nice person really.
As someone who has worked (past tense) on infrastructure (here and abroad) I think we do need certain infrastructure. I agree the children's hospital is in the wrong place but various consultant groups and boards have been 'paid' to come up with the answer the HSE want which is the HSE are right.
Although I do think we need to improve our rail infrastructure which is now fifty years behind even third world Africa e.g. we have no high speed rail links, in fact we can't even run the new trains at full speed as the track system is badly built. I do think good high speed (c. 150 KM/hr would do)is necessary even for a small country I think and CIE have run down our rail system over the last number of years ….so much for the functioning of our rail company.
The NRA have sold our motorways by forming public private partnerships which are in favour of the private partner e.g. if the numbers on the new M3 do not reach a certain level we pay them ……..who made that deal ??? The motorway system also had a basic fault in that it 'shadowed' the main roads whereas it should have been a separate system (look at how Granada, Seville and Malaga are linked, there is no direct road but a motorway system which is common')
Metro North as planned was not fit for purpose as most metro links have greater distances between stops but I do think we should have had a scaled down version serving just the city and the airport.
In short, the NTA (National Transport Agency) are a crowd of cow-towing shisters and sadly we have no strategic planner in the country except the strategy of 'feathering our own nests'
The large pensions and payoffs of senior civil servants (such as Bertie the bollox, Charlie the McCraphead and Mary Hernia starring in the politician role and various shitheads in the civil service) cannot be touched as it is a contractual obligation
Us poor citizens don't seem to deserve such a contractual obligation such as those who paid their tax and made unemployed are sure to get their 'contractual payments' cut to shreds in the next budget. And of course if you were self employed and paid your taxes and that of your employees you are entitled to nothing, nada by the smiling slacker sitting on the other side of the desk (with the state wage and pension in waiting)……………….makes ones blood boil.
I'm gonna go and lie down now………………..
Every point you make has been put here in one post or another. I'm in full agreement with you on all you say.
BAsil,
I am a little more cynical. We have never had a government in the history of the state that paid more than lip service to rail infrastructure. Look at the railway lines they closed down all over the country. In terms of Dublin we had the likes of Todd Andrews closing down the Harcourt Street line because he didn't want the sons and daughters of Protestant stockbrockers having the benefit of it. I think that was the jist of his reasoning at the time, thoughI can't remember the exact quote. Now (bigotry aside) that wouldn't matter much but we had to build and pay for the LUAS line to compensate. That money could have been spent on infrastructure projects for Cork, Limerick or Galway instead. Well maybe not Galway as they didn't have an FF Minister of note at the time LUAS was being built. Mind you, with those fuckers in charge at the time we'd probably have gotten a LUAS in Clara!
RE Your point about the M3 and other motorways. It's a good one, cui bono? I often find myself wondering who owns lands directly in the path of motorways that were subject to compulsory purchase! They wouldn't be connected to FF by any chance? Take a closer look at who owns or owned lands at the Blundellstown interchange on the M3. This is the one that was built within spitting distance of Tara, despite a shorter, less controversial route being available IIRC.
RE Thornton Hall, now that is one that I considered to be really suspicious given the nature and timescale of the transaction. Practically overnight I think, though I may stand to be corrected on that. I found myself harking back to the supposed raison d'etre of the PDs i.e. stopping FF corruption and looking at the PD scion who signed off on it, Michael McDowell. I could only imagine his posturing and grandstanding if such a stroke was pulled by an FFer such as Ray Burke. We wouldn't have heard the end of it. But strangely enough, when McDowell signed off on it – not a dickiebird. So did whoever owned the land prior to sale have links to the PDs or to McDowell personally? It would be a major concern to me if that was found to be the case, though unfortunately not a shock.
As for your mention of civil servants pay and pensions. Isn't it curious that lower paid ones have had the pension levy and some (small) cuts so far. But that senior civil servants pay and conditions are sacrosanct? You'd nearly think that politicians pay rates are benchmarked to their pay or something.
Bock,I agree with your analysis on this one even though in general I would like to see infrastructural progress.
The average punter in Ireland perceives the entire public service as being integral to all this abuse you have outlined.Rightly or wrongly,ordinary citizens are pretty pissed off with everything to to with the running of this state.
I have a question regarding the 'contractual obligations' that prevent the government from reducing current state pension payments to civil servants, particularly the higher paid ones.
In September the 'Troika' ordered the Greek Government to reduce all civil service pensions by twenty per cent if the Greek bailout was to continue.
If the 'Troika' issued the same edict to the Irish government, threatening to withdraw all bailout funding if they didn't reduce pension payments and lump-sum payouts, what would our government do ? Would they say 'Sorry Troika, but we have contractual obligations and legal restraints, so we cant do that' ? To paraphrase Mr. Gogarty, the fuck they would !
Its just when it's the plain people of Ireland they have to answer to that they come up with this shite.
They already reduced the pensions of all public servants. I don't know why they talk about contractual obligations in regard to secretaries of departments.
I wonder has there been much money paid out to these 'projects' that are now not going ahead?
In terms of Ahern. I listened to a Mike Murphy interview with him recently.
Christ he's one deluded man. Bertie I mean.
He denies everything. The economy was all in good shape when he left and he was still harping on about the Lehman brudders.
I was reading recently that Julian Assange was saying he has or had some documents relating to Swiss bank accounts, with some top politicians being the account holders. I wonder would Bertie be one?
Ah sure, probably not, he never had a bank account, didn't he once say?
I don't think he's one bit deluded. Ahern is the consummate bullshitter. He'll tell you day is night and he'll do it with a straight face.
Yeah. I reckon he suffers with this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudologia_fantastica
He's a pathological liar basically.Definitely. The more you listen to him the more it becomes apparent.