Fine Gael & Fianna Fáil ARE the Crisis. Irish politics explained.

After the absolute colossal gombeens of Fianna  Fáil lead us over the ledge only one political party were ready to step up to take the mantle,  only one party dared to take the hard decisions, only one party was brave enough to oversee the  total corporate sell-off of the entire country like a modern-day Raj administrating rule  here on behalf of the vulture capitalists and cuckoo funds. These blue shirt of modern  heroes were the only ones with an ideology so ready-made and extreme that recogni

zed that  yes, those normal people in the streets, at least the ones haven't be forced to emigrate yet.  Yes they not the banks had to pay for the rampant recklessness of the financial system and implement  perpetual austerity. Take the brave decisions to dismantle our public services, watch a healthcare  system fall into ruin, sell off all our state assets and basically sell everything that wasn't  nailed down, and actually, on second thoughts, everything that was nailed down too. Sell it  all.

Sell it all to the very same investors and speculators that caused a crash in the first  place. Thing is, unlike the constant narrative that's wheeled out that Fine Gael were forced to  make that hard choices, the truth is the policies they have implemented in Ireland that's caused so  much suffering, that's seen catastrophic societal breakdown, mass emigration and the unprecedented  transfer of wealth to the rich is actually what they represent. It IS their ideology, It always  has been Fine G

ael and Fianna Fáil ARE the crisis. People reared in workhouses as you're aware, are no great acquisition to the community  and they have no idea whatsoever of civic responsibilities. As a rule their highest aim  is to live at the expense of the rate-payers! consequently, it would be a decided gain if  they got it into their heads to emigrate. Often in Ireland politics feels like it's removed  from the rest of the world. The media especially likes to treat the centrism of Fine Gael and Fianna Fá

il  as the natural order and adopts a dismissive attitude to any other analysis of society  that's outside the narrow confines presented by the establishment. Of course, that's because  since the formation of the Free State the same establishment has been in place to defend their  interests and that of capital. The same strata of a society dominated by the professional classes  including the media. The old Ireland that remedied any radical thought with a hurley around the  feet and then the head

, right back into the obedient embrace of a Catholic theocracy. The same  joyless, sexually repressed, sadists that dictated this authority represented by the church and class  were to be respected and feared and which stifled and suffocated generations of Irish people. A  place where social mobility was non-existent. Any hope to fulfill yourself intellectually,  sexually or creatively or in many cases just to survive with enough to eat you were expected  to leave. And millions did. One of the f

irst acts of the first finance minister of the new  Irish Free State, Ernest Blythe, after the end of the civil war in 1923 was to cut the old-age  pension by a shilling. The defeat of the Republican forces containing the bulk of those radicals and socialists that had fought in 1916 and the war for independence, left the stage open for what can  only be described as the counter-revolution. The victors in that Civil War, the pro-treaty Free  State Government was made up of businessmen professiona

ls and middle class conservatives and  ensured the perpetuation of the highly centralised state administrative system, which closed off  access to power to the broad mass of ordinary people. The professional classes, property owners,  capitalists, industrialists and bankers still had that access and the influence that went with it. So  too had the Roman Catholic hierarchy. There was even enough time, when fearing their dominance  on power and capital being threatened by Fianna Fáil entering the

Dáil, the new Irish Free State  establishment, well, supported and fostered actual goose-stepping Nazis saluting fascists. Eoin  O'Duffy was the Blueshirts leader and first leader of Fine Gael. Something they seem reluctant to acknowledge. Go on their website and marvel as they don't even mention it at all. Thankfully  for fans of subjugation rather than being a socialist threat that would shake up the status  quo, De Valera and Fianna Fáil rapidly proved to be nothing of the sort. Winning power

in 1932 and with  that, the establishment of today was set in place. 100 years of it. And the thing is they wouldn't mind a ghoulish  dystopia because as a lot of us suspect, some people are getting really bloody rich. We  joined the EU 1973 and adopted an economic approach reliant on foreign direct investment. The  Maastricht treaty was signed in 1992 and to join the euro and the single market the Eurozone periphery  was expected to liberalise and deregulate its banking sector. Low interest ra

tes and intense  competition from the newly entered European banks and domestic Irish banks drove an unprecedented  property bubble. One of the largest asset price bubbles in the history of the world. The Irish  economy had transformed into one almost entirely reliant on credit, domestic demand and not much  else. But it was cheered on by the establishment, their cohorts in the media, the developers and  the landowners. The Irish wealthy connected class borrowed billions in a frenzy, and Fianna

Fáil, the  dopes, continuously poured petrol onto the fire by adding even more tax incentives for property  investment. Bertie Ahern even said people should go kill themselves if they questioned it. The Celtic  Tiger was the darling of the economic world. A perfect neoliberal model for small countries to  follow. Then the bubble burst. The debt owed was 5 times more than the entire economy was worth.  Every bank that operated in the state had loaned large sums of money. A lot to developers secur

ed  on land and were essentially bankrupt. For the last decade Ireland went through  something described by author and journalist Naomi Klein as the Shock Doctrine, also known  as crisis capitalism and it's only through a major crisis, manufactured as part of a deliberate  policy framed by corporations and trust funds with influence in government with the type of society  we see today in Ireland be able to be imposed. The short term profits offered by purely speculative  investment has turned th

e stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis creation machines. And  when the dust settles that leaves states stripped of all its assets, their people much worse off  but the architects of the crisis ending up as the beneficiaries. And Ireland was no different. The  entire story is extremely murky. I mean, we went from the reckless lending of global banks along  with unregulated speculation almost brought down the world economy, to, actually we've decided  that the banks and private inv

estment funds that created the crisis aren't actually gonna  pay, in fact, hey, Ireland, we're gonna make it sovereign debt. So the Irish people are gonna  pay, in fact, you're going to pay 42% of the entire European banking debt. Oh! umm, since we've  instantly bankrupt your state, you're broke. So you're gonna have to pay for it by taking this  massive €64 billion unpayable loan, with interest that you'll barely be able to service. Saving  even unsecured bond holders while selling off all your

public and state assets to the same  speculative ghouls that caused the crisis. And since you're so damn reckless you'll submit to a  program of supervision, meaning that the ECB will gain leverage over the levers of government in order  to seek specific changes to the way Ireland was being governed. It's called bailout and you  have to accept or else bomb goes off in Dublin! But that's not fair said some of us, while the rest  figured out what class of a scam government bonds spread yields, cr

edit default swaps and memorandum  of understanding were. ......ing about, it's defunct, it's over, it's finished. Now why are the  Irish people required under threat from the ECB while the Irish people required to pay billions  to unguaranteed bondholders under threat to the ECB? You didn't answer the question the last time  so maybe you'll answer it this time. I think what is already sa.. This isn't good enough, you people  are intervening in this society causing huge damage by requiring us to

make payments not  for the benefit of anybody in Ireland but for the benefit of European financial institutions.  Now could you explain why the Irish people are inflicted with his burden well I think I hav........ You have nothing to say? there's no answer? is that right? we all partied said Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil in unison while serving us up on a platter to international capital. Irelands  wealth was the sustenance they need to fill the dark, empty, cavernous void of greed at the heart of

  the system. But that hunger is never satiated so all the land and property and distressed mortgages  required to nama to bail out property developers and Anglo. We're gonna sell those for buttons  to vulture funds to make the lives of families in negative equity hell. Recapitalised banks, flush  with all your money will then get busy screwing over more Irish families with tracker mortgages  of overcharging billions while handing out pamphlets on the most effective forms of suicide  after being

made homeless in a ditch. And just in case you're wondering, apart from the people of Ireland , none of them are ever actually going to pay taxes ever again. Not the banks. Not the Vulture funds or  Apple or Facebook or any multinational Corporations. In fact we're gonna pay millions in their  legal defense to not pay billions of tax owed to us because we've also decided that Ireland's  only future and purpose is to be a corporate profit funnelling Banana Republic. Facilitating  the richest peo

ple in the world to hoard their wealth in tax havens while the citizens live under  perpetual austerity. if you think about it, in normal circumstances would  Irish people vote for a completely failing health system? One of the worst in the developed world  it's so bad that A&E are overflowing, people are dying on waiting lists, corpses rotting in  the corridors, yep, I'll say that again. Corpses rotting in the corridors. Which incidentally, Fine Gael with  their customary empathy, claimed there

was no evidence of. Even as hospital staff mopped bodily fluids and  tried to console distraught relatives. Of course they wouldn't vote for this but if people have  means they're forced to pay for private insurance because, well, they want not to die. And so it's  normalised that access to health care is dependent on wealth. Of course, private corporations are there  to provide it at a tidy profit. Subsidized by the state giving them public land for free. There's  a reason why global investors

have entered the Irish primary care market because it offers relatively  high profit opportunities anf F**k anybody who can't afford it, because poverty is a moral failing and  if only they got up early in the morning, they too could be living the Irish dream. "Wouldn't it be a  decided gain if they got it into their heads to emigrate!" Do you think Irish people would vote  for a party that said we definitely need more homeless people on their posters? Or even let's  make it impossible for peop

le to ever afford to buy a house or have a place to live. That in exchange  for all your money, you can microwave baked beans directly from your bed that's also your kitchen!  No, but that's exactly what results from their policies because no matter what you're constantly  told about the left its Fine Gael that are the extremists. Oh! guess what Fianna Fáil's solution to  the housing crisis is? They call it a first-time buyers incentive which is really just a subsidy for  private developers! Aft

er everything they're responsible for! Driving up the property prices  again while their developer friends get a tasty profit. The same policies as before the crash. Most of them are landlords. Greedy and stupid Gombeen men. Nowadays housing Minister Eoghan Murphy, a man so out  of his depth that just his picture on Wikipedia is enough to explain the entry on class privilege, is the living embodiment of the corrupt ruling class the British and the free state has foisted on us  generation after g

eneration. He represents Dublin Bay South the former constituency of beady-eyed  arch anti-Republican Michael MacDowell by the way. His grandfather an accountant, famously  swindled millions off the rich and famous of the Irish media and art world. HIS father, a barrister,  senior counsel and I shit you not, erotic fiction author! made millions during the Mahon tribunal  and in doing so actually shows its findings of how corruption is so entrenched in irish elites  way of doing business, it IS t

he Irish elites way of doing business. So what could possibly be  a reason Eoghan Murphy born into the Irish elite will not build social housings to alleviate the  housing and homeless crisis? It couldn't possibly be to defend this class interest and the profits  of the private landlords the hoarding landowners while the inflated price of property now means, it's even more lucrative for vulture funds to repossess people's homes. This IS the Fine Gael property  investor cabal, you know, the club

that you're not in! These vulture funds didn't buy all that land, private property and stressed mortgages at knock down prices from NAMA to not profit massively.  These people don't give a damn that all these young people find it impossible to find somewhere to  live. People driven to suicide from stress or families being evicted with nowhere to go. It's  exactly the same policy the British carried out enforced with the RIC thugs in the 19th century.  But however callous Fine Gael really are, e

ven they wouldn't try to commemorate the tools of  their own subjugation like the R I C and the Black and Tans. "Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan is here in  studio. Minister thanks for coming in to us. Now, 24 hours ago you were speaking to us and you were  defending your decision to press ahead at that stage with your state commemoration for  the RIC and the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Now it's been deferred, why did you change your  mind?" "Tomás McCurtain Lord Mayor of Cork was dragged

out of his bed and shot  in front of his wife and son by RIC officers" "We can't not acknowledge those atrocities and  particularly, because it was a guerrilla warfare, most of the atrocities and the reprisals  were on communities, were on women, children and families. All right, it's not like they're  bulldozing homeless people off the streets! Still groggy from the shock Irish people  are suddenly beginning to ask questions at the inequality and injustice. That it isn't just the natural state

of society and just the way things are. We're beginning to get angry at those in  service to elites in the financial industry, at all our expense. We've seen in recent years a  growing resistance like the hugely successful grassroots campaign against water privatization  and the raise the roof housing protests. I mean we have alternatives and thankfully the media and  Ireland will give a voice to these concerns and alternatives to the government. Oh. Which unfortunately  means, I have to talk ab

out the role of the Irish media in modern Ireland. Political journalism  in Ireland, on the whole, exists to maintain the status quo. There's a huge problem with the private  concentrated media ownership in general and if the role of the media is to be a vital watchdog, speaking  truth to power and vital to a healthy dynamic democracy, let's have a quick, horrified look at the  rotten, putrid corpse of the media here. The private media we can sum up like this: A Cosy relationship  between redact

ed and the government leading to a reduction in scrutiny and the undermining of the  ability of the media to hold a powerful to account and the ability of redacted to dominate Irish  media and have a substantial influence on the news agendas and the content received by audiences.  For those of you not aware, Independent news and media controls much of the daily and Sunday  newspaper market along with the private broadcast media and the majority shareholder is the one  and only Denis redacted O'B

rien. According to a 2016 report by reporters without borders into the  concentration of irish media, they stated democracy would be threatened if a single voice within  the media has the power to propagate a single viewpoint or to become too dominant. Ireland has  one of the most concentrated media markets of any democracy. Accumulation of what has been described  as "Communicative power" within the news market is at endemic levels and this combined with the  dominance of a One private individu

al media owner in the state, creates what the media reform  coalition have described as "Conditions in which wealthy individuals and organisations can amass  huge political and economic power and distort the media landscape to suit their interest and  personal views. There will be extreme election interfere in the election debate and it won't come  from the Russian BOTS or ShinnerBOTS, no matter what convicted liars like Sarah Carey summon from  the nightmares of their dark overlord, to spew all

over the pages of independent. To paraphrase actual  journalist Caitlin Johnson ,the interference will come from the billionaire class and its political  media lackeys. And it will be perfectly legal. On all the traditional media outlets the narrative  is: the People's Choice is Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. We will have lively debates with panels stuffed  with establishment figures that will frame it this way, over and over and over again. With this media  landscape and most people too busy tryin

g to pay rent, in debt, working long hours, commuting in  traffic jams or in terrible public transport thinking of how to afford the unaffordable  childcare, that after forced privatisation is totally unviable. bBoth to parents and providers. It's a  low-key drudgery that forces most of the population to disengage from politics, accept everything  as inevitable, that's the best we can do. You know, you've heard in work or in bars; "Politicians,  they're all the same!" But something's nagging at

the back of the Irish psyche though and it's beginning to  manifest even as we're told that the recovery is complete, the economy is strong and everything is fine.  Now there's signs that Irish people are angrier. That no matter the amount of times that RTE claims that  Gerry Adams was in the IRA, the IFA or the ESB so They're beginnning to sound desperate! So transparent that it's  having the opposite effect. Maybe Ireland, one of the only three other European countries has never  had a Left g

overnment is finally pissed off enough to begin to realize it doesn't have to be like  this. Anyway, the highlight of the election was the leaders debate that kicked off the election  campaign, that spectaculary backfired. So much so that, noted revolutionary and human 2"x4" Pat Kenny  remarked halfway through it "You're both kind of in agreement here" Summing up the history of politics  in the Free State and the Irish Republic for last hundred years. But although it's 2020 and not 1936, a time

when the Catholic Church were waving blue shirts off to fight for fascism in Spain and  ghost writing the Constitution with De Valera through the medium of fear, cruelty and guilt, It's obvious the only difference between the two parties is the different ways they attack Sinn Féin. Micheál Martin the Fianna Fáil leader is a man with all the gravitas a wet sock and the charisma  of several more wet socks stuffed into a cheap polyester suit actually found himself arguing at  one point that he was

less of a total disaster as health minister than his opponent LeoVaradkar who, fresh from being called a Tory boy and reincarnation of Thatcher by a member of the  public, which by his usual standards of human interaction is a roaring success, seem to be on  a one-man charm retreat. He had the presence of a man had just been told that there's an election  and well somebody's gotta have to explain the last nine years to the people. So uninspiring was  this exchange that the only entertainment for

the viewing audience was to cringe at the screen  as Varadkar visibly strained to express basic human empathy, surprising that he risked it though, since the  only recognizable human characteristic he's shown before is a smug disdain for the poor and novelty  socks in place of a personality. Both politicians were so thoroughly out of touch and unconvincing  I got the feeling that a lot of people watching, not a dissimilar way to the fall of communism  when people decided they just didn't believ

e in the system anymore, people all over Ireland  were having a similar epiphany. Two soulless gray opportunistic empty suits with several fat  state pensions with no vision for the future, or even worse, the exact same miserable vision  for the future. That they don't actually have any intention of making us a real functioning  country or address any of the issues affecting people which pisses me right off because we can't  truly enjoy laughing everybody else phone and the proto-fascist dystopi

as. The beige empty waffling  mundane horror of the nature of our rulers just placeholders for the status quo. The second leaders  debate with the rest of the party leaders and it didn't get any better for our boys as a studio  audience resembled an assembly of the Russian Factory and mill workers in pre-revolutionary  Russia repeatedly bursting into rapturous applause every time Richard Boyd Bart said anything "If you want  to solve the housing crisis you don't do as both Fianna Fáil and the gr

eens and then Labour did under Nama is sell-off 40 billion or more worth of land and property assets  to property speculators and vulture funds" between which Mary-Lou eviscerated them, showing  the ruthless efficiency of Denis O'Brien's lawyers trying to sue someone for libel " ...You'd never  imagine that one had crashed the economy and that the other is so fiscally responsible that he's  producing the most expensive Hospital in the world! Leo Varadkar, often a man with the whiff of Tsarism o

ff him, by the end had the energy of a corpse daused in acid and dumped into a mineshaft, whereas Michael Martin,  like an unstable tightly wound ball of spite, the constant attacks at the Sinn Féin leader just give  the impression of him being petty and disingenuous. The human equivalent of a cantankerous, watery cup  of tea whose leadership is as convincing as a limp handshake and with a total lack of substance  only rivaled by the word "Republican" in "Fianna Fáil the Republican Party" The sa

me is happening all  over the Western world but since Irish media's coverage of international affairs amounts to  cut and paste from ex-cia political analysts or outlets like Reuters, who helpfully admit it  recently that they've been funded by the British MOD, people that feel resentment and anger are  looking for answers but find it difficult to contextualize the way globalization has affected  populations everywhere. So I'll just summarize. What Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil represent is the  las

t gasp of a corrupt failing order, they our own local face of a decaying global system that's  based on infinite resources on a finite planet massive debt crisis with gross inequalities so  extreme, 26 individuals own more wealth than almost 4 billion people. A system in order to survive  condemns the vast majority of humans to perpetual poverty due to unsustainable and inequitable  consumption. It's greatest values are consumerism debt and isolating people from each other. Pointless wage slaver

y that author David Graeber called [ __ ] jobs. Millions of people even the middle  classes toiling away in meaningless unnecessary jobs AND knowing it. Creating an environment of  disastrous mental health issues and a lack of meaning and connections in people's lives. Just cured  by prescriptions opioids and prozac in the West and for the rest of humanity the rosy  prospect of toiling away their horrible brief existence in mines. Struggling to breathe  while scraping out cobalt with their bare

hands to feed the corporate Green Revolution need for batteries. It's a system that actively destroys our own habitat maybe a total eco-collapse and  quite possibly leads to our own extinction as a species. Wasn't the free market supposed  to eliminate inefficient unnecessary jobs? jobs that have disappeared tomorrow wouldn't even  change a thing. Didn't Capitalism promise that by now we would be all working less, our basic needs  met, instead of manufactured scarcity with shite wages that bare

ly covers the necessities of living  and the super-rich, haven seemingly decided that given their infinite possibilities, what they want  to do is F**k trafficked children! This is a world where obscene wealth hoarding by the rich on the back of the  workers is called a virtue. That wealth probably hidden on a Carribean island cleared of pesky  native pickaninnies 100 years ago by the British Empire but today has the GDP of the American arms  industry yet, the only thing there is thousands of sh

iny PO boxes for shell companies that  contain papers that simply read: "the bearer is entitled to the entire [ __ ] resources of the  planet" A world were entertainment on Saturday night amounts to guessing when exactly Israel  or Trump's violent neuroses finally snaps and the world comes to a nuclear end over perpetual war  for control of resources that's not only normal but vital, to protect their monopoly on the  distribution of energy and service the world economy, a dogmatic belief in a sy

stem of economics  although so completely demonstratively disastrous but continues to exist because our own collective  delusion that rivals the Catholic Church telling us that no! In fact, that cracker stuck in the roof  to your mouth has undergone transubstantiation and yes you're literally cannibalizing the flesh  of a 2000 year old dead Palestinian zombie The manufactured consent served up by shady establishmeny organs like the Institute of statecraft, the integrity initiative and newstalk 

lunchtime with Ciara Kelly spew establishment narratives peddled by the media and designed  to fit whatever online information bubble we're trapped in by Google and Facebook. It's a powerful  force but increasingly even that isn't enough to sustain the mental gymnastics required to miss  the colossal failure of Neo-liberal economics and the establishment in Ireland that enforce it.  Because as we've seen the Irish establishment only care about themselves and their masters in  the finance indust

ry. They pump billions into banks and allow Vulture funds to make  billions in profits. While they hover over working families. They forced tens of thousands of  people to immigrate and multinational corporations pay not a cent in tax. The endless scandals of  Fine Gael and now Fianna Fáil think it's their turn again?! They will attack anybody who wants to  tax banks, build homes or reduce rents they'll be called dangerous and extreme while  these parasites continue to get rich but there's a rea

l chance for change here first time ever  maybe and their really sh*tting it this time. So yeah I think we can do better, we have to. In Ireland  it starts with getting rid of both of them. Vote progressive candidates and there's a chance for  the biggest shock to hit the Irish establishing since its foundation. Even if on RTE, the revolution  will not be televised.