The shed housing plan is the ultimate example of the governing Irish political ideology that everything must be set up for someone to make money from it.
Here's a national crisis being converted into an opportunity for people who're unaffected by it to screw money out of those who are.
A new low.
50 ways to lose your electorate.
Closer to the hidden power you think?
Arguably we have outsourced government to a cadre of power-seeking individuals who cos play governing and measure their success *against each other* every 5 years at a ballot.
The constituents are currency.
An excellent piece on the pitfalls of outsourcing.
Ireland is addicted to contracting away all kinds of State capacity
www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...
Almost everything we argue about is a substitute for the thing we should be arguing about: the immense wealth & power of an oligarchic class, which captures governments, ruins lives and wrecks the living planet.
This class redirects our rage at scapegoats. To resist its lies is to resist its power.
Follow-up to “The Blockade Is the Message” is up.
3 collapses in a weekend the blockade ended:
📌a gov’t that found €750m for a tractor but not €100m for disability
📌an opposition that filed the right motion on the wrong grounds
📌a tradition claimed by people it was built against
🔗 shorturl.at/j7lWA
Chíle nationalised copper mines in 1973. US backed coup later that year.
See the pattern?
I've long believed the drivers of HGV and large buses should drive from a perspex bubble bolted to the front of the vehicle, low down.
Same, same, and like MAGA and other ethno-nationalist groups the world over, they are successfully exploiting the manifest failings of “democracy“.
Were they wrong to blockade citizens? Yes.
Will they do it again? Almost certainly.
The answer is not more troops on street but more humanity in Dail.
“In Finland, the number of homeless people has fallen sharply. Those affected receive a small apartment & counselling with no preconditions. 4 out of 5 people affected make their way back to a stable life. And all this is CHEAPER than accepting homelessness.”
IT SAVES PUBLIC MONEY to house people.
_"The Government’s consistent cheerleading for data centre expansion has reached a point of reckless disconnect from the economic reality of Irish citizens... Irish families are paying nearly double the electricity rates of these industrial facilities, effectively subsidizing the massive energy consumption of global tech giants while struggling with a punishing cost-of-living crisis." https://greenparty.ie/news/uncritical-expansion-data-centres-will-fuel-social-inequality-and-energy-crisis-cllr-hazel-chu
Data centres uses 32% of Ireland's total electricity supply but pay almost less than half of the residential rate. So we're effectively subsidizing tech giants during a cost of living & energy crisis. Meanwhile this Govt continues to cheerlead their expansion & continue to fail in their obligations.
It is actually remarkable that we had two weeks of serious social unrest about energy and fuel prices and yet, I don’t think I saw or heard anything about “Data Centres” from any protest organiser or in their demands to the government.
Also it's OUTRAGEOUS to me that it would be cheaper for me to drive than use public transport here in Clare. Public transport is supposed to encourage people to avoid cars. I'm probably going to have to buy a car as I don't think I can afford public transport anymore. Madness.
We must hold the publishers responsible in court, with criminal liability extended to the C-suite.
Am quoted by columnist Jennifer Horgan in her @irishexaminer.bsky.social piece this week.
www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/colu...
Spot on and funny. A must read.
“Only in Micheál Martin’s mind is this unashamed unpreparedness an excuse, rather than its own failing. Not only a failing, but perhaps the failing that precipitates all others.”
This week’s column.
AI is like… “hold my beer..”
The method for choosing fellow humans to be our "leaders" is not fit for purpose. It's broken. It trends towards psychopath and narcissist, so when a reasonable human emerges they are wildly celebrated, possibly beyond what their "accomplishments" justify.
Unsurprisingly the website seems busy this morning
What man? I see two imbeciles and a chyron.
This is a genuinely mindblowing combination. 1) Deliberately false information, 2) promoted in schools, 3) using public money, 4) in the service of private profits, 5) at the cost of our collapsing ecosystem.
Just when you think the Healy-Rae's have done their worst. There is no bottom for them.
As I posted earlier, Ozzy bit the head off the wrong bat.
NZ Greenhouse Gas Inventory shows Fonterra and the intensive dairy industry is fuelling climate chaos www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/pre...
#climatechange #nzpol #toomanycows
We really don’t deserve this planet tbqh.
As I mentioned elsewhere, Ozzy bit the head off the wrong bat.
