An awful shower!

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They are an awful shower, those Europeans.

Imagine, the cheek of them! Telling us Irish that poor oul’ Apple owe us €13 billion plus interest in taxes, at a time when we’re doing our best to lure in the multinationals and bring our young people home from the four corners of the earth.

Over €13 billion in unwelcome taxes? No wonder the country is up in arms. People must be enraged.

They must be ringing their TDs all the way from Cork to Donegal to tell them to fight it all the way to the top Court in Europe.

Have those pesky Europeans no idea how we do things in the land of the stroke, the hand-shake, the wink, and the banana?

Have they no idea how important it is for us to provide "sweeteners" to keep the big boys on board in the greatest little country in the world to do business in?

Taoiseach Enda Kenny: doing his best to fight the unwelcome

€13 billion-plus windfall from the European Commissionn

Some eejits are wondering what €13 billion might do to help us tackle our homelessness crisis or our hospital waiting lists, or at least abolish the deeply unpopular water charges, but this time the European Commission have just gone too far.

They can’t just force us to take tax off one of the biggest corporations in the world.

So the Government is up in arms and rightly so. This is a new Emergency, in the only country on earth which had its own name for World War Two.

Our leaders are off to Brussels, or Strasbourg, or wherever these big decisions are made, to fight tooth and nail for Irish sovereignty.

Funny, there were no Government delegations heading off to Brussels to fight for Irish sovereignty in those far off days following the 'bailout', when the toxic banks were taking almost €9,000 from every man, woman, and child in the country.

There weren’t too many calls, from official circles at any rate, for the Europeans to stop meddling in Irish affairs when the State spent €60 billion to stabilise those toxic bankers.

Figures released three years ago showed that the financial crisis cost Ireland 25% of GDP, but there was no talk of forcing the Europeans to change their minds.

Come to us with a €13 billion windfall, however, after Apple set up a global HQ in Cork, and the Europeans are threatening Irish democracy.

There was no talk of bullying within the EU – and not much solidarity from the Irish – when the Greeks were tied into a bailout which seems set to cripple their economy for decades.

It cost us €60 billion to “bail out” the banks and yet I’ve never met a single person who felt that Anglo Irish Bank should have been saved. The net cost has been estimated at about €43 billion, as the Government is set to recoup some of this sum.

But, in all those dark years of austerity since 2008, we never heard the Government challenging the Europeans or telling them that they had to re-think their financial policies.

There was no point in complaining when the offshore Irish were forced to pay for 42% of Europe's banking debt.

Now they are offering us €13 billion, plus interest, and the nation is up in arms.

Apple: their decision to set up a HQ in Cork could

yet have huge implications for the Irish economy

So … impose water charges, force the low-paid to pay the ‘Universal Social Charge’, or bailout the banks to the tune of €60 billion, and our European masters are only doing their jobs.

Sorry, lads, there's nothing we can do, because the lads out in Brussels said so. And we can't change their opinions on anything.

Vote the wrong way in two European referenda and, instead of accepting the result, the little Irish “pixie-heads” have to vote again until they come up with the “right” result.

Demand a return of some of our fisheries rights, or an explanation as to why we gave away our natural resources in the Atlantic at a knock-down price, and you'll be told these decisions were irreversible.

But tell us we are due €13 billion plus interest in unpaid taxes, and those European bullies are suddenly threatening the very fabric of our democracy.

After years of inertia by our leaders in the face of European bullying, it's great to see Enda Kenny out battling on behalf of the Banana Republic ... standing up for the rights of the poor little Irish in the face of this unwelcome windfall.

An awful shower, indeed, those pesky Europeans!


(find me on twitter, @ciarantierney)

Imagine ... there is no war

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Today I read a post on Facebook by a Galway man who said he “did not feel safe near any Muslim” following the appalling terrorist attacks in Brussels.

“Can anyone blame me?” he asked, mulling over the fact that the person beside him in an airport, cinema, or train station could be just about to detonate a bomb.

When taken to task by anti-racism activists, concerned that he has a prominent position at a Galway sports club, the man refused to withdraw his words.

Imagine, just imagine, how disgusted people would be if a British person made such a sweeping generalisation about all Irish people during the height of the IRA bombing campaigns in the 1970s or 1980s.

Imagine how awful it would sound if someone made a comment about how unsafe they’d feel beside Jewish people. We saw how the demonization of that particular religion led to the insane killings of six million people in Europe in the 1940s. Well, never again.

There are 1.7 billion Muslims all across the globe, yet now some people in the US or Europe are prepared to demonise them all.

US Presidential candidate Donald Trump would prefer to turn all 1.7 billion of them away at the border, while ordinary people in Galway now say they don't feel comfortable standing beside them at the cinema or the bus queue.

Racism is unacceptable, so is ignorance. Views like that, based on nothing but racism and fear, lead to the kind of mentality which allows people like Donald Trump to demonise minorities.

There is no war between Muslims and non-Muslims.

How can we hate all Muslims? I spent three weeks on a Muslim island in January and the only thing that made me fearful was how crazy some of them were on the roads.

A few extremist yobs use the name of Islam to destroy innocent lives, just as the US military bastardises the word “freedom” when it bombs the hell out of innocent people in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

What happened in Brussels yesterday is appalling and, yes, we should mourn the dead. 

But some lives are more important than others and we can be so selective in our grief. 

What kind of message does it send out when we mourn the loss of innocent lives in Paris or Brussels, but ignore those lost in Yemen or Syria?

George Orwell was right. Some animals are more equal than others. The media make that very clear in the wake of each and every atrocity. Some get wall-to-wall coverage, some are conveniently ignored. Sky News spend a full week reporting on a tragedy in Brussels, but hardly bother to mention the loss of innocent lives in Beirut.

We will have images from Brussels on our TV screens for the next week, before the networks move on to the next 'big story'. But we never, ever see the pain on the faces of ordinary children in Syria or Iraq. We hardly ever get to hear their stories, in contrast to the saturation coverage from the streets of Brussels, including interviews with neighbours where the Islamist terrorists lived.

We should mourn the loss of all innocent lives. 

 

How ISIS attacks are reported in the news

Most people, whether they are white Europeans or Iraqi Muslims, just want to bring up their children in peace and get on with their lives.

We should ask what motivates young men to blow people up in train stations or airports.

Just as we should ask why innocent people thousands of kilometres away are slaughtered in the name of freedom – and why we never see their anguished faces on our TV screens.

Often the truth is too uncomfortable to face. The young men who commit these atrocities in Europe grow up in our cities, attend our schools, and yet seem so alienated from the Western world. 

Most of them are not, as the Daily Mail might suggest, refugees from the war-torn Middle East who sneaked into Europe along with thousands of migrants, hell bent on destruction.

It's scary that these young Muslim men, after growing up in Europe, can be brainwashed into thinking that they will be whisked to Paradise if they blow up 20 innocent people in a busy airport or train station.

It's equally scary to think that they've seen through the hypocrisy of it all, that spilling blood in some cities generates far more publicity than the loss of life in other parts of the world. Because, most of the media tell us, that's just the way it is. 


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