Welcome to the wonderful 'Regime Radio'!

Welcome to ‘Regime Radio’ … right here on your dial every Saturday and Sunday morning.

Giving you all the information you need to know your place in this big, bad world.

You know you should 'rat' on your neighbour, you
really should ... for the greater good!

 . . . First up this morning we have a Government Minister to tell us about his campaign against welfare fraud. The frightening underclass among us are ripping us off for millions and he wants you to “rat out” your neighbour if you see him going on holidays or buying a new car.

Funny that he doesn’t have statistics to back up his claim that welfare cheats are milking the system or that he’s launched his hate campaign against the poor just when he’s aiming, too, to become leader of our land.

And we won’t bother asking him about banker fraud, because we don’t get “sexy radio” out of that kind of white collar crime.

 . . . Now, next up in the studio we have a ‘Senator’ from outside the Pale. And not just any old Senator, but a former successful businessman, until he went bust, who will tell us all about the wonderful committee he chairs.

He’s a great man to talk, this Senator, especially about himself and his wonderful political connections.

What we forget to mention, though, is that he wasn’t actually elected to the Senate by ordinary or normal people like you, dear listener. After failing to win a popular vote, by a complete miracle he was nominated by the leader of a party who bankrupt the country a few years ago.

But we don’t talk about things like that here on Regime Radio!

Or we won’t talk about his old company, and how it survived for so long on subsidies from that same – once disgraced, but now resurgent – political party.

Sure, they are on the way back, we’ve completely forgotten that they brought the country to its knees, and so is our wonderful Senator.

And we only back winners here on Regime Radio!

 . . . Next up we have a wonderful former Government Minister. Wonderful, because he likes the sound of his own voice so much we have no problem inviting him onto the radio, to talk about anything at any time.

We only back winners ... here on 'Regime Radio'!

He’s from deepest Tipperary where they know a lot about the kind of neck it takes to get to the top in Irish politics.

He’ll tell you how he did this and he did that, and he was the first person to raise this or that issue in the Dail. We love big egos here, to match our massive salaries on your favourite Regime Radio!

We won’t ask him much about how his party collapsed after turning their backs on the working class or how one of his colleagues referred to the poor among us as “the f---ing dregs”.

We try to be positive here on ‘Regime Radio’!

 . . . And now we have a communications expert, who will laugh and joke about how she prepares her political clients for grillings on this very type of show.

She’ll defend the indefensible, as long as the price is right. Mind you, she might storm out of the studio if we ask the wrong question. She won't let us talk about nasty religious orders, who have refused to compensate abuse victims after causing them decades of pain. They're great clients, you see, and she's coached them on how to avoid pesky questions.

But, sure, we wouldn’t want to ruin your weekend morning by talking about such horrible issues here on the wonderful, positive 'Regime Radio'!

 . . . And now we have another Senator, a superb male expert on female bodies. We won’t talk about the fact that he was “elected” by a tiny pool of University graduates, or the fact that his beloved Institute seems to have been on the radio more times than we’ve had hot dinners this year.

He’ll give you the courage of his convictions and, sure, if he’s not available this Saturday we will replace him with another member of his Institute who bemoans the biased “liberal” media while she writes a national newspaper column every week.

 . . . We have a special guest this week, a senior Garda officer. We won’t ask her about the corruption, the smears, or the fabrication of evidence which has undermined your faith in the Irish police force; instead, we will guarantee her the easiest interview she’s had since she entered the service at Templemore.

Let's not talk about the viciosu smears, which almost ruined the
life of an honest whistleblower. Sure, it'd ruin the dinner!

. . . And we’ve time for one more superstar, a “celebrity” guest from the heart of Dublin 4. She’ll remind you how insignificant your little life is out there on the West coast, you consequential little peasant, as she gives us “the goss” on “celebrities” you’ve never heard of.

We’ll celebrate the pending arrival of the summer, loike, with our tales of the hardship of camping in the VIP section of a sold-out music festival. There’s no mixing with the plebs for us, here, when we have such access to the stars on ‘Regime Radio’!

There’s no better way of feeling like an outsider in your own land than listening to a lovely group of South Dublin people gossip about other South Dublin people.

Just to remind you how “out of the loop” you truly are down there in darkest Donegal or gloomy Galway.

If you are lucky, yes really lucky, we might have a time slot to feature one of our colleagues just up the corridor, after nailing him or her in the ‘Regime Radio’ canteen. There’s hardly a Saturday or Sunday goes by that we don’t interview one of our own colleagues, just to justify all the money you spend on the licence fee.

We are so glad to bring this dizzying array of high profile guests to you here on ‘Regime Radio’ every Saturday and Sunday. It’s such a stressful job that we have to take about ten weeks holidays a year.

. . . Of course, if you want to find out more about our wonderful station, you might learn more by looking at the people we WON’T put on the show this week or any week in the near future!

 . . . You won’t hear from the young mother from Cork who walked all the way to Dublin because she wants to use medical cannabis to treat her daughter’s severe form of epilepsy.

Her seizures stopped when she got access to medicinal cannabis, but her mother was made to feel like a criminal when she was forced to import the drug from overseas. We can’t have anyone who challenges the law of the land contaminating your little West of Ireland minds!

 . . . You won’t hear from the bank executive turned whistleblower who reported breaches in liquidity to the central bank a year before the nation’s entire banking system collapsed. He might just have saved the State a few billion euros if anyone in authority actually listened to him back in 2007.

He wants to know why no action was taken to deal with his concerns, or why the State contrived with developers and bankers to help out a rotten banking system in a ‘bailout’ which resulted in a cost of billions of euros to the Irish taxpayer.

The authorities have never explained why they didn’t act on his urgent warnings. He hasn’t worked for years, but his voice is not the kind we want to hear to challenge the cosy consensus here on ‘Regime Radio’.

Our readers don't really want to hear about the mum
in Direct Provision who couldn't afford a taxi at UHG

 . . . We won’t hear from the mother who carried her child home from a Galway hospital last week, because she couldn’t afford a taxi on her weekly allowance of €19.10.

We don’t want to upset your dinner by discussing the terrible Direct Provision system – not while we are highlighting the plight of “our own” undocumented Irish fearing for their lives that Donald Trump will expel them from the United States – here on ‘Regime Radio’.

 . . . And we won’t hear from the single mother who has been living in a hotel with her daughter for a year, because the homelessness crisis might also upset our listeners as they prepare their weekend dinners here  on your favourite radio show.

 . . . Or the teenager who was hauled out of his bed at dawn for daring to sit down in front of a Minister’s car during a protest in Dublin. He’s too articulate, too angry, too intelligent and too much of a threat to the widespread view that those awful Irish Water protesters are nothing more than the “sinister fringe”.

Sometimes, you see, you learn more about what’s going on in the real Ireland by looking at the stories we don’t feature here on your beloved ‘Regime Radio’.


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and Digital Storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Check out his Facebook page here He admits to having a sense of humour and denies being a member of the "sinister fringe"

Fear of mass protests and the 'sinister fringe'

“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

― Malcolm X

They still don’t get it, do they?

With all the bickering there has been over the water charges in recent weeks, leading to today’s virtual u-turn by the Irish Government, it seems that the true anger of a mass movement of people has still not been fully understood by our leaders.

Yes, they do realise that 250,000 people marched against the charges, in what used to be one of the most passive countries in Europe. That sent fear through the ranks of back-bench TDs who were already worried about holding onto their seats in the next General Election.

And, today, the new Minster for the Environment admitted that mistakes were made. Alan Kelly is from the Labour Party, who once promised they would not bring in water charges.

Minster Kelly could not even get the u-turn right, as he ran out to a press conference instead of hearing the views of the opposition TDs in the Dail. He reduced the charges, instead of realising that people wanted the entire quango to be abolished, for him to "rip it up and start again".

What the Government don’t seem to get is that people have had enough of austerity after eight years. People are sleeping in cars or crowding out homeless shelters because they can’t afford to pay the rent any more.

Two weeks ago, I experienced for myself what it's like to lie in a hospital trolley for more than 24 hours. There is something seriously wrong with a country which prioritises bankers over the health of ordinary people.

People have faced job losses, losing friends and family members to emigration or suicide, and had their pay packets decimated by the property tax and the wonderfully named Universal Social Charge (USC).

Even though we all know that these new taxes were invented because the Irish Government did not have the balls to burn the unsecured bondholders.

We have seen the bonus culture of the chosen few with the right connections who have risen to the top of Irish Water.

Thanks to social media, we have seen videos of Gardai and contractors confronting peaceful protesters in their own driveways.

These contractors are not looking for leaks in the system, they are installing meters for a private company without the consent of the landowners. And guess who owns the company which is installing the meters?

So a couple of protesters have thrown bricks or abused Gardai and an entire movement has been denigrated in the mainstream media. Thousands of citizens who marched in opposition to the charges have been associated with a “sinister fringe”.

But nowadays people have Facebook and Twitter and You Tube. They can see the kind of footage which does not make it onto our TV screens.

They can see that people are angry, but mostly peaceful in their protests, up and down the country.

Malcolm X lived in an era when there was no access to social media, when elite corporations could control the access to information of virtually the entire population.

When people see that the news on their TV screens or in the papers does not reflect what they have seen on YouTube or with their own eyes, they have a right to be angry.

It’s the injustice of charging people a new tax for water – something which they are already paying for through other taxes – which has galvanised people a lot more than the prices which were reduced by the Government this afternoon.

People attended the water protest in Galway on November 1 who were never previously at a protest march in their lives. And that's what is really scaring the FG-Labour coalition, who are not too bothered when a few hundred march in solidarity with the people of Gaza or the victims of sexual abuse.

These water charges appear to be the final straw for many people who have been fed up paying for the sins of a tiny elite for six years at this stage.

While the people at the top are contriving to make a mockery of the 1916 commemorations, they have done everything in their power to discredit a mass movement which, to them, must seem quite frightening.

The Taoiseach has claimed that democracy is under threat from the “sinister fringe”.

Others might argue that the real threat to democracy we have seen in recent weeks has come from Gardai pepper-spraying peaceful protesters, hurling a young woman to the ground, or contractors “squaring up” to protesters in their own driveways.

That’s not to excuse those who have engaged in violent acts against the Gardai, Government Ministers, or contractors. It was simply wrong to trap the Tanaiste, Joan Burton, inside her car in Jobstown, just as it was wrong for one teenager to throw a brick at the Gardai afterwards. 

But it's ridiculous to blame a huge protest movement for the misdeeds of a few.

Social media posts and videos have shown us the real truth about the Irish Water protests, in a way which would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. 

Unfortunately for Malcolm X, there was no Facebook or You Tube in his time. Unfortunately for Enda Kenny and his Government, videos which have gone viral have exposed the truth in a way which makes people question the "spin" they have been exposed to for far too long.