Beware of shysters bearing promises ... !

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

Homeless on the streets of Galway, May 2019

In my part of Galway, a young man running for the local elections told one of my neighbours recently that he had never heard of Direct Provision.

The system which the Irish State has used to detain asylum-seekers for almost two decades somehow slipped under his radar.

A system which has made some business people, no doubt many of them supporters of his party, very rich indeed had never entered his consciousness before he began to canvass householders across the city.

But, sure, it doesn’t matter.

He’s a sound lad and he used to be a mighty footballer.

He's the new face of the most popular political party in the land.

He wears a shiny suit and, sure, what more do you want from a local politician? He might even swing a planning application for a member of your family sometime in the future.

Another young(ish) man from his party, who happens to be the Minister for Housing, announced this week that young people in our cities should be “excited” by the prospect of co-living apartment schemes.

The en-suite bedrooms proposed are smaller than the recommended minimum size for a disabled parking space and young workers or students should be delighted to fork out €1,300 per month for these tiny rooms with no kitchen facilities.

As a young man in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I remember being shocked by the tiny bedsits some of my friends were living in on weekend visits to Dublin.

It seems the solution to our appalling housing crisis, with 10,300 people now homeless, is to return to the bedsits of the 20th century or the tenement slums of the 19th century, while business people in suits – the kind of people who vote for Fine Gael – can celebrate the huge profits to be made from other people’s misery.

The scale of the homelessness crisis is unprecedented

But we vote for these people, don’t we?

We vote for the kind of people who left my 93-year old relative lying on a hospital trolley for 48 hours last summer.

As I sat beside him for hours and hours, losing hope, I didn’t dare to complain.

Because that’s not the Irish way, that’s just the way it is, and anyway you might just be punished if you dare to speak out.

You wouldn’t want to be left an extra day without a bed because you made a complaint now, would you?

Third world conditions in an Irish public hospital

We all know there have been crises in health care and housing for a decade and yet here they are again, knocking on our doors, filling us full of promises five years on from the last round of promises which led to very little or no action.

In my city, the men in shiny suits tell us we badly need a bypass.

As the climate teeters on the brink of catastrophe, an urban roadway through one of the most beautiful parts of the city is the solution to the city’s chronic traffic problem.

No talk of buses, trams, or bicycles, when planners cannot think beyond the car, even as some of the children of the city are experiencing an obesity epidemic.

At the primary school I pass every morning, the road was widened on both sides to make more room for the parents’ cars. And yet they still double or treble park when dropping off the youngsters in the mornings.

It never entered the minds of the planners, or the local politicians, to look for alternatives to the car or to point out to parents that it might be a good thing for the youngsters if they could walk, cycle, or take the bus to school.

Plans are in place for a motorway to destroy a green area of Galway

Across the city, in another ward, a councillor in a shiny suit has become adept at making slick videos.

He walked through the city centre last year to make a video about buskers. Only he didn’t actually speak to any of the buskers themselves.

In the Capital of Culture 2020, it’s all about business and not so much about culture. Why bother talking to the artists who give the city such a welcoming atmosphere when there are businessmen to listen to and bucks to be made?

Funny, I have never, ever met a tourist who has told me he or she has left Galway with treasured memories of the British-owned shops along the high street.

They tend to love our city for its street life, for its vagabond performers, but try telling that to our local politicians who are more interested in looking after investor landlords than solving the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people who are struggling to pay the rent on time.

The street performers, the artists, the vagabonds, and the ordinary working class people are being driven out of our cities and out of their homes by politicians who have done so little to provide social housing or control spiralling rents since they last came knocking on our doors five years ago.

It’s actually monstrous that so few people (investors, landlords, bankers, developers) are benefiting so much from the troubles and struggles of so many.

So many people I know have no money at the end of each month.

So many with “zero hour” contracts or par-time work barely earn enough to pay the average rent in Irish cities.

So many people worry at night that they are just a week or two without work, in jobs with no security, away from not having enough money to pay the ridiculously high rents on their homes.

So many people I know believe – sorry, know – they inhabit a different planet from smooth talking Government Ministers like Eoghan Murphy, with his proclamation that the young should be “excited” by paying €1,300 per month to live in a shoebox on the edge of town.

But I guess it’s our own fault.

After all, don’t we vote for these “shysters” with their promises time after time?

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world.

Ask them!

Irish Current Affairs Blog of the Year 2018

When it comes to housing, our politicians are letting us down

Here he comes in his shiny new suit, primed for action and full of the joys of life. He wants your vote and he’s ready and willing to engage with you on your doorstep. As long as you don't delay him for too long!

Funnily enough, you haven’t seen much of him for the last five years or so.

There’s football on the telly or you are engrossed in your favourite soap opera and you wonder if you should bother answering the door.

But you should!

Because this is the one time of the year when your local politicians will truly listen to what you have to say.

They are desperate for your votes and some of them are running scared. It’s your chance to tell them what you think.

Such as your disgust that the beautiful green space next to a historic castle, where you like to take an evening stroll, is about to be turned into a four lane urban motorway.

You haven’t spoken to him in five years and maybe it’s time to ask him why he and his colleagues have no imagination when it comes to transport in your city. The medieval streets are clogged and they can never imagine life beyond the car.

Maybe it’s time to tell him how healthy you feel because you abandoned the car and now you cycle to work or school.

But also how unsafe you feel in the mornings because you are so vulnerable on the road.

It’s time to ask why the roads are so eerily quiet during the school holidays and why so many people are so reliant on their cars.

Our streets are gridlocked with cars

Why, in the past five years, have he and his colleagues done so little to provide your neighbours and friends with viable alternatives to their cars?

And why are we building motorways when the very future of your planet depends on less reliance on our cars?

You could tell him that you wrote articles about wonderful plans for a state-of-the-art tram system a decade ago, only for them to be discounted by the "powers that be" at the time.

You could ask him about the scandalous rent prices and how some of the people you work with are spending more than half their wages just to keep someone else’s roof over their heads.

You can ask why local authority meetings can end in furious arguments over issues as trivial or irrelevant as whether or not they should have a monthly prayer and why his party doesn’t feel ashamed that there are now so many homeless children in this city.

You could ask him why a national emergency wasn’t declared when the number of homeless people in this country passed the 10,000 mark for the first time.

Homeless in Galway, just two minutes from Eyre Square

And you could ask him if he felt even a tiny bit of embarrassment when the man in charge of housing people in this city “slept out” for charity last Christmas. All for a glorious photo opportunity, admittedly for a worthy charity, alongside the auctioneer who thrives on pushing up the prices and the businessman who put half of his staff out of work last year.

He might tell you that health care has nothing to do with the local authority, but you might tell him how I felt when I saw my 93-year old father spend 48 hours on a trolley in the Emergency Department of our local public hospital last summer.

About the despair I witnessed all around me and the fear in the voices of people who felt they would be punished or further delayed if they dared to complain.

Only for you to see a smug, happy, smiling Minister for Health post a photo of his dog on social media the following week, seemingly without a care in the world.

You might tell him how hollow the great national “recovery” seemed as you sat there, hour after hour, watching the stressed out hospital staff struggle to cope with the sheer number of bodies in that overcrowded corridor.

Our public hospitals are crowded as the economy "recovers"

You might ask why so many people you know are frightened, clinging on to private health care they can’t afford in the full knowledge that they are only one pay cheque away from being left without a home.

You might ask why so many of your friends and neighbours are struggling, when it still seems that a tiny elite of select individuals can make a "killing" from lucrative Government contracts which are beyond the reach of 99% of us.

You could ask why those who are scraping a living in insecure jobs are forced to pay the deeply unpopular Universal Social Charge, or why the council doesn’t seem to build any houses while so many people are relying on emergency accommodation.

If it wasn't for those charities, or the kindness of friends, how many people would be forced to sleep out in this city every night?

 . . . Or you could leave the telly on and not bother to answer the door!


Got a story worth investigating or a business blog to be written? Email ciaran@ciarantierney.com

--  * Ciaran Tierney won the Irish Current Affairs and Politics Blog of the Year award at the Tramline, Dublin, in October 2018. Find him on Facebook  or Twitter here. Visit his website here - CiaranTierney.com. A former newspaper journalist, he is seeking new opportunities in a digital world. 

Call off the blimp!

The Donald Trump 'blimp' is not coming to Ireland after all 

Let’s call off the blimp, because Mr President is not coming after all.

Well, not yet, at any rate!

It has been amazing to hear so many people in Ireland express regret that President Trump has postponed (or cancelled) his Irish visit this coming November.

They were so fired up that many said they were looking forward to joining a political protest for the first time.

Irish protesters had to reach out to their counterparts in the UK, who turned out in their thousands to make the President feel so unwelcome when he visited London back in July.

Sorry, they said, we won’t need to ship the giant orange “baby blimp” to Ireland after all!

People in Dublin were really looking forward to the sight of a giant baby Donald in a nappy floating across the skyline.

And a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign had already covered the cost of bringing over the six metre high blimp within days of being set up.

Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be part of mass protests against the US President. The sense of anti-climax was palpable as soon as the White House announced that he had postponed his travel plans.

The leaders of two opposition parties, Labour and the Greens, had come  together to announce plans for a joint rally for “democracy, decency, and international solidarity” in Dublin.

As though such concepts, so alien to Mr Trump, were plentiful across the political spectrum here in Ireland.

Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin went as far as to say that President Trump was “no friend of democracy or human rights”.

Mr Howlin said it was important to stand up to Trump on issues such as climate change, the treatment of migrant and asylum-seekers, spending on arms, and the slashing of aid budgets.

In Galway, the local anti-racism group wanted hundreds of people to gather to spell out the words “Feck off Trump” (with a little Irish humour, from the ‘Father Ted’ TV series) on a beach.

In much different times, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy addressed 50,000 people in Eyre Square and the city authorities renamed it as Kennedy Park in his honour.

We are unlikely to see a ‘Trump Park’ in Galway any time in this millennium.

So many Irish people wanted to protest against Trump in November

So many people are disappointed that the street protests are off. They wanted to convey a firm message that Trump’s policies have no place in a modern, prosperous, outward-looking Ireland.

They want to reject the anti-immigrant rhetoric on an island where emigration provided the only refuge for the afflicted through much of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The street protests are off . . . as though there was nothing to protest about closer to home.

The economy might be in recovery, but the recovery does not seem to have reached so many Irish people who are struggling to keep a roof over their heads.

Last week, masked thugs – protected by masked Gardai – used heavy-handed tactics to evict homelessness campaigners from an empty building in Dublin.

Marcing in solidarity with homelessness campaigners
in Galway city centre last week

The sight of masked policemen with no identification on their uniforms caused consternation at a time when there are almost 10,000 people living in emergency accommodation across Ireland.

And now our Minister for Justice says he would support moves to criminalise the photographing of Gardai as they carry out their duties.

Such a move would be an attack on press freedom and should lead to questions as to what the Gardai have to hide.

Would that mean banning photos of public events such as GAA games or the annual Macnas Parade?

The last time I checked such measures were only being considered in states such as Israel, where an oppressive occupation force has a vested interest in covering up its crimes in the West Bank.

Given recent Irish history, we don’t have to cross the Atlantic in search of police forces who abuse their power. In fact the filming of protests has helped to prevent injustice from occurring.

So, instead of worrying about Trump, perhaps we should be looking at how power is being abused much closer to home.

Children sleeping in a Garda Station in Dublin

Last month, a photo of homeless children sleeping in a Garda Station went viral. The youngsters had to sleep on hard chairs in the police station because there was nowhere else for them to go.

The distraught mother who took that photo could soon be guilty of a crime.

Last week, a photo of a sick and distressed 92-year old woman sitting on a chair in a public hospital Emergency Department went viral.

Gladys Cummins posted the photo on Facebook out of frustration and despair. Her mother did not even have a trolley, as she spent 25 hours sitting on that chair.

Two months ago, I saw a 93-year old family member spent 48 hours on a trolley in the ED Department in Galway. The unacceptable has become acceptable and lengthy waiting lists in our public hospitals have become the new norm.

In a supposedly “socialised” health service – compared to the US at any rate – the old and the weak are being forced to spend days lying in corridors in overcrowded facilities.

But Irish people are not taking to the streets to protest about our health crisis.

In June, Irish people became outraged by the images of child migrants on the US-Mexico border crying in distress after being separated from their families. They were outraged by Trump.

Yet few of them have much awareness of the hardships endured by those who spend up to seven or eight years in Ireland’s own Direct Provision system.

A protest against Direct Provision in Dublin

About 5,000 asylum-seekers are detained at 31 accommodation centres without permission to work, or even to cook for their children. Among them are 2,000 children, growing up in highly inappropriate shared spaces with adults from a variety of countries.

Direct Provision centres have been described as the Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes of our times. Some even see them as a "time bomb" for future problems to come.

We have British politicians steamrolling headlong towards Brexit, with little or no awareness that their dangerous language is threatening the peace process which transformed life in Northern Ireland over the past 20 years.

We have the families of victims of loyalist collusion who are shocked that a former member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary is now at the helm of the Irish Gardai.

They believe he has questions to ask about their long search for justice for atrocities such as the Miami Showband Massacre and the Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

We rant against Trump for his sexism, at a time when Irish society has been convulsed by a cervical smear test scandal in which the Irish Government treated Irish women appallingly this year.

A lot of Irish people are disappointed that they won’t get a chance to protest against President Trump, but let’s not pretend that we don’t have some pressing problems much closer to home.



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Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Find him at http://ciarantierney.com/

This is Galway on a Friday night

The mood was sombre as we left the ground. Galway United had just lost a crucial game to a last minute goal from Dublin club Shamrock Rovers and the unseasonable drizzle matched the mood of the home fans for the walk back to the city centre.                            

Homelessness is far more visible than in the past

It was the first Friday night in months that Eamonn Deacy Park was in darkness as we left the ground following a home game and the shortening days seemed to bring grim tidings of a long winter to come for the city’s soccer club.

Relegation was beckoning and suddenly, given the biting wind and incessant drizzle, optimism was in short supply.

I normally drive to Galway United games and park my car across the river at NUI Galway. On this night, though, I had brought a group of 22 students from Mexico, Switzerland, Spain, and Brazil to the SSE League game, where they had revelled in the atmosphere and the quality of the football, if not quite the result for the home side.

So I zipped up my jacket and braced myself for the 15 minute walk into the wind and rain, towards the city centre where I had arranged to meet an old friend in a pub.

What I didn’t expect to discover was that a whole new “neighbourhood” had popped up in my city, barely ten minutes away from Eyre Square and the pedestrian heart of the city.

The Dyke Road is really green at this time of year, a bush-lined roadway between the soccer ground and the heart of the city.

To our right, amid the overgrown bushes, a number of discarded sleeping bags caught my eye. I had ignored them earlier, given the logistics of arranging match tickets for 22 foreign language students, but now I was in no particular hurry as I made my way back into town.

I heard some voices coming from behind the bushes. Someone, unseen, called out to me from just metres away.

Galway is famous for its festivals in Summer time

Curious now, I stopped and peered in through a gap in the bushes. A man of about my own age approached me.

I asked him politely what he was doing there and he told me this was his “home”. Leaving the road for a few minutes, I walked in through the bushes and discovered a makeshift village of six or seven of the kind of cheap tents you can buy for €25 or €30 in one of the discount supermarkets.

He told me that there were a dozen people living there and I felt ashamed that I knew nothing about this makeshift “community” which had popped up just ten minutes from the heart of my city.

I asked him if he was alright and told him I didn’t smoke when he asked me politely for a cigarette. There seemed to be a look of resignation in his weather-beaten face and despair in his quiet voice as I surveyed his appalling living conditions for just a few brief moments.

This was Galway in 2017, the kind of place the tourists never see, and it made me wonder how many other people scattered throughout the margins of my city were living in similar conditions just minutes from prying eyes.

How many were sleeping on friends’ couches or in their cars because the hostels were full? How safe did these people feel, sleeping in tents so near to the city’s main thoroughfare?

And so I walked on into the city centre, where my friend had arranged to meet for a post-game drink before driving home to his small town an hour from Galway.

It's "normal" now to see homeless people on the streets
of Irish cities throughout the year.

With him was another man I had met once or twice before. Also about my own age, he began to question me urgently about the rental situation in the city.

On strong medication for the past decade, the man is desperately seeking a change. He wants to move out of the small town where he can’t find any employment opportunities, where he feels trapped, but feels he is stuck in limbo and can’t move on with his life.

He has battled mental health problems for a long time and now feels it’s time to move on. He would love to get a job in the city, to have something akin to a normal life, and I can see despair on his face when I tell him it costs about €350 per month now to rent a room in my city.

How could he afford that? he wondered. How could he get a job when a decent place to live is beyond his means?

He wants to live a fruitful, meaningful life, but he’s in a spiral of unemployment and broken dreams, surrounded by people in the same predicament as him. Although he barely knows me, he confides that he’s trying desperately to get off medication and that it has hampered his ability to regain control of his life.

I feel bad. I feel as though I’m destroying his dream, even with a brief little chat about the rental situation in my city. And I wonder how hard he would struggle to return to the jobs market, given how the medication has “numbed” him out for years now.

I feel desperately sad to see how sad he is about his prospects of getting a job or a flat in Galway. The “half-way house” he lives in is keeping him off the streets, which he is thankful for, but things most of us take for granted (a job, independence, a girlfriend) seem totally beyond his reach.

Surely, in 2017, “numbing” people out of pain because they have had mental health difficulties in the past is just not good enough. Especially if they really want to make changes in their lives.
I feel apologetic as we bid our goodbyes.

I’m not drinking tonight, as I left my car in Salthill an hour before the football game. So I take my leave after almost two hours in the pub and make my way through the city centre.

In Forster Street, there are bodies huddled in doorways, beside some of the city’s busiest and most trendy pubs. Their faces covered under hoods, people have laid their sleeping bags out as they prepare for an uncomfortable night’s sleep.                              

Students enjoying the Galway Untied game on Friday,
just metres from where people are living in makeshift tents

In Eyre Square, two young men in their early 20s shout loudly to each other as they urinate in full view of a group of appalled Swiss or German tourists. They are oblivious to the disapproving eyes.

I cross the road, where three young women are alighting loudly from a taxi. Already drunk, one of them clutches a drink in her right hand. Excited, perhaps, by the prospect of a night out in one of the city’s clubs, they shout loudly at each other. One of them racially abuses the cab driver before heading off into the night.

The driver glances at me for just a brief moment, shrugs, and drives off to pick up his next fare. His reaction seems to make it clear that this is not an isolated incident on a weekend night.

At the corner of Eglington Street, it seems there is a riot going on. Not to worry, it’s just a group of young people socialising loudly outside one of the city’s biggest bars.

I’m no prude. I used to love socialising in the city centre late at night in my 20s and 30s. But trying to walk by a large group of people who are clearly out of their minds with alcohol is no fun if you are completely sober and walking alone on a Friday night.

I turn down Shop Street, a place which tourists tell me they find scary in the early hours. The place is buzzing with activity, as young people make their way towards the city’s late night bars and clubs. It will be heaving again when the clubs empty out around 2.30am.

I have to admit I haven’t been here for a while in the early hours. On the city’s main thoroughfare, in the heart of the pedestrian zone, I’m quite shocked to see quite a few people bedding down in doorways on either side of the street.

A couple from Eastern Europe seem oblivious to the passing eyes as they argue loudly while laying out their sleeping materials for the night. Tomorrow, people will be drinking lattes right next to the place they now call “home” for the night.

Just 50 metres away, some poor woman is sleeping out on her own. I don’t want to appear too curious, to discover her nationality. A kindly passer-by is down on his knees, asking her if she is ok, and I wonder what circumstances led her to sleep in a shop doorway in my wet and windy city, of all places, in August 2017.

I wonder how she will sleep when the pubs empty out at 2 or 2.30am and the young revellers make their way to the fast food premises. Will she face verbal or physical abuse? It’s already cold and wet in August, but will she still be here in November when the conditions will be much worse?

How did it come to this? That a little makeshift village has sprung up within a ten minute walk of the city centre or that people have no option but to bed down in shop doorways through the night?

That young revellers now see it as “normal” to come across people lying outside under the elements as they make their way to and from the late night clubs?

When did scenes like this become "normal" in Ireland? 

This is Galway, in August 2017. We have just had an amazing festival season, yet the sad underbelly is impossible to ignore if you venture into the city at night.

Why isn’t there more of an uproar in a place where the City Council can devote an entire meeting to whether or not they should say a prayer before their monthly meetings?

Yes, I felt like a bit of a prude on Friday; or a little naïve, to have been so oblivious to the extent of the homelessness problem in my city right now.

 But the City of the Tribes did not feel like the most welcoming place for everyone when viewed through sober eyes on a cold and wet Friday night.

Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. You can find his Facebook page here

Find Ciaran Tierney on Twitter: @ciarantierney

A letter to Donnie O'Trump

Dear Donald,

(Or Donnie ... as we might call ya out here in the wild wesht of Ireland).

Just a quick note to say I’d only be too delighted to join you at the White House, or the Teach Ban if you’d like to learn a bit of Irish, on St Patrick’s Day.              

With President Obama in the good ole' days

Meself and Fionnuala have the bowl of shamrock ready since November and we’re really thrilled by the chance to meet yourself and Melania on March 16.                        

To be honest with ya, I could do with the break. I’ve had a rough few weeks since a feckin’ do-gooder Garda, a policeman to yourself Donnie, almost brought down the entire Government over a few feckin’ penalty points and nearly cost me my job.

It means even more to me to visit this year than it used to when the O’Bamas were in the White House, because there’s a lot of feckers tryin’ their best to retire me at the moment.

But I won’t give up without a fight. I didn’t become the longest serving TD in Ireland, or make Ireland great again, by pure chance.

It’ll be great to have an oul’ chat, maybe pop up to Trump Tower in the Big Apple, or fly down to Florida for a round of golf.

We’ve a good deal to talk about.

Like the feckin’ fake news media. I’m sick to the teeth of them and I can see they’re giving you a hard time across the water too.

They once accused me of being a racist here in Ireland, because I used the feckin’ ‘n-----‘ word at a private function a few years back.

Imagine, you can’t even tell a joke these days with all the political correctness flying about.

Ireland is like America, it’s gone far too feckin’ PC for my liking. So I have to say I admire your straight talkin’.

They’re always accusing me of making up stuff here in Ireland too, especially when I meet this fella with two pints who always tells me just what I want to hear at functions.

They’re like rats, some of them meejia types. Try  as I might, I could never convince them that I often met this fella with two pints on nights out in Dublin or Castlebar.

I see you are planning to build a big wall, and now they’re even sayin’ you are a racist for trying to keep the oul’ Mexicans and Muslims out.

For putting your own people first?

Well, they’ve been accusing my people, the Blueshirts, of being racists ever since we sided with poor oul’ Franco down in Spain in the 1930s.

You can never do anything right to please these people.  
           

President Trump's ban on refugees has led to calls
for Enda Kenny to boycott the White House this year

We can’t build a wall here around Ireland, although I believe those feckin’ Europeans stopped you from building one around your golf course down in Co Clare.

Feckin’ eejits.

I know you were like a vulture fund when you bought Doonbeg and Ireland was in crisis at the time. But we rolled out the red carpet for you when you visited, remember.

Like you, I only back winners and I knew you’d be a winner even then. I'd like to invite you to Ireland for an official visit as long as all the oul' whingers won't kick up a fuss like they are now in Britian.

We could invent an oul' Irish great-grandfather for ya. I'll tell the world from the Oval Office that there were plenty of O'Trumps about the place when I was growing up in Islandeeeeeedy, outside Castlebar. I'm sure your connections in Russia Today and Fox News would be delighted to spread the mighty story of your hidden Irish roots!

Wouldn't it be a great legacy for me to be remembered as the Taoiseach who brought you - the man who's making America great - to Ireland? Sure, I'd nearly die happy, although I've too good a pension set up to be going anywhere too soon!

Anyway, I might have a few tips for ya for dealing with those troublesome Muslims. We have a mighty system here called Direct Provision.

We can’t keep them out, but we can put them up in oul’ cheap hotels owned by our friends for ten to 15 years. We pay these refugees €19.10 a week to stay out of trouble and the beauty of it is we can then provide plenty of money for our buddies to put them up for years on end. Saves us from actually having to build houses for the buggers!

If you can’t ban the Muslims, maybe you could come up with a Direct Provision system of your own. Mind you, I think you have one for the black lads, at any rate, because most of them seem to be in jail.

We could talk about our rogue police officers, too. Maybe you could give me a few tips about those lads who shoot black lads over in the Shtates.

We have troublesome Gardai here in Ireland too, some of them are never satisfied unless they have somethin’ to complain about.

One or two bad apples and they want to discredit the whole force.

Our lads tend not to shoot people, but they cause a fair amount of damage when they go around accusing their own feckin’ colleagues of being corrupt.

We haven’t found the best way of dealing with them yet, although spreading rumours that they might be child abusers seemed to work for a while. It kept them quiet, until it caused all the bother last month.

I’d love to talk to ya about the oul’ health service as well. I see you are getting rid of that Obamacare and I’d like to know how you are getting on.

Our solution here in Ireland is to make the waiting lists so long that patients generally die before we have to treat them. We tend to save a fortune that way, you know, as most of them don’t need treatment by the time they get to the top of the queues!

And, sure, anyone with a bit of money or a bit of sense can avoid the oul' overcrowded public hospitals. My friends with health problems tend to like flying over to Americay, to places like the Mayo Clinic. 'Tis great for you and great for us!

We’ve a bit of a housing problem at the moment here, too. Mind you, it’s not a problem really, because many of us are landlords, so rising rents go down very well with our core voters.

Homelessness doesn’t really bother Fine Gael voters unless a fella has the temerity to die right outside the Dail, but I love the way you attack the media and I’d like to learn more about spreading the word about “fake news”.

I love the way you keep discrediting the news media so much that nobody believes them any more.

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind an oul’ Fox News or Breitbart to spread the Fine Gael gospel here in Ireland. Especially with that hound Micheal Martin breathing down my back.

Then there’s the oul’ corporation tax and your wonderful multinationals. I was pure disgusted when the European dictators (sorry, authorities) told us Apple owed us €13 billion in unpaid taxes last year.

I can assure you we will fight this to the highest level, to ensure Apple will never have to pay a cent in corporation tax to the Irish authorities.

I want to assure you, Donnie, that the Americans will always be welcome here. You are welcome to pay as little tax as you want for as long as you want.

Your soldiers are welcome to stop off here to buy leprechauns and whiskey on their way to and from the bombing missions in Iraq and Syria.

There's mighty hospitality for the US
troops at 'neutral' Shannon Airport

Never mind the ‘loonie lefties’. They say Ireland is a neutral country, but we know who our true friends are here in Ireland.

And I have to say we are honoured to be the only European country to have US pre-clearance on our soil.

Your immigration people are always welcome and I hear they are becoming so friendly that they are now even helping passengers to remember their passwords and open their Facebook and email accounts before they board the planes these days.

Damn right, you shouldn't let anyone into America if you find out they've ever 'friended' a Muslim or a Mexican on that oul' Facebook.

People say you hate immigrants, like the Irish, but sure how could ya? Didn’t you marry an immigrant yourself!

People say you are surrounded by white supremacists, but there’s nothing wrong with a bit of supremacy. In Mayo, we’ve been trying to be the best footballers in Ireland since 1951. What we’d give for a bit of supremacy in 2017!

So, like I said, we’ll be delighted to make the trip to Washington on St Patrick’s Day. Fionnuala has the green dress ready and all.

I promise I won’t give you a lecture about your own tax returns or raise any tricky questions about the 50,000 ‘undocumented’ Paddies living in the US.                  

Should Irish people boycott the White House
on St Patrick's Day this year?

We say that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter here in Ireland. Well, I'm sure that one man's undocumented migrant is another's illegal immigrant.

And Paddy's Day is not the day for tough questions.

Irish Taoisigh have been bringing the bowl of shamrock to the White House for over 20 years and I’m not going to let a bit of racism, human rights concerns, Muslims, or cranky Irish Americans spoil a good party.

You’re making America great again, just like I’ve made Ireland the best little country in the world to do business in over the past six years.

See you on the 16th,

Love and best wishes,

Kim Jong Kenny,
Taoiseach of the Republic.

(Please note that this blog actually admits to being Fake News)


Ciaran Tierney is a journalist, blogger, and digital storyteller, based in Galway, Ireland. Check out his Facebook page here

More information at http://ciarantierney.com

Find Ciaran on Twitter, @ciarantierney

So we were fools ...

So we were fools, were we?

According to an opinion piece I read in a national newspaper at the weekend, the hollowness of the “anti-austerity” campaign was exposed by the failure of the Greeks to overturn the harsh measures which were imposed upon their country.

The Greeks were fools for voting for Syriza, it seems, and we were fools for supporting them in their hopes that a democratically elected Government might just stand up for ordinary people.

But the newspaper columnist, who might as well be paid by the Irish Government to spout pro-Government propaganda every week, believes that we fell for the “seductive slogans” of populist politicians.

He didn’t write a word about the injustice of ordinary, poor people in Greece, Ireland, or Spain “bailing out” a tiny elite of bankers, politicians, and developers who plunged their countries into a mess which was not of their doing.

Instead, he almost revelled in the failure of Syriza to take on the powers that be in the European Union.

So the Irish politicians who flew out to Greece to campaign for Syriza last January should now be eating humble pie.

Those of us who thought there might be another, better way have been forced to concede that austerity is the only option for societies which were riddled with debt by bad right-wing Governments and tiny, smug elites. Or so it seems.

Yes, we’re fools. Fools to think there might be an alternative. Fools to think that people who are struggling to put food on the table should not have to pay for the crimes of the few.

Fools to think that elderly patients should not be lying on hospital trolleys, while our Government slashes and burns – implementing a harsh ‘bailout’ programme – with such a relish.

Or that we shouldn’t have to pay twice for our water while lucrative contracts are handed out to the cronies of the people who happen to be in power.

A street meeting to oppose the installation of Irish Water meters in Galway

The same columnist warns us that our choice is between “stability” and “chaos” in the next election.

In a country in which 54% of the wealth is in the hands of 10% of the population, it could be argued that what he means by stability is really maintaining the inequality of the status quo.

The views of the jobless, the homeless, the patients on trolleys or the couples struggling in negative equity are not taken into account, just as Stephen Collins' cynical dismissal of Syriza's "populism" fails to acknowledge the fact that ordinary Greeks have suffered considerably under austerity in recent years.

His nightmare scenario is that a host of Independents and left wing types will be returned to the next Dail, as opposed to the wonderful people who have led us out of the chaos over the past four years.

When commentators view Irish political life through the exact same prism as our leaders, you wonder about the future of Irish journalism. Surely we need people to question the cozy consensus, to show that there are thousands upon thousands who are still struggling to survive in the Emerald Isle.

When people keep telling you that the Government is doing a mighty job, that the “recovery” is well under way, you wonder if you are even living in the same country.

This remarkable recovery is not evident in the thousands who are still choosing to emigrate, to seek new lives in Canada, Austraila, or Britain.

It’s not evident in the protests against Irish Water which were evident in housing estates all across Galway City over the past few weeks. People in the Westside, Shantalla, and Mervue demonstrated in numbers because they knew they were being asked to pay for a scam.

Who owns the meters? How much are the people at the top getting paid? Is the plan to privatise?

The recovery is not evident in the overcrowded Accident and Emergency Department where I’ve witnessed dozens of people lying on trolleys overnight in recent weeks.

It’s not evident in the Department of Social Protection Office, where people are being constantly urged to join JobBridge schemes – to get their social welfare plus €50 – in order to “massage” the true jobless figures.

Hell, someone was even looking for an experienced solicitor to undertake one of these nine month internships a few weeks ago.

It’s not evident in the homelessness crisis across our cities, or the way in which students are finding it impossible to find affordable places to live.

Homelessness only became an issue last winter when a poor man from Co Kilkenny died within metres of the Dail. Yet charities like the Peter McVerry Trust tell us that we are in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.

It's not evident in the thousands of people with crippling mortgages, legacies from the "boom" days. People who work hard all week but can barely afford a night out on the town because they've been trapped into crippling property debts.

But, according to the newspaper article I read on Saturday, the “recovery” is well underway and the only alternative to the “stability” of our current Government is “chaos”.

It must be great for the Government to know they have such well-paid cheerleaders, urging them on with scare stories about the lack of alternatives every week.

Even if it leaves you feeling that some people inhabit a parallel universe, a long way from the working class housing estates where people have maintained a four week vigil to ensure the Irish Water meters have not been installed.

The article on Saturday might just leave you with a feeling of dread, that we don’t really live in a democracy; and that efforts by parties like Syriza are futile – because the interests of big business and a small elite take precedence over the rights of ordinary people all the time. 

Syriza’s failure to get better terms for the Greek people did not expose the party as “populists” with seductive slogans, it rather underlined the futility of seeking democratic change within the confines of a far from democratic European Union.

But, of course, we are fools for believing that any alternative is possible.