Take Two (or Three) in Carton House, Maynooth.

Remember during the housing boom-mirage, the Irish Times property people did a "Take Five for €xxxxxx" feature?  It might still be running for all I know, but they usually picked out 5 properties, one in Ireland and the others abroad, for a given amount of money.

So, just supposing the figure was €700,000, the Irish offering was a bog-standard, three-bed semi-D in Dundrum, and the foreign equivalents were normally a rambling chateau in France, a mountain-top Schloss in Germany, a crib-style pad with swimming pool and quadruple garage in Florida, and half an apartment block in Budapest.

Most readers will know I often drive to Maynooth for my beer and other less essential foodstuffs, and the odd time I might stop off at Carton House for a ramble around the demesne.   Sometimes I wear very dark glasses to protect my eyes from the garish Argyle jumpers of the golfers as I pass the course there.  I don't want my good walk spoiled.

There are some lovely houses there too, and if you were self-employed - a drug-dealer for instance - it would be an idyllic place to live.  For wage slaves like most of us, though, it would be out of bounds as the hike out of the grounds and the further trek into Maynooth for public transport would be too arduous.  Then there is the price.

But just supposing you found yourself a lucrative sideline based around mainlining - or you won the Lotto -  you might be presented with a dilemma in choosing between the two properties featured in Gombeen Nation's very own Take Two in Carton House.

The asking price for one is €1,010,000.  It boasts four bedrooms and measures 1,897 square feet, according to MyHome.  The other four-bedroom house has a tag of €735,000 and measures 2,700 square feet, with 400 of those in the basement.  The smaller one looks bigger in the pictures, but I assume that is due to the design being over three levels rather than two.

I suppose it depends on how important a condescending, bird's-eye view of the golfing hoi polloi from your bedroom window is for you?  Or maybe you want to see the police coming earlier and have more time to flush your stash down one of the toilets?

Then again, you could make it a Take Three and simply go for yet another one that is identical to the "cheaper" offering above, with an asking price of €1,775,000 - over one million more!.

I assume the decor must be considerably better.  Or the vendors don't have a calendar.

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Commercial vehicle clampdown in Ireland - no escape from Vehicle Rip-off Tax.

There has been much in the news  recently on the Government’s suspected intentions to “clamp down” on people who use commercial vehicles for private and social purposes.

It seems that buyers of such machines may, in future, be required not only to sign a declaration at the local police station that they will use their vehicles for commerical purposes only, but will have to produce a “Revenue registration identity number” to prove their business credentials.  My oh my.  If only our Government was as stringent on all matters tax-related, as J.P. McManus, Dermot Desmond, Bono and the rest could testify.

And why is this, you may ask?   Well, it is because our Government continues to make Irish-based motorists pay more for their vehicles than residents of most other EU states through the continuing application of excise duty, or VRT (Vehicle Registration Tax).

Here is an example of why some people here choose to buy cars with the back seats and windows taken out, in order to lessen the effects of the Irish Government’s anti-EU tax, which is contrary to the spirit of free movement of goods within the European Union.  For the anti-SUVers, I'd add that I've even seen Volkswagen Golfs in Ireland that have undergone the "van" treatment:

Nissan X-Trail, 2-litre diesel, 150 bhp, passenger car.
Price: €40,535. Road tax: €1,050.

Nissan X-Trail, 2-litre diesel, 150 bhp, commercial “van”.
Price: €25,790. Road tax: €288.


And would you blame them? Or should they gladly hand over an extra €14,745 – plus an additional €762 in annual road tax - for our imbecile Government to pump into Anglo Irish Bank, Nama, and all the rest?

In the extensive coverage of this matter the obvious point has not been raised.  Namely, it should not be why commercial vehicles are cheaper in Ireland than private ones.  It should be why Irish residents must pay up to 40% more for their private cars than residents of other EU states.

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Note: Lots more on this on the blog.  Just tap "VRT" into the search box at the very top-left of the page..

Hansfield: the Dublin-Dunboyne station that isn't.

Look at the picture above.  It is from Manor Park Homes’ glossy brochure for the Barnwell, Hansfield, housing development in Ongar, north-west Dublin.  You will notice they boast about a rail service offering a peak-time frequency of every 15 minutes?

All well and good, you might think.  However, assuming such a service does transpire on September 2nd (Irish Rail’s promised introduction of the Docklands-Dunboyne rail link) if you live in Hansfield you will have to be content with watching the shiny new trains whizz past, as they will not be stopping at the newly built station.

Why? Well, it seems Manor Park Homes and Menolly Homes have not provided a planned access road to Hansfield Station, meaning the trains will pass through like it is not there.

First we have ghost estates, now ghost train stations.

We’ve more ghosts than a Doris Stokes séance.

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Louis Walsh has a pop at RTE

I don’t know much about Louis Walsh, other than the facts that he is responsible for Boylife or Westzone, and hosts a programme called Britain’s Got X-Factor.

But anyone – all of us, that is –compelled to pay a licence fee to keep the broadcasting apparatus of Official Ireland, RTE, in existence might well concur with the doyen of dubious light entertainment’s views on the ministry for public enlightenment that is Montrose.

Ken Sweeney, the Indo’s entertainment reporter, quoted Walsh as saying that:

“RTE need new faces and new attitude. They launched the new schedule and it was the same old faces, who I’m fed up looking at. RTE is the civil service. It’s a big building with all these people doing nothing. RTE should be sold off and the people running it sacked….


How are TV3 so successful when they have a smaller budget and only one little studio? They call RTE ‘the station of the cross’. God know’s it’s true. We have all been suffering for years. It has to end soon. Please.”

Agreed. There is something more than vaguely disconcerting, in my view, about the whole concept of a State broadcaster. Wochenschau did not have the benefit of being beamed into people’s living rooms but even then Dr Goebbels saw the mind-shaping potential of public broadcasting. OK, that is an extreme example, but you get the idea.

Be it Pravda, Der Stürmer, or RTE (yes, I’m being extreme again) you can’t expect Government-controlled media to be impartial to political influence. Never mind the fact that RTE enjoys an unfair advantage over TV3 by taking in advertising revenue and a TV licence fee, unlike the BBC.

It can’t be a good thing for the media to be controlled by the likes of Murdoch and O’Reilly either, but some kind of monopoly legislation should be capable of preventing this.

In which case, RTE should be kicked off the stage.

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Daft property reports and McWilliams herald further falls. And what about the earnings multiples?

We shouldn’t be surprised by recent reports from property website Daft that confirm house prices remain in decline and rents continue their downward slide. One of the reasons lending got so out of hand was the banks were handing out unsustainable multiples of people’s earnings, pre-crash.

There is little doubt that when they lend at all in the foreseeable future, they will be constrained by the strict application of the multiples formula when calculating affordability.  So, let’s say that they now apply 3.5 x times earnings for the primary income and 1 x one the secondary income (a generous multiple) for a couple who are both in full-time, permanent employment, that could work out as follows:

Income one: Average public sector earnings of €50,000
Income two: Average private sector earnings of €38,000*

= The maximum they can borrow is €213,000.

Even if one was on €80,000 and the other on €60,000 (and I don’t know any such couple pulling in that between them, but maybe that's the company I keep) the maximum amount would be €340,000.
Obviously, single people or couples with one earner could borrow correspondingly less.

I invite you to take a look at My Home or Daft, where you will still see asking prices of €750,000 for detached houses in established parts of Dublin 15 (just an example, as it's my own backyard), and see if asking prices tally up with those figures.

Then take David McWilliams piece in the Indo yesterday, where he predicts further price falls based on the following investor model:

"With government bonds yielding more than 5pc, it's fair to suggest that an investor would need to get a yield of at least 7pc from housing. So taking the average house price at €220,000 and the average rent at €863 per month, we see that the investor gets -- with these prices and these rents -- a gross yield of just over 4pc. This is before he takes into account his funding costs. Why would he bother getting into the market just yet?
In order to make a 7pc yield at the present average rent, the average price of houses would have to fall to €135,620. This suggests a huge further drop in average house prices here."

By either criteria, Tom Parlon’s famous bottom looks very far away at the moment.

Mercifully.

*both figures sourced from Ronan Lyons, Feb 2009.

Nama Zombie hotels to drive legitimate concerns out of business

One of the best descriptions of Nama I came across was on the blogosphere, namely Bock. He described the government / banker / developer scam thus:

“Whatever they tell you about haircuts, remember that Nama will still be paying the banks more than their loans are worth, through a deft piece of doublethink known as Long-Term Economic Value.

This means that Nama doesn’t buy the assets from the banks at their current value, but at some price which they hope will emerge perhaps ten years from now. It’s like buying an Ikea table and waiting for it to become an antique.”

Excellent.

But it seems that the Irish builder/developer class, their banking payrollers and, by extension, Fianna Fail just cannot see the connection between their cronyism and the country’s subsequent headlong plunge into crisis.

It has been remarked before on the blog how people who badged themselves free-marketeers – clowns like Charlie McCreevy – consistently used State intervention in the form of so-called “stimulus” policies to interfere in the residential and commercial property markets.  Even when the market was overheated Fianna Fail kept these policies going in a bid to keep the billions flowing into their builder buddies' bank accounts. It was like injecting crack/cocaine into someone suffering from an epileptic fit.

They did the same in the hotel industry with their tax breaks, and now many of these hotels that came into being on the back of such largesse are being taken over by Nama, effectively becoming “zombie” operations that, despite unsustainable borrowings and debt levels, have been allowed to stay open and operate at below cost price.

The result? Viable businesses will go bust as they can’t compete against such artificial, unfair competition. The Irish Hotels Federation expects 80-90 long-established, legitimate hotels to go into receivership this autumn.

What are the "free-marketeers" saying now?

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Tescos Maynooth Stella Artois scandal.

Frivolous Sunday post alert.

What the hell is going on? In any other country the indignant masses would be out on the streets storming the place, but not here.

Despite assurances that prices have dropped 14% in the past year, and despite the fact that the Government has reduced VAT on alcohol, Tescos has seen fit to increase its price for a crate of Stella Artois by 33%.

How can a major supermarket chain justify this increase on such an essential foodstuff, when real costs have actually fallen?   Sounds like blatant profiteering.  Then there’s the fact that Tescos Maynooth petrol and diesel prices are actually higher than the local pump here in Blanch.

What’s that about economies of scale and all the rest?

Maybe it's time for a Lidl diversion.

Rapist Larry Murphy released today.

A young woman was abducted from a Carlow car park by 36 year-old Larry Murphy in February 2000. He punched her and forced her into the boot of his car before driving to a dirt road nine miles away where he raped her.

Murphy then forced the woman back into the boot of the car and drove to an even more isolated spot in the Wicklow Mountains where he again raped her, and was in the process of strangling her when two men hunting foxes arrived on the scene. The rapist fled and the young woman escaped with her life.  Murphy later told gardai "she was lucky".

Murphy was only apprehended because one of the huntsmen recognised him.  He was subsequently found guilty of rape and attempted murder. The woman was too traumatised by her ordeal to even give evidence in court. Murphy’s sentence was 15 years.

That was back in 2001, and Larry Murphy walks free from Arbour Hill prison today, having attained early release for "good behaviour".

During his time in custody, the rapist/attempted murderer refused to take part in any rehabilitation programmes. As a result, there is intense media and public interest around the subject of his early release back into society, and not unreasonable fears that he still poses a danger to women.

Murphy was convicted before the Sex Offenders’ Act of 2001 came into force, so he cannot be made subject to any form of compulsory supervision by the State and any community into which he moves will not officially be made aware of his past.

While this site is hardly a “hang-'em, flog-'em” one, the question has to be asked as to how the perpetrator of such a vile crime can be released back into society without having undergone any kind of rehabilitation?

There is a danger – given the high profile and nature of the case – that when the law is seen to be an ass, some might seek their own kind of justice.

This is in nobody’s interest. Certainly not Larry Murphy’s.

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Social welfare fraud, public-office fraud, and tax evasion. The differing Irish attitudes towards each.

An article in last weekend’s Sunday Times offered food for thought on the authorities’ contrasting attitudes towards social welfare fraud and tax evasion, and the resources dedicated to tackle the respective abuses.

It seems that measures introduced in 2005, giving the State powers to data-match information held on individuals, have resulted in €484 million in welfare savings for the exchequer. The operation is run by 600 civil servants who monitor information on births, deaths and marriages from the General Register Office. I imagine such practices have been standard in other countries for decades.  What is more interesting, however, is the following.

In the last 10 years, according to the same feature, there were 3,183 prosecutions for social welfare fraud in Ireland, resulting in 48 people being jailed for 12 years and fines of €43 million being imposed.   In the same period, only 39 prosecutions for tax evasion resulted in a clawback for the State of €2,250,000 million. 

That is: 3,183 prosecutions = €43 million, against 39 prosecutions = €2.25 billion.   Surprisingly, only 6 tax fraudsters were jailed. 

Then again, given the nature of our rotten little republic it is not surprising at all, is it?  Given that tax “avoidance” by the very wealthy is lauded by much of the general public, who rush to pay homage to the likes of Bono, J.P. McManus, Denis O’Brien, and all the rest of them.  “Ah sure he gives a lot to charity, isn’t he great?”  is the mindset of these ragged-trousered, knuckle-headed, philanthropists.   Evasion is only the next, illegal, step.

And then we have Official Ireland agonising over whether corrupt politicians, who painstakingly plundered the public purse through fraudulent expenses claims, should be prosecuted – or even barred from public office.

We are a nation of no-hopers, and that is the truth. We need to be invaded again.

And this time the  “oppressors” should not leave until the civilisation process is complete.

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Irishman, Michael Keogh, saved Hitler's life.

Thanks to F for sending in the following clip from the Belfast Telegraph, concerning an Irishman who did the world the disservice of saving Hitler's life.

The long-lost memoirs of an Irish soldier who saved a young Adolf Hitler and fought on both sides during World War I have been published after being missing for over 40 years.

The amazing wartime tale of Dubliner Michael Keogh began when he joined the British Army in 1914 and won the George's Cross for bravery before being captured by the Germans in 1916.


While in captivity he was persuaded by members of the Roger Casement Brigade, a group formed to recruit Irish soldiers to fight against the British as a display of Irish republicanism, to join them.   The detailed accounts of Mr Keogh's life, written after his experiences, mysteriously disappeared while he was on his deathbed in James Connolly Memorial Hospital in Blanchardstown in 1964.


According to his son Kevin (84), who lives in Swords, north Co Dublin, a man "dressed as a priest" took them from under his pillow two days before he died. The files were eventually found in the UCD archives and given back to the family in 2004.  The memoirs report a chance encounter with a young Adolf Hitler that changed the course of history.

Shortly after the Great War, while Mr Keogh was staying in Munich to fight against the Communist rulers who had declared a short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic in April 1919, he recalls how he led a military operation to save the life of the future German tyrant.  He had earlier met Hitler in September 1918 near Ligny on the French Border, where the pair were in the same Bavarian Regiment.

In his memoirs he describes how, as the officer on duty during the anti-Communist revolution, he received an urgent call about a riot involving 200 men and two "political agents", one of them being Hitler, in a nearby gym.

"I ordered out a sergeant and six men and, with fixed bayonets, led them off on the double."

Mr Keogh explained that two political agents, who had been lecturing from a table top, had been dragged to the floor and were being beaten.

"The two on the floor were in danger of being kicked to death. I ordered the guard to fire one round over the heads of the rioters. It stopped the commotion."  The group of soldiers managed to haul out the two injured politicians.... "The fellow with the moustache gave his name promptly: 'Adolf Hitler'.  They had come to the barracks as political agents for the new National Socialist German Workers' Party."

Keogh, who died in 1964, went on to become a founding member of the Roger Casement Repatriation Committee and a leading figure at ceremonies in Casement's honour.

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Noel Dempsey takes Government jet to Donegal MacGill conference.

You might think with the ongoing Callely revelations, burgeoning dole queues, and a growing budget deficit, that our politicians would make some effort to at least be seen to moderate their innate piss-taking propensities.  Not so.

Transport minister Noel Dempsey is the latest to hog the spotlight for wasting public money and racking up needless expense.  He took the government Gulfstream IV jet on a short hop to give a speech last July at the MacGill Summer School – a pointless talking shop that takes place each year to “debate issues of national importance”.  The jet costs €7,890 an hour and is capable of flying across the Atlantic, according to a report in the Indo.

As if that was not bad enough, his Garda driver travelled the 274KM from Dublin to pick him up at Derry Airport, before chauffeuring him the remaining 94km to Glenties, Donegal, where MacGill is held.

And what was the topic of discussion at the conference?

"Reforming the republic—issues of politics, economics and accountability".

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If you're drivin', come into the parlour. Car crashes into Clare house - again.

Monday’s papers reported the case of an elderly man in Clare who was lucky to escape death when a car crashed through his front wall and into his house the previous day.

Incredibly, it is not the first time 80-year-old Martin McGuane has had such an experience – this was the seventh time a motorist gatecrashed his home.

The situation has become so perilous that the retired farmer shuns using his front door and opts to use the back one instead.  It seems there have been at least 20 accidents on the road outside his dwelling and he has asked the council to erect safety barriers, but to no avail.

Indeed, according to McGuane the local council insists he must build his own barriers, due to “liability issues” - an option he refuses to take as he “would then be liable if someone hit it and was hurt”.   Road safety, Irish style.

So, let's see. We have an 80-year-old man afraid to sit in his living room for fear of being mown down by an errant driver because:

1) The council can't be bothered to put up safety barriers on an obviously dangerous section of road.

2) The elderly house occupant is afraid of being sued.

Only in...?

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Water skiing (or wakeboarding) the canal in Tullamore.

I had never heard of wakeboarding until someone sent me this You Tube clip. Apparently, according to Wikipedia, it is:

“a surface water sport which involves riding a wakeboard over the surface of a body of water. It was developed from a combination of water skiing, snow boarding and surfing techniques.

The rider is usually towed behind a motorboat; typically at speeds of 18–24 miles per hour depending on the water conditions, board size, rider's weight, and rider's comfort speed. But wakeboarding can also be performed with a variety of media including closed-course cables, winches, PWCs, and ATVs.”

Unless you live in Ireland, of course, where you simply find a nearby canal, hitch a rope onto the back of a friend’s car, and off you go.  It must be something to do with the (unofficial) recession, where inflatable banana rides off the Torremolinos coast and the like are not as attainable as they were in the past.  At least it is some kind of indication of a “can-do” spirit, I suppose.

I love the dialogue at the start of the video. “It won’t start off in second gear!!!”.

Erm, how about putting it into first?



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Gaeltacht spokesman Frank Feighan "must do better".

Gaeilgeoir long knives out for man who "can't speak Irish".

I was alerted to the radio this morning by the sound of elongated, strident-yet-strangulated, middle-class Dublin vowels issuing forth.  Nothing new in that, you might say - but these ones were dripping with enraged indignation.  “Maybe it’s a McDonalds opening up on Shrewsbury Road?” I thought, “or a Dalkeyite who regrets spending all that inheritance money on property, and wants compensation?”.  Whatever it was, they were not happy.  Then I heard them utter the phrase “minority rights”, so I turned up the volume a bit.

Turns out it was one of the Irish Language enthusiasts who got a slot in yesterday’s Irish Times letters page to condemn Frank Feighan's appointment as Fine Gael’s Gaeltacht spokesman.  Feighan, it seems, has “very limited Irish (Gaeilge)”.  Poet Gabriel Rosenstock, who has a weekly column in the paper, as Gaeilge of course, was one of the signatories.

Feighan was then wheeled on to Morning Ireland to apologetically defend his position, pointing out that he wasn’t the first appointee, or indeed minister, so lacking.  He argued that the administrative and day-to-day running of the region did not demand such language proficiency, but was taking Gaelic grinds just the same - presumably to appease his purist foes.

Whatever about all  that, I find it truly, sickeningly galling to hear members of the Irish Language Lobby talking about “minority rights”.  It is a particularly tasteless kind of parody, and a base slur on the many people in this country who really do suffer discrimination on an everyday basis.   In contrast, members of the Irish Language Lobby in Ireland are anything but a put-upon minority – they are a privileged elite who use their chosen language to put those who do not speak it at a disadvantage in education and employment, particularly in the State sector.  But they do like to put on “the poor mouth”.

A report published by the University of Limerick in January of this year found that “Irish was the language of the elite in Ireland… with speakers enjoying higher income than the rest of the population” (Irish Times, Jan 9th, 2010).

Key findings were:

• Non-speakers of Irish are twice as likely to be unemployed as their Irish-speaking counterparts.
• 42 per cent of Irish speakers worked in senior professional, managerial or technical jobs, compared to 27 per cent of non-speakers.
• Just 12 per cent of Irish speakers are in semi or unskilled jobs, compared to 20 per cent of non-speakers.
• Irish speakers were also seen to enjoy the advantage of a network of social contacts and all of the perks that go with such a network.
• 22 per cent of Gaelscoileanna sent all their Leaving Cert students to third level, compared to a progression average of 7 per cent (2009 Irish Times Feeder Schools List).

So much for “minority rights” then.   But I suppose elites are minorities too, in their own way.

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Irish house prices could drop 70% from peak

Professor of economics at Trinity College Dublin, Kevin O’Rourke, has predicted that Irish house prices could fall as much as 70% from their peak valuations. Such a fall would “rival the steepest drops ever recorded in the advanced world” according to a report in Sunday’s Tribune.

While some might question the use of the word “advanced” in relation to Ireland, there is no doubt that economic gravity must make itself felt, and that "the more prices rose before the peak the more they have to fall after the bursting of the bubble”, as O’Rourke puts it.

It is always instructive to check the credentials and motives of economic forecasters, and to simply dismiss the utterances of any who are attached to banks, building societies, brokers, the government or any other vested interests.

When economists attached to such institutions – including the supposedly venerable ESRI – were telling us in 2006 that the housing market was in for a soft landing, it was only the likes of David McWilliams, Alan Ahearne (since gone over to the Dark Side and silenced by a job in government) and Morgan Kelly who were speaking sense  -  forecasting the landing would be anything but fluffy.  Tellingly, the former was an independent “celebrity economist” and the latter two were attached to universities.

So maybe this guy is also worth listening to?  Never mind Parlon, Lenihan and all the rest of them. Nama only exists because property loans were unsustainable. The banks are on public life support for the same reason. The only thing that makes sense for the housing market, and subsequently the economy, is serious deflation.

Add in the fact that the prospect of a property tax has not been dismissed, water charges are in the, erm, pipeline, the banks can’t lend what they used to, and migrant workers from the 10 accession states admitted in 2004 will have unrestricted working rights throughout the whole EU from next year – resulting in fewer potential tenants for buy-to-let investors – and that 70% figure might become a reality yet.

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Do as I say...

Now, who would have thought anybody could get away with parking a motor veh-hic-le so inconsiderately?  Right on top of a traffic light on a corner?

Spotted outside the court buildings on Chancery Street, opposite the Bridewell Garda station.

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Nenagh Feins Tipperary "boy racers" video - thank goodness for the RSA.

"Dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear".

You can hear Road Safety Council chairman Gay Byrne saying it already as he dons his special glasses to look at the video on this You Tube thing.  "We need more speed cameras",  he'll sagely conclude at the end.

The video below features three boyos from the "city of Nenagh", Tipperary (and it's not "a long way away" enough, after seeing this).  The lads thought it would be a very good idea to film themselves proudly standing in front of their cars, registration plates and all, and then post footage of their adventures driving around the locality doing various, erm, death-defying stunts on You Tube.

Needless to say, it didn't take long for our super sleuth gardai to track them down while watching the whole thing over a few doughnuts in the station, after the Road Safety Authority had brought  the video to their attention.  "If a young child had cycled out on that road, if they had come around a corner and found a slow-moving tractor, it would have been mayhem", said the RSA's Noel Brett.   It would, Noel. Mayhem.  I wonder how many liiives you've saved by telling us that? 

Anyway, the video is causing a bit of a stir in Ireland at the minute - it even got a slot on RTE news the other night.  Much of the hysteria  is of the "we are all going to be killed by speeding, reckless hoodlums as soon as we venture on to the roads" variety.   Never mind the fact that these half-wits in their clapped out bangers - look at the windscreen on one of them - would probably have been overtaken by Gaybo himself. 

They are just eejits.  Get over it. 



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Animal cruelty in Ireland and Smithfield Market

 In a previous post  – the one dealing with the penguin stolen from Dublin Zoo  –  a friend of the blog quoted Kant’s statement that “we can judge the heart of man by his treatment of animals.”  Well, if that is the case, we are in a very bad place indeed. 

Last week, an article appeared on the front of the Herald Metro documenting the fact that “six horses in as many days” had been subjected to acts of cruelty that were “just plain evil”.

One horse had been painted head to hoof in red paint.  Yes, a horse was painted – such things happen in Ireland.  Another one was underweight and had severe leg injuries, while the animal rescue people had to destroy another one that was covered in wounds as a result of being “thrashed”.  A pregnant mare was put down after she had been “ridden to exhaustion” by skangers.  Sorry, youths.   The legs of another two horses had been tied so tightly that the rope had penetrated to the bone, and one of them also had to be destroyed.

Only a few weeks ago, Socialist councillor Ruth Coppinger called for “young people” to be allotted free grazing space for their numerous horses running wild in parts of Dublin.   Just in case any of you are not fully familiar with contemporary life in Ireland, I should inform you that it is “normal” to see horses, in various stages of degeneration, running/hobbling around certain housing estates.

What happens is local kids go into Smithfield Horse Market, buy a couple of  piebalds, take them back to their estates, and let them run wild.  This phenomenon is most prevalent in localities that seem to be permanently blighted by unemployment – even in the boom times.  Coppinger justified her request roughly on the grounds that horse riding is not that much different, recreation-wise, to playing football.  And we have football pitches, right?  The ones that have not been wrecked, anyway.

I disagree.  Far from encouraging people to go out and buy horses they can’t look after, she should be calling for the closure of Smithfield Horse Market – or at least demanding basic regulations on transactions carried out there.  The Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has repeatedly called for the mandatory microchipping and licensing of horses.    I would have thought that this is a reasonable request, but it is one that has been consistently ignored by the authorities. 

There is a responsibility implicit in taking ownership of an animal that goes beyond handing over a few Euro at a dodgy market.

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Alone in Berlin - Hans Fallada. Its application to Ireland.

Government is government, and government is force,
Left or right, right or left, it takes the same old course.

Crass. Bloody Revolutions, 1980.

It’s hard to know where to stand on politics really. The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848,  the time of the famine, and quite a period has elapsed since then in terms of manifestos and famines.

There was no exact timescale given in Marx' and Engels' work for the collapse of capitalism, other than it was inevitable. However, capitalism – with all its glaring faults - has survived the Russian revolution and the subsequent corrupt Stalinist states of the old Eastern Bloc.

But at least the idea of communism was a noble one, if you will excuse the paradox. It had the eradication of classes, along with exploitation, war, racism, sectarianism and all the rest at its heart. In sharp contrast to the idea of fascism - and Nazism in particular – with its hateful messages of race superiority, Darwinist nationalism, anti-humanitarianism, state oppression, and the promotion of war as politics by other means. Oh, and the little matter of the genocide of a whole, selected, mass of people. So the only thing you have left is to question authority.

 I have just finished reading “Alone in Berlin”, originally entitled “Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein”, written by Hans Fallada in 1947. Fallada lived in Nazi Berlin and was sent by the government of the day to an insane asylum for not meeting their expectations of political understanding. He survived the experience and subsequently wrote the book, based on the true story of resistance by two ordinary working class Germans, Otto and Elise Hampel.

It’s a great book, if written a little clunkily… though I don’t know how much of that is to do with the translation. It is based on the Hampels’ campaign of dropping subversive postcards around Nazi Berlin in the war years, after their son had been killed on the western front.

The postcards bore such messages as “German people wake up! We must free ourselves from Hitler’s supporters!”, “Hitler’s war is the workers’ death, there will be no peace with Hitler’s regime” and “Why fight and die for Hitler’s plutocrats?”.  It all sounds relatively harmless and, given the odds stacked against the couple, quite Quixotic. But these were the days before the Internet, where radio and the newspaper were the major means of information dissemination .

The saddest thing is, the vast majority of the postcards left around Berlin did not promote critical thinking of the Nazi regime among the public but, rather, were delivered by conscientious citizens straight to the Gestapo.  Now, it is all very easy to sit back and criticise the actions of such Berliners for carrying out their civic duty while the thinking, critical, ones were sent off to concentration camps. But they were doing what they thought was right - they didn't realise they were participating in one of history's most evil episodes.

The best thing, it would seem, is to take an Anarchist approach and question and criticise all orthodoxy and authority. That is the only thing that brings progress... no matter what country or what time you are born into.

Otto and Elise Hampel where beheaded in 1943 as enemies of the state.

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ESRI says 120,000 will emigrate by end of 2011

There was a new sound on Morning Ireland yesterday. It was Brian Cowen’s newly animated, and painfully forced, upbeat “we’re out of recession” voice.

We know that the official “out of recession” stats are founded on GDP figures, based on exports created predominantly by the multinationals.  For the first quarter of 2010 GDP weighed in at +2.7% compared with the previous three months of 2009.  However, GNP - which measures only indigenous business - still fell by 0.5% in the same period (Irish Times report, 1st July).

Yesterday, the ESRI forecast that unemployment will continue unabated and predicts 120,000 people will emigrate by the end of next year.  But we’re out of recession, officially.  And what is official, as opposed to what is reality, is all that matters in Ireland.

It’s funny, the last time I heard, unemployment was increasing. So considering there will be more people on the dole, the banks are not lending, and fewer people are working - with a greater burden on public finances - you might wonder what will drive any real domestic recovery?

Also, according to the same ESRI report, Ireland’s budget deficit is expected to rise from a predicted 12% (last April) up to 20% of GDP figures, mainly due to Eurostat rightly reclassifiying the bank bail-outs as government expenditure rather than investment.  And remember that GDP figures are an exaggerated measure of the true performance of the real economy.

Cowen can sound as cheery as he likes, but it's only to drown out the fact that he's splashing about in brown stuff of his very own manufacture without the benefit of a paddle.

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