Post by SAD IRELAND ADMIN on Oct 4, 2006 14:20:58 GMT
It is hard to allow the Bertiemate affair to pass by without some observations and comment.
Can you imagine Gordon Browne, the chancellor of the British Exchequer letting it be known to wealthy British businessmen that he was skint ? What would their reaction be to the revelation that the person charged with running the financial affairs of the British State was a financial disaster without even a bank account to his name ?
Imagine it became known that Tony Blair took thousands of pounds for personal use from a whip around on his behalf by wealthy businessmen at a lunch. Can you see the BBC dispatching Jeremy Paxman and a TV crew to 10 Downing Street and affording Tony a 'Gwyneth Paltrow Moment' to illicit the sympathy of the British public on the matter ?
RTE must now surely give up the ghost of pretence to be anything other than a propaganda machine and wing of government. Their flagship political debating program Questions and Answers has long since dropped the Answers part. Last Monday's programe failed utterly to hide it's carefully selected planted audience and resembled a Fianna Fail Ard Fheis. So much so, one member of the audience asked to a few handclaps and an embarrassed silence from everyone else if he was the only person present not in Fianna Fail.
Bertie is indignant and fuming at the fact somebody has let the cat out of the bag and we all now know of the sorry financial mess he was in and the remedy he found for it. However, at the time he was not too concerned or bothered about who it was who told the businessmen showering him with tens of thousands of pounds.
Crimes of corruption were committed in Ireland so great no agency of state could detect them. When these crimes did come to light so great were they that no court in the land could try the perpetrators. Instead, to the cost of tens if not hundreds of millions the Irish people have been treated to the spectacle of corrupt businessmen and politicians swaggering into tribunals boasting of their exploits in corruption. As the tribunals come to an end we now have yet another leader of this country exposed for accepting money from businessmen with vested interests. It was neither a loan, a gift or a donation says he. What was it ? What use tribunals if all the same people involved now use the same defence for future less than honest dealings ?
Can you imagine Gordon Browne, the chancellor of the British Exchequer letting it be known to wealthy British businessmen that he was skint ? What would their reaction be to the revelation that the person charged with running the financial affairs of the British State was a financial disaster without even a bank account to his name ?
Imagine it became known that Tony Blair took thousands of pounds for personal use from a whip around on his behalf by wealthy businessmen at a lunch. Can you see the BBC dispatching Jeremy Paxman and a TV crew to 10 Downing Street and affording Tony a 'Gwyneth Paltrow Moment' to illicit the sympathy of the British public on the matter ?
RTE must now surely give up the ghost of pretence to be anything other than a propaganda machine and wing of government. Their flagship political debating program Questions and Answers has long since dropped the Answers part. Last Monday's programe failed utterly to hide it's carefully selected planted audience and resembled a Fianna Fail Ard Fheis. So much so, one member of the audience asked to a few handclaps and an embarrassed silence from everyone else if he was the only person present not in Fianna Fail.
Bertie is indignant and fuming at the fact somebody has let the cat out of the bag and we all now know of the sorry financial mess he was in and the remedy he found for it. However, at the time he was not too concerned or bothered about who it was who told the businessmen showering him with tens of thousands of pounds.
Crimes of corruption were committed in Ireland so great no agency of state could detect them. When these crimes did come to light so great were they that no court in the land could try the perpetrators. Instead, to the cost of tens if not hundreds of millions the Irish people have been treated to the spectacle of corrupt businessmen and politicians swaggering into tribunals boasting of their exploits in corruption. As the tribunals come to an end we now have yet another leader of this country exposed for accepting money from businessmen with vested interests. It was neither a loan, a gift or a donation says he. What was it ? What use tribunals if all the same people involved now use the same defence for future less than honest dealings ?