Feb
9
Wealth
February 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment
So this islands ‘wealth’ is earned by the private sector, the public sector is not ‘productive’ ie. nurses/teachers/Gardí etc. have nothing to make/sell. Add to this retirees, OAP’s unemployed and it is a massive figure. Also NGO’s and Government and the list keeps growing. This group of people are paid approx 30% more than the private sector worker. We have become more and more reliant on companies like Dell for private sector employment, now at 10% of GDP.
There is also a large list of people in the private sector who supply service to this group and as we have seen this can be a very lucrative business. But a lot of these services do not produce wealth, the only thing that produces wealth in a country is when a company manufactures an item which is either sold on the home market as an import substitute or way better is exported. This is where the real wealth is produced by my reckoning.
I do not have figures for all of these but I am guessing that the reason that Fianna Fail stay in power and will continue to do so is because the majority of the people in these areas vote for them.
This is a catch 22 situation, If the government did the right thing which although savage after giving out the pay rises in the first place, and cut the Public sector pay bill by 30% at the start of this recession we would be on our way at least towards recovery. But we have a populist government that will not do this, as it will unseat them from power.
And so we continue on, hoping for a miracle, a new boom, because that is what is needed to sustain our spending, not going to happen! A gradual increase in the economy, and our debt increases faster, a slow death. A double dip in this recession and the shit really hits the fan with the IMF coming in and making the cuts the government will not leaving us devastated but at least rebuilding on reality albeit bleak.
There is a strong sense of surrealism to the way our government reacts to all of this, almost as if they did not have to really worry about it at all, and they don’t, they have their salaries, pensions and benefits. What a strange political spectrum we find ourselves in!
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Feb
5
And today….
February 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Silence is Golden, so no blog this week, it was exactly half ways on the length of time I had decided to blog for and I took a week off, just to reflect and see were it is bringing me.
I could write a thousand refelections on what I have learned from it but will find yet another way to bore the arse offa ya!
Normal services resume on Tuesday.
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Jan
31
Niall O’Donnchu and Laura Barnes
January 31, 2010 | 1 Comment
O‘Donnchu and Barnes
In 2005 Laura Barnes, an American book dealer, made a profit of up to €800,000 from selling a cache of James Joyce papers to the state. One year later she began a relationship with Ó Donnchú, an assistant secretary in the Department of Arts, Sports and Tourism.
In 2006, a blogger who styles himself as Ardmayle posted a comment about the couple and the sale of the Joycean manuscripts under the headline “Barnes and Noble”. Following a legal complaint, he took down the blog and in February 2007 he posted an apology which had been supplied by Ó Donnchú’s and Barnes’ lawyer, Ivor Fitzpatrick solicitors.
In 2007, Ó Donnchú was cleared of wrongdoing by an internal inquiry in the Department of Arts. It concluded that the department’s interests were not compromised by his relationship with Barnes, and that the official had “dealt appropriately” with his responsibilities under ethics legislation.
In 2008, members of the Committee of Public Accounts accused the National Library of Ireland of being “stung” in the Joycean papers deal. The library could have bought the papers from a Parisian bookseller for €400,000 in 2004. They eventually paid €1.17m to Barnes.
Ardmayle has agreed a €100,000 settlement after libelling Niall Ó Donnchú, a senior civil servant, and his girlfriend Laura Barnes. It is the first time in Ireland that defamatory material on a blog has resulted in a pay-out.
It is also a complete piss-take with an art dealer, an art collector and a senior civil servant raking in the money as we speak, a shower of media whores who think they are above the level of people like you and I.
I wrote a long diatribe about them but thanks to crap broadband and lots of wine it is now lost to the ether. All three people involved are cunts, media and money whores of the worst level imaginable, best left alone to their own devices and ignored.
Jan
29
How Intelligent Are We?
January 29, 2010 | Leave a Comment
I think this is the bottom line, how intelligent are we? not as individuals but as a country, the sum total of our thinking. The decisions we make everyday, and the decisions that our government make effect us directly. So how smart are the people who make these decisions, how clever are we?
I took a look around various sites on the net that had information to answer this question, the first one is here, Cambodia, S.Korea and New Zealand come out on top. I took a look at several more and probably the most interesting and controversial is IQ and the Wealth of Nations, a book by Dr. Richard Lynn.
This work has resulted in the above chart that shows that as Nations get more wealthy not only does their population growth fall below replacement levels but the national IQ drops as well.
Naturally there are criticisms of how Dr. Lynn arrived at his figures and how accurate they are but nonetheless an interesting way to look at ourselves and the world we live in.
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Jan
28
Empty Houses
January 28, 2010 | Leave a Comment
Over 600 ghost estates are scattered around the country, 300,000 houses empty, Cork and Dublin have about 150 of these estates and will probably absorb them, in time. The rest are concentrated in Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon and Sligo.It is estimated that around half of them will be taken over by NAMA, which will then have to decide whether to sell, lease, maintain, hold, develop or demolish them.
The Long Term Leasing Scheme is to replace the current traditional system of local authorities building or buying properties for social housing. The demand or social housing will be filled very quickly and there will still be hundreds of thousands of houses left empty to all into rack and ruin. The local authorities who lease them will not have the money to maintain these houses and they will be broken into, set on fire and used by undesirables.
Demolishing them would be an alternative and return the land to agricultural purposes but this is expensive. It will be interesting to see what will become of these houses, whether they will become desolate shells portraying a period of greed and corruption in this country or whether a solution to this waste of assets will appear.
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