NEWS FOR WATERS DISSIDENTS #IrishWaterMovies

I live a lot of the time, in what is regarded as a third world country, for the so called politically correct, a developing country. I have international super markets around me, with prices similar to Ireland. It does not rain for at least 4 months of the year here. I have a consistent Government piped, quality, water supply, for my 3 bedroom house of three showers and 2 bathrooms, that costs 10 euros annually in total, approximately. The people here, simply would not tolerate it being any more expensive because they have not been media washed yet ! Simple! The British  cultural legacy of "Ruling by fooling" is still the norm in Ireland where the Government if it has it's way will charge an average of 1.000 euros annually for their water and licensed media. This "Ruling by fooling"culture has driven myself and millions like me out of my beloved land and away from my people! We are scattered to the extent of an 80 million diaspora across the world. For the vast majority of those who remain, the choice is simple, either indentured slavery or revolution. For those of you who agree, please share this post, because this perspective will be censored by both the BBC, RTE and most of the mainstream media.

The Irish Water debacle: why the State is heading towards being ungovernable
Opinion: The public revolt against water charges is about injustice, and it’s justified

Fintan O'Toole


News
Politics

First published:Tue, Nov 4, 2014, 12:01

It should be so easy. How much political brilliance does it take to persuade the population that it is necessary to change a water supply system that leaves whole cities (Galway) and almost entire counties (Roscommon) without drinkable water for long periods? That wastes through leakage half of all the expensively treated water it produces? That the State can’t do this tells us something about much more than the debacle of Irish Water. It tells us about the governability of the State itself. It would be hysterical to suggest that the State is ungovernable. But it would be naive to deny that it is heading gradually in that direction. And heading there for good reasons: a very significant part of the population has ceased to feel that the State is theirs, that it tries its best to treat them with care and dignity.

The public revolt against water charges is not, for the most part, a rebellion against the eminently sensible idea that a small State should have a single public utility to develop its water system. It’s an expression of anger about bigger things: command-and-control politics; trust-me- I’m-an-expert arrogance; rotten, feckless disregard for the realities of life at the bottom of the heap; the feeling that nobody gives a curse how you live or what you think.

It’s about injustice, and it’s justified. The recent budget was the fourth regressive budget in a row. Four times, the Government has coldly and deliberately decided to hit the weakest and poorest hardest. This has nothing to do with “austerity”. The “austerity” budgets under Fianna Fáil between 2008 and 2011 were mildly progressive – they hit the better-off harder than the worst-off. But every budget under Fine Gael and Labour (Labour!) has quietly reversed this trend. In last month’s budget, the average combined impact of the tax and welfare measures and of water charges on the lowest income households is to reduce their income by about 1 per cent. For the one-fifth of households with the highest incomes, there is a gain of about 0.5 per cent.


I use the word “quietly” with deliberation. The budget was greeted universally in the media as the end of austerity. There’s a reason for this: the Department of Finance refuses to release with its budget documents a distributional analysis of how all the combined measures will affect different income groups. This is a deliberate political policy. One of the clearest promises made in the Programme for Government was that “We will open up the budget process to the full glare of public scrutiny”. The Government may really have intended to do this – until it realised that opening the budgetary process would have revealed how decisions were being slanted against the poorest households. Better to keep it quiet and let a few eggheads do the sums afterwards.



– but it wasn’t for you. Your income is still being reduced by Government decisions right now. And of course a 1 per cent cut in the income of someone on the breadline has a vastly bigger impact on day-to-day life than on someone who’s comfortable. For those who matter least, money matters most.


Such people are quite right to feel that they live in a political world whose “reality” excludes them. This “reality” is a rhetoric of shared sacrifice that masks a deliberate programme of increasing the gaps between rich and poor. It is massive consultancy fees paid out by Irish Water and justified by Phil Hogan with the inanity that “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”. It is bonuses for those who “require improvement”. It is being preached to about how we must all stop thinking of ourselves as citizens and start thinking of ourselves as customers – except, of course, when we expect actual customer services like someone to answer the phone when we call.



And if you create a political world in which many citizens are right to feel these things, the State slowly ceases to be able to function. This is what we’re seeing with the Irish Water debacle. There is nothing wrong in itself in having a single national utility to invest in a dilapidated water system. What’s wrong is that the State can’t articulate with any conviction the idea that a project like this (or any other) is being done fairly, openly, democratically and in the public interest. And in this Irish Water is a warning – a democracy that hollows out a sense of genuine common purpose slowly moves towards ungovernability. Too many people don’t believe that the State has their interests at heart. They don’t see the give-and-take of citizenship because they have experienced too much take and too little give.

AGENT BLACKADDER ORDERED ARREST OF GERRY ADAMS

• Margo_Sweetbread  comment

Sin Féin were getting uncomfortably popular in the polls........especially Gerry Adams.......Lo and behold our woeful, inept Coalition of blunderers said to themselves.."Let us make a cunning plan to destroy this abductor of our precious votes"... 
Lo and behold, again.....THE 'CUNNING' PLAN BACKFIRED bigtime...........Sin Féin/Gerry Adams more popular than ever and the Coalition of blunderers EXPOSED for the dumb hypocrites they are......even sacrificing the peace process in NI for their own GREEDY hold-on-to-their-fatcat-salaries no matter what the cost.............THE TRUTH WILL OUT 
(NB I do not support SF's stance on Abortion/Homosexual 'marriage')

Fintan O'Toole

Long after the British army’s Parachute regiment left the west Belfast estate of Ballymurphy in September 1971, one of its members, Harry McCallion, reflected with pride that “we had over 15 confirmed kills but had claimed many more . . . It was merely convenient for the IRA that most of them had not been sworn in as members.”

These “kills” had not been sworn in because they were not members of the IRA at all; they were innocent civilians. Eleven of those killed by the Paras between August 9th and August 11th, 1971, were unarmed. Among them were a Catholic priest, Fr Hugh Mullan – who was clearly carrying an improvised white flag made from a babygro – and a mother of eight children, Joan Connolly, who was shot multiple times as she went to help a wounded boy. These events happened in the chaos of the introduction of internment, when the IRA launched concerted attacks on the British base in Ballymurphy. But the evidence strongly suggests that the victims were not caught in crossfire – they were killed by enraged soldiers in what were, at best, acts of appalling recklessness and, at worst, deliberate murders.

Last week, shortly before Gerry Adams was arrested, Northern Ireland Secretary,Theresa Villiers announced there would be no independent inquiry into the Ballymurphy killings. Sinn Féin rightly pointed to the outrageous double standard implied here. But Villiers also announced that there would be no inquiry into the hideous La Mon hotel fire-bombing in 1978, when the IRA incinerated 12 members of, of all things, the Irish Collie Club. The families of the La Mon victims believe, rightly or wrongly, that transcripts of police interviews with IRA suspects relating to this disgusting crime were deliberately removed from the files in order to protect senior figures of importance for the peace process. Did Sinn Féin complain about the continuing failure to give the La Mon families the comfort of truth? Of course not – it has double standards about double standards.

The abduction, murder and disappearing of Jean McConville is an atrocity that cries out for accountability. But so were the Ballymurphy killings, the La Mon bombing, the McGurk’s Bar bombing by the UVF in which 15 people died, and murder after bloody murder. While the gunmen on all sides preened themselves with talk of “kills” and “war”, the truth is that the conflict was largely about people with guns killing people without guns. So-called republican and loyalist paramilitaries lost between them 563 members. Well over three times as many defenceless civilians were murdered (1,879) – mostly by paramilitaries but in some cases by so-called security forces in or out of uniform. The slaughter of the innocents was not a byproduct of the Troubles – it was the main event.Lingering outrage
It was not enough, though, for these poor people to die once, to be the human fuel for a conflict that careened obscenely onwards long after it had lost any semblance of logic. Like souls in Dante’s hell, they have been given an excruciating punishment;

they are recruited to fight, again and again, in the strange meta-conflict that replaced the real one – the fight over which of the perpetrators can claim the coveted status of victimhood. There is, rightly, lingering outrage about the IRA’s “disappearing” of victims like Jean McConville, the denial of a decent burial. But in a sense, most victims are still denied a decent burial. Their bodies are figuratively dug up and paraded through the streets or dumped back again into the abyss of amnesia, depending on who needs them for what political purpose. Tribal disputes are still conducted in part as a form of competitive necromancy.

There are just two decent ways of dealing with the legacy of these atrocities: all or nothing. The nothing option has a certain integrity – it at least prevents the political exploitation of the dead. But it denies to bereaved families the right to know what happened to their loved ones. The only way to counter the exploitation of the dead is to start with the most obvious thing about them – that they died horrible, untimely deaths. Death brings a terrible equality: it does not discriminate between Protestant or Catholic, uniformed policeman or masked gunman, or even between innocent and guilty. Every violent death was a rending in the fabric of the lives of spouses, children and families. Each deserves acknowledgement – not for any political purpose but for its own sake and as a condition of a civilised society.

• Analysis: Belfast Agreement is fragile and can be very quickly disrupted by events

Selective memory

If Gerry Adams had anything to do with the killing of Jean McConville, he should answer for his actions. But it would be far better if he gave those answers to an open, independent commission with a remit to investigate all unsolved killings by state forces or by paramilitary organisations. If, by design or accident, Adams seems to be singled out, while other crimes are ignored, the cycle of selective memory and selective amnesia will go on. There are no special victims and there must be no special perpetrators.

Link: ‘Shatter feels that he is above the law and should resign’ – Wallace