From Hairshirts to Hippie Hats and Headbands - Happy New Year 2011

Happy New Year to all the blog-readers and loyal followers of Dispatches from the Deise from my first post in 2011 - I've been blogging just over two years now since I started just after Christmas 2008, and it's been a great journey as I've catalogued various events in my life and numerous random ramblings. I've enjoyed reading other blogs, following many, commenting on some (not enough!) and having over a hundred followers of my dispatches. It's an interesting and diverse community, and without any literary or journalistic pretensions, blogging's a great creative outlet for any aspiring writers - at every level.

Family photo - Christmas Day 2010

I hope you like the family photo taken on Christmas day on the patio - we were all wrapped up for a walk before the turkey dinner, and it was absolutely freezing. The next day it was about 8 degrees Centigrade (above freezing) - and the thaw has persisted but more frosty Arctic weather is forecast - just in case we get comfortable and complacent. The water's back by day, and down to a dribble at night; the pumps are turned off to fill the reservoirs as there are more leaks in the Irish water supply than Julian Assange could dream of in a lifetime - the County Councils here would give Wikileaks a right run for its money.

I wish everyone a wonderful 2011 despite the state of the nation and the economy and the dread and dismay we'll all find in out payslips in about a fortnight or so when the first haircuts of the hairiest hairshirt budget in history kicks in.

Cloche crochet hat with flower - on me.

I am trying all the positive mantras - lucky to have a job, many worse off than me, and amn't I lucky to be a vilified public servant - albeit frontline so maybe my job won't be one of those targeted for the chop if Fine Gael get into government after the General Election - probably March now. I just hope their expected partners in government, Labour, (my party affiliation) will be able to rein them in - Eamon(Gilmore) better make sure his charm offensive knocks the socks off Inda (Kenny) enough to stall the Blueshirts' proposal to slash and burn the public sector as they promised in their recent budget alternative. 

Jany and me with her creation - New Year's Eve 2010

 A question for 2011 - will Bono ask the IMF and the World Bank to Drop the Debt for his own country as he has so eloquently advocated for so-called Third World Countries? That would be a supreme irony as he has lost a lot of street cred since U2 headed off on a tax break of their own to The Netherlands when they moved their assets offshore for higher tax exemption savings - all strictly legal but morally very questionable given his holier-than-thou banging on about helping poor countries - surely the best way to do so would be to pay taxes in your own country?

Random-dyed pink flower detail on headband - crochet

Purple flower detail on headband - crochet

Crochet flower headbands

My thinking is that it can only be uphill from here as we can't get any worse than 2010 from an economic and national morale standpoint - it was a new low for our collective national psyche when the IMF rode into town, and we are still reeling from the shock of losing financial sovereignty with the bailout of €85 billion.

But enough misery - this Christmas and New Year I have been mostly crocheting new projects for myself and teen daughter and her pals - there's a resurgence in Hippie nostalgia and retro headbands and hats have become de rigueur -  at least around here.

Jany, d-i-l in-waiting, has been instrumental in reawakening this fashion fad as she has been busy with scarves, hats and headbands for little Sofia and her work colleagues. So when she showed me how to make 3-D flowers with the help of a wonderful YouTube tutorial from the wonderful Art of Crochet by Teresa, I was hooked ( I know, I used that pun in a recent post - guilty as charged!). You can see how wonderful it is in the link above or the video clip below.

I want to share some finished projects with you too, and maybe inspire you in the potential for a new cottage industry in the lean days ahead - a stall at the local Farmers' Market would be a terrific outlet for the crafty among you. You could do worse for in this age of austerity! 

Jany never crocheted till a few months ago and now she's teaching me techniques and new skills every week - so it's no excuse not to get down to it if you're motivated enough.If I can do it anyone can.

self-timer pic - scarf and hairband/headband with flower

Headband with flower - self-timed pic.

a bit too-close-up! flower cap with brim

 The Art of Crochet by Teresa - amazing tutorials on everything you need to know to crochet. 

More Memorable Typos - Lifting the Pre-Budget Blues

I was out for a walk last week and spotted this
congratulatory beauty in a shop window. Luckily I had the camera in my pocket for a quick snap, capturing the sentiment for posterity, and being the typo terrorist anorak that I am - after winning the Irish Times Terrible Typos competition in September there's no stopping me now - I just couldn't pass this by. 

Camogie, for the uninitiated, is hurling for girls and  women, it's very popular among local teams but has very poor national support compared to the senior hurling and football All-Ireland Finals in Croke Park, which are usually sell-outs. The GAA tried to sex it up a few years ago by a "Chicks with Sticks" campaign, but while it might have boosted the game's image and shown the calibre of the players, it smacked of desperation to me and many other old-school feminists out there.

Then a few days later I was at a conference in the West of Ireland and this wonderful misspelling jumped out at me from the ticket to the Gala Dinner - or Banquette? It set me thinking of the unreliability of grammar and spellcheckers that are so ubiquitous in computer software but don't bypass the need for proofreading and judicious editing before committing to print. This would surely prevent a lot of red faces when the errors come to light.

Last week I was listening to Liveline - a phone-in daily RTE Radio One show that purports to take the pulse of the Irish listeners and reflect the zeitgeist -when this woman with a plummy South Dublin accent rang in to say she was in the horrors over a typo on a baby vest she'd spotted in Dunnes Stores. (Note the absence of a possessive apostrophe in their title - deliberate or not no-one seems sure.)
You can link to the audio clip here.

Well she set the airwaves alight! The baby vest for infants under a year had typos that made a nonsense of the little slogan but was of the kind all too common on fake designer rip-offs when we lived in Laos. ("Your going to fast in your little red car" was the slogan!)She came over all righteous and wanted a head on a plate but had got no joy from Dunnes other than a vague assurance it wouldn't happen again - so she made good on her threat to "Talk to Joe" and  fired off a missive to Liveline. The response she got from other listeners can't have made her day as she got no support and was written off as a tad OTT. Her own cliché was picked up when she said "At this point in time" so she wasn't getting away with anything.

Fair enough - I get grief from my lads for being an "Eats shoots and leaves" typo type, but I do hope I don't get too smug over it all! Some would say Liveline caters to the whingers and moaners who have nothing better to do than ring in with their gripe of the day, but it is incredibly addictively listenable when a good row gets going, and certainly has ruffled political feathers on many occasions. 

Courtesy of RTE - protest at hospital closures

Finally - the pièce de résistance! This was broadcast on national TV news the other evening at a protest march against local hospital closures when the extremely unpopular Minister for Health Mary Harney was present.  That she's seen as the Angel of Death to local hospitals is quite understandable - but this put a whole new angle on the situation! Given that she was splashed with red paint the previous week at a sod-turning ceremony, it's amazing that she had the brass neck to put in another public appearance where she would be heckled. But she's got brass neck in spades (couldn't resist that pun!) and there are some terrific Photoshopped images out there - Santa killer below being one of the best! 

Courtesy of Photoshop - Mary Harney kills Santa!

Enjoy them and forget the wolves at the door - in the guise of the IMF or the European Bank Bailout Crew - whom we are told with Shakespearean denial (as in protesting too much) by the government are not on the horizon - we all think they are, sharpening their calculators to see how much they can bleed from the peasants come Budget Day on December 7th. I think I'll just knit my way through the recession - it'll take my mind off the dreary penny-pinching days ahead!

Poor or Public Sector? Unparliamentary Language in a Post-Apocalyptic Budget 2010

This has been a bad week for the Irish public sector worker - we have been collectively hammered in the harshest most divisive budget in my memory at any rate. With taxpaying workers, it solely targeted the public sector for cuts, and despite the one day strike on November 24th and subsequent attempts at resuscitating union-government Partnership talks - which broke down at the 11th hour - there was an inevitability that nothing would make a difference and the decision on slashing pay was a fait accompli. There has been an increasing divide and rule fomented by the right - government and the employers bodies like IBEC and think tanks like the ESRI - in recent months to drive a wedge between the public and private sectors. As Joan Burton TD, Labour's finance spokesperson, said in her response to the budget, the low-paid public sector cleaner will constantly be reminded they are lucky to have a job and no doubt we'll all be reminded of this fact frequently in the future. Do we have to be grateful and not demand any more than the crumbs that fall from the private sectors' conspicuous absence of pay cuts? There was no increase in income tax which meant that the private sector felt no pain in the area of pay cuts, only the same as the rest of us in the carbon tax and other general increases like the drugs payments. All this to raise €4 billion, a fraction of the €54 billion given to bail out the banks but this time falling on those unable to circumvent the blow.

The budget targeted not alone the public sector for this unfair and unbalanced hit, but also hit the most vulnerable - social welfare recipients, child benefit, and carers - all had cuts to their payments except for the pensions paid to over-65s. The government learned to their cost last year that hell hath no fury like a pensioner with a grievance after they tried to remove the universal medical card for the over-70s in October 2008 budget - arguably the worst PR move since Garrett Fitzgerald's Fine Gael collapsed the government in 1982 over the proposed VAT on children's shoes. The jobseeker's allowances (dole) has been halved for the under-21 year olds, and reduced for under-24s. Those on disability and other long-term benefits will all be hit, and the universal child benefit paid to mothers - historically to give them a payment in their own right back in the days when women were chattels and had no right to own anything in marriage - has been cut by €16 per child. The excuse that we have generous social welfare rates is no reason to be so brutal in cutting these payments - hitting the captive audience of those on social welfare is a low blow as the cost of living is way higher here than in many other countries.

All in all, I will be down about another 6.5% direct pay cut on my gross salary. I know this will be slightly less when net income is calculated as I will have less tax and PRSI and levies to pay, but it is a real hit when you realise the public sector were hit with an obligatory pension levy back in May - for me, a 7.5% levy on my gross pay. So this year I have effectively had a 14% pay cut, which is draconian by any measure outside the IMF - in fact some of us feel the IMF taking over the government coffers would hardly be worse in their structural adjustments than the present Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition. The IMF is trotted out like the bogeyman whenever there's outrage and uproar from people over the budget cuts, and the government thinks it can get away with anything as a result of this fear - along the lines of - if you think this is bad, what do you think would happen if the IMF took over? Well, some say 15-20% pay cuts across the public sector would result - hallo, what have we had in the past year? With income and pension levies, and this pay cut, that's exactly how much we have taken. So I am inclined to say - bring it on. At least it might weed out the corruption and pandering to vested interests we see in the current budget. Publicans, the motor industry and the private sector are the winners in this budget.



Did I mention the biggest joke of all? The excise duty on alcohol was reduced in order to make booze cheaper! No, this is not a clip from Father Ted or a letter to Santa written by Father Jack -it is for real - the budget saw a drop with immediate effect in the price of drink and the justification is to stem the flood of shoppers trekking to the North Face of Newry every weekend (and every strike weekday!) That the government thinks that knocking 60 cent off a bottle of wine will keep patriotic shoppers at home shows how far removed they are from reality. People shop in the North of Ireland for overall cheaper prices as Tesco, Lidl and Ikea are all cheaper there than in the south. As for the motor industry - that would be car showrooms and sales outlets - a scrappage scheme was introduced in the budget which will give a €1,500 trade-in on cars over 10 years old when a new low-carbon emissions car is bought. As most people can't afford new cars with that scrappage it will probably be totally ineffective but the car dealers are happy.





The only bright spot in an otherwise abysmally depressing week on the news front was the diversion in the form of Green Party publicity hound TD Paul Gogarty lashing out at Labour's Emmet Stagg yesterday in the Dáil in an unparliamentary outburst. He took exception to Stagg and other Labour TDs accusations of hypocrisy at his statement that the budget was unfair but he was voting with it nonetheless. It is best watched in the YouTube clip above - but you have been warned, there is no beeping out the unparliamentary expletives! Of course it lightened the day a little and he achieved his goal of yet again hogging the limelight as is his form - he has shown similar form in the past and relished the spotlight, but is generally viewed as a prat by the media and by most of the electorate at this stage, and his hectoring and heckling in the Dáil was becoming tiresomely predictable - until yesterday's meltdown brought him to a new level nearly as low as his rollover in front of Frances Fitzgerald.

Rabbitte eats his Greens - the Budget and other Emergencies

Here is a photo from the recent Labour Party Conference of Jan and me with the party leader, Eamon Gilmore, with Jan in his Lismore Mayoral bling and me festooned with badges and a red rose looking quite the photographer!

Rabbitte eats his Greens - Former Labour Party Leader Pat Rabbitte's Contribution to this week's Budget Debate was simply a masterclass in razorsharp political speechmaking.



Jan, Eamon Gilmore, and me at the Party conference in Mullingar

The video clip is just too good to keep to myself - it has already been shared around Facebook and YouTube, and now can be seen by followers of this blog on the sidebar as I was not able to embed it in this post - some Green gremlin out there forbade it!

It is one of the only lighthearted moments of the last week, which has seen the 2nd savage Budget in 6 months, known variously as the Mini-Budget, the Supplementary Budget and finally the Emergency Budget.

This has a nice resonance in Ireland of the Euphemisms, where what was known globally as World War II completely passed us by in our state of Irish Neutrality, and instead we had what we termed "The Emergency" which coincided with the period from 1939-1945.

Ireland has clung to neutrality with great tenacity since then and it has not been without its somewhat Kafka-esque moments. Eamonn de Valera, our then Taosieach (Prime Minister) famously and shamefully made a trip to the German Chancellery to sign the book of condolence on the death of Adolf Hitler in 1945. This action was defended by him and his many supporters in the name of Neutrality, and indeed then President Douglas Hyde also visited Hempel to offer condolences on Hitler's death.

This was defended as a Diplomatic duty that was only revealed when the national archives were released in 2005. At least such contentious issues are rightly debated in these times, as what was deemed due deference to those in high office resulted in an unquestioning acceptance for many years. Thankfully those days are long gone and we can objectively view the errors of former national heroes in their true colours.

We will all have more time to reflect on our newfound relative penury as the Orwellian terminology and euphemisms make their impact on our salaries and payslips in May. Taxes are now Levies (much less threatening), ceilings are lowered on all entry points for same, and these were doubled, including one introduced in last October's "budget horribilis". Most salaries will be pushed back by a number of years with average monthly cuts in take-home pay of between €200-€400 - that's public sector, factoring in the Pension Levy I blogged about here.

The Labour Party called it the "Budget from Hell" and it certainly hits the lower earner and those on social welfare, as the Christmas bonus payment of a week's extra pay has been cut, and the grant for providing The one cut that really annoyed me was the cut in the grant to provide emergency alarms for older people, which is a lifeline for those living alone or in isolation.

So all in all it's been quite a week, we still are reeling from the impact of this budget, as there is a sense that while not making the catastrophic blunders of October's budget - like the near-blanket withdrawal of medical cards from over-70s - they still appear to have let the bankers and developers off the hook. The medical card debacle was reversed in jig-time after massive street protests showing that the erstwhile children of the 60's hadn't lost their revolutionary zeal.

The taxpayers and citizens now have the government putting its hands in their pockets for the foreseeable future to buy back the toxic assets of the banks and developers at what seems to be massively over-valued rates. This is all to be determined by a new "bad bank" hiding behind another euphemism - the National Asset Management Agency or NAMA - which appeared with Orwellian rapidity on Budget Day.

It remains to be seen where we will all end up in this crisis. An end to vulgar excess we can all do with, but the general impression is that the little people will still end up bearing the brunt of it all.