Winter Woollies - StayingToasty in Turbulent Times

Cap and Scarf in Super-Chunky wool

I have been busy knitting warm woollies to help me cope with our winter of discontent. Not alone has the weather been unseasonably cold for Ireland and we've had to cope with frozen pipes and a waterless Christmas, it's now clear that this was but a portend of the disastrous political turmoil of the past week.


Today the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen resigned as the main government coalition party leader but decided to stay on as Taoiseach. This brings us back to GUBU days - no, not Glory Days, but Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented. This famous acronym dates back to 1982 when a double murderer was found to be hiding out in the apartment of the Attorney General, and the term was coined by Conor Cruise O'Brien apropos of the controversy in which the then Taoiseach Charlie Haughey found himelf embroiled.  We wonder now if the planned General Election - announced last week for March 11th - will be brought forward again as the confidence in the government plummets to new depths.



They say that a week is a long time in politics -well here's a timeline to what went on in the past week and as the week wore on it became apparent that an hour is a long time in Irish politics - the farce could have been written by any one of our wonderful playwrights - though John B. Keane would probably have done it fair justice, what with his acute eye for morality in the human condition, not to mention political shenanigans. The Field, one of his most famous plays, is now showing in Dublin and the radio ad for it is prescient - the voiceover of the Bull McCabe asks - "would we rather have our principles or be millionaires?"

Well, it's evident that the political rulers of the past 14 years veered spectacularly towards the latter, and in the words of Charlie McCreevy, then Minister for Finance in one of the giveaway budgets of the boom years - "when we have it, we spend it". Quite. And now we're left holding the baby the IMF has given us - a debt of billions that will be a legacy for future generations and is going into the black hole of the banks that went under due to the lack of proper regulation.

The woolly gloves

That it coincided with week after proverbial Blue Monday just added to the irony, and it is proving hard for all us political junkies to keep up with the daily upheavals. I won't even go into the detail, suffice to say for those living on Mars for the past few weeks that the country is now being misled by a government with a rudderless party.

Today the Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Brian Cowen resigned as the main government coalition party leader but decided to stay on as Taoiseach. This brings us back to GUBU days - no, not Glory Days, but Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre and Unprecedented. This famous acronym dates back to 1982 when a double murderer was found to be hiding out in the apartment of the Attorney General, and the term was coined by Conor Cruise O'Brien apropos of the controversy in which the then Taoiseach Charlie Haughey found himelf embroiled.


So you can understand why I immerse myself in reading and knitting or crochet. Of late I have been mostly
knitting scarves, hats and gloves - and in warm winter russet tones. You can see the fruits of my January labours in these photos - even the self-consciously self-timed one gives an idea of the hat and scarf set, which was made with James C. Brett's super-chunky Marble yarn, which I got in the lovely Lismore Design Workshop from Angela - she has only been open for a few months but already has inspired a lot of knitters to get their needles out and she has also got a knitting circle up and running on Tuesdays - morning and evening! I went last week and it was a lovely few hours, spent sitting by an open fire chatting away to fellow-knitters. The gloves are pure wool, which have to be hand-washed, a slight drawback offset by their cosy warmth.

Mary, Paul and Catherine - the Knitting Circle Table Quiz team (& me!)

We even got a team together for the Table Quiz last night in Ballyrafter House Hotel - a fundraiser for our Travel Writing Festival, Immrama, which happens in June each year. I have blogged about it frequently. We came 5th overall, not bad with a score of 61 out of a possible 72.

Coincidentally, today's Irish Times had two articles about Lismore and its environs - both by Immrama speakers. One was by Manchán Magan, on the joys of staying in Lismore in rhododendron or any season, and the other by Thomas McCarthy, a poet of international renown from nearby Cappoquin, who name-checks Lismore in his writings on the downfall of Fianna Fail, the current political pariah party

This post has just touched on the events of the past week - the Labour Party is coasting towards the General Election and we have a Selection Convention on Monday night in Waterford to formally nominate two candidates - a man and a woman - to contest for the four-seat Waterford Constituency. We hope they will double the representation by securing a second seat this time - watch this space for updates!

Tourist Trails, Scenic Routes and Election Posters

I decided to come home from last week's Irish Nurses Organisation conference in Killarney via the scenic route of Kenmare and Glengarriff, as it was a lovely warm and sunny day. This was an opportunity to see Killarney's amazing mountain and lake scenery in all its glory, and I wasn't going to miss it. The road from Lismore via Fermoy and Mallow is pretty uninspiring on the stretch from Fermoy to Killarney, and is in appalling condition, with more potholes than the worst roads in Africa, so the tourist trail I took was a pleasant alternative. Kerry is one of Ireland's prime tourist counties, with the Ring of Kerry, the Dingle Peninsula, and Killarney being the main draws, not to mention the rather dated pageantry of the Rose of Tralee. I have plenty of Kerry blood in my veins, so I can take some proprietal pride in the county.

I dropped into Muckross Gardens just outside Killarney and walked down by the lake and the house, though I didn't go in, it has guided tours and I did that at the last conference there 18 months back.

Here are some nice photos of the house and gardens, overlooking the lake, somewhat similar to Belvedere House in Mullingar which I wrote about here.

Muckross seems to be the base for the jarveys and their jaunting cars that take tourists around the lakeshore drives, and I was nearly mowed down by a few enthusiastic horses! I climbed to the top of Torc Waterfall which has more steps that the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and nearly as crooked and disorientating, and realised how unfit I am, so it's time for a summer exercise programme of plenty of walking!

I had coffee at Lady's View overlooking the Lakes of Killarney, and dropped into that bastion of yummy-mummy-ness, the Avoca Shop and Café, at Moll's Gap near Kenmare. Certainly no recession in evidence there, with prices to match the quality of the wares. Most of the shops in Kerry have an abundance of shamrockery - Aran sweaters and scratchy Tweed scarves vie for space beside keyrings, mugs and glassware adorned in shamrocks and leprechauns - and are very tourist-oriented, which is understandable given that the season is so short but it does reinforce Ireland's well-earned reputation as a pricey place to visit.


Glengarriff looked positively Mediterranean in the evening sunshine, and it has a balmy climate - believe it or not Ireland's south-west has lots of sub-tropical plants as it rarely freezes there thanks to the proximity of the Gulf Stream and its warm air. The first time I visited Glengarriff in 1974 on a hitch-hiking trip around Ireland with my best friend from nursing student days it lashed rain in August - just after Nixon's resignation - and we squelched around Garnish Island in soaking jeans and trainers! I hadn't been along this road for about six years, when we went to Kerry for a weekend, and what I had remembered were the tunnels in the mountains between Killarney and Kenmare; I thought there were a lot more of them and that they were longer, but they are quite short and some are just like sea-arches only on the road.

Ireland really has some spectacular scenery and while Lismore has very lush and wooded landscapes, Kerry is very wild and rugged, and the mountains are barer than our Knockmealdowns - more like our Comeraghs. A trip like this reinforces my appreciation of our lovely scenery, and while I moan a lot about the political mess we're in as a nation, and all the economic doom, we do have a lovely country and if it was blessed with decent weather - why, we might even stop complaining about everything else!

My only other political comment on this post is a mention of the blight on the lovely landscape of the election posters. There wasn't a pole untouched in all of Cork and Kerry, and even Waterford has a few, though Lismore has a local agreement whereby none of the candidates for the town council - hubby included - will put up posters in the town. That won't stop all the county and European candidates and I spotted the first European one in Lismore today, much to my disgust. Labour's county candidate, John Pratt, and the South's European candidate, Alan Kelly, have both agreed to the Lismore Council's decision and won't be seen on a pole within sight of the town, though it remains to be seen whether the other party candidates will comply.


What is extremely noticeable by its absence is the near-invisibility of the government's Fianna Fáil name and logo from their election posters. (Just try to spot the FF party logo on this European Election poster at a Cork roundabout! Yes I thought so too, not easy - have they something to hide?)

This has been noted by media pundits as well as the opposition, much to their amusement, as it is seen as a ploy to distance the local candidates from guilt of being tainted by association with the party that has sunk the country through bad governing over too many years. It struck me on the way to Killarney how many Labour and Fine Gael posters there were and that I was seeing no Fianna Fáil posters, till the penny dropped! They are thin on the canvassing ground as well, and it is becoming a point of much hilarity to spot the elusive FF candidate on the stump. They are like the sightings of the first cuckoo, much anticipated and reported in the letters pages of the Irish Times!





I hope you like the photos and I might make a slide show of the better ones from this trip - the long way round - Irish style!

Running of the Bulls in Ballinrobe, and random Irish Bull

Here is a still from a YouTube video clip , which is simply irresistable and hilarious! I wanted to share it with my blog readers as I have already posted it to my Facebook profile and it's on the sidebar of this blog.

Tonight's RTE news had this clip on its "...and finally..." slot. We have been inundated with bad news for so long that the sight of a bull on the loose in a Mayo supermarket was something to lift the heart of the nation. The parallels with Pamplona's famed Bull-Running San Fermin Festival are undeniable, particularly where the farmer is legging it out the supermarket door with the bull in hot pursuit.

I watch the news lately with trepidation as I know it will bring more budget cuts, health cuts, staffing cuts, redundancies, layoffs, "downsizing" and other euphemisms, with a few factory closures thrown in. I see my payslip diminishing every fortnight since the March pension levy came into force, and I know that this is only the start of the slippery slope, as we await further cuts and levies - read taxes - in our May payslips.

One of these levies is laughably called a Health Levy which is meant to go towards the public health service, and it was introduced ten or fifteen years ago as an interim measure. Interim is a term open to very loose interpretation and the levy is now firmly entrenched in our Social Insurance (like National Insurance in the UK), never to be rescinded. It has now been doubled from 2% of all income to 4%, and there is a doubling of the Income Levy as well. Don't ask, I have no idea what it's for either, but it sounds suitably ominous and necessary, doesn't it?

There was a government semi-putsch yesterday which nearly caused a palace revolution. Biffo (remember him?) did a cull of the Junior Ministers or Ministers of State, reducing their inflated numbers from 20 to 15, a somewhat token reduction but giving him scope to enhance cronyism with some new appointments in the reshuffle. The distressed displaced and dispatched former junior ministers sang like canaries of their displeasure; showing no stoic acceptance of the hand of Cowen, their party loyalty took a sabbatical, possibly permanent, as they considered their fate.

As I drove home from my Nurses' Union meeting in Waterford last night, I enjoyed listening to The Late Debate, where the hapless Conor "Kebabs" Lenihan (brother of Brian of Budget and Finance fame) who came out to bat for the government reshuffle was roundly hammered by Ruairi Quinn of Labour who wiped the floor with him.

Some of those who were cut off in their political prime had laid their public lives on the line with their constituents by attempting to uphold and defent the indefensible budget cuts on the elderly last October (Maire Hoctor from North Tipperary), while the deeply unpopular downgrading of services at some of the smaller general hospitals, like Sligo was opposed by Jimmy Devins of Sligo, a step tantamount to political suicide, where his demise was predictable. The most trenchantly vocal critic of the cull was victim John McGuinness from Kilkenny, whose ministerial demise was largely unanticipated by the media.

Some were no surprise, as they were seen as pretty ineffective in their given brief, and it never ceases to amaze me how skill or knowledge seems not to count when appointments are made in a particular area, e.g. the junior minister with responsibility for older people. These vague, woolly titles lead to total lack of achievement as there are no quantifiable targets set out, and junior ministries are seen by the cynics (i.e. everyone in opposition to the government) as a loyalty card for TDs, to keep them on side and toeing the party line. This gives the opposition unending fodder for satire, as immortalised by my earlier YouTube clip of Pat Rabbitte of Labour "eating his Greens", where he derides Trevor Sargent as the minister with responsibility for turnips and parsnips or some such vegetarian reference to his post as Minister for State in the Dept. of Agriculture.

So I hope you enjoy the video clip, and my update on the ever-changing political and economic home front.

The state of the nation.

I have shied away from this becoming an overtly political blog as the blogosphere is awash with them, and if they are from people with my own (left) leanings, then they are readable and enjoyable as I can empathise with them. I will occasionally write some posts with a polemic approach, if I feel strongly about something (as in this post on African colonialism some weeks back) - though I am not aggressive enough to be a true polemiscist by definition!)

This is a "cat's eye" on the road near Lismore - I like the imagery of the Irish Tricolour being driven over by the cubs of the Celtic Tiger which is now barely miaowing.

What has me exercised at the moment is the state of this nation and the carry on of the bankers and what they are getting away with - they have arrogantly bled the economy during the boom with the encouragement and collusion of the right wing Fianna Fáil government, and now when it all goes pear-shaped we are the ones paying for their excesses.

No-one will be called to account and as long as these high-stakes gamblers of our money stayed marginally within the law, morality and ethics don't seem to matter. Now we are all bankers - or owners of a pretty toxic bank - since Anglo-Irish Bank was nationalised a few weeks back. It isn't something you would be bragging about as it seems every day uncovers a new scandal relating to the wheelings and dealings that went on.

The latest insult to the national intelligence is the decision - unilateral - of the government to levy a hefty increase on the pension contribution of the workers in the public sector, which includes me, and most other nurses and teachers, and all civil servants. The rationale for this levy, designed to raise €2 Billion (euro) is that the public sector workers are guaranteed a fine fat pension on retirement with a guaranteed income based on final salary. Which all sounds fine and dandy, and has set us up as grasping pariahs in the eyes of many in the private sector, but is only half the story.

The government would like us all to be as placid as this cow -we need to know our place!

To qualify for a full retirement pension one has to have accrued 40 years of service, and to have paid contributions throughout. The final pension includes the State Pension (the old Old Age Pension in pre-PC days) and many of those who are at the lower end of the spectrum will never get much more than their State Pension, as their final salary would not be much higher than twice the State Pension. The most you can get is half your final salary, after 40 years, and pro-rata below this. The reality for most public servants is that most will not have 40 years service.

This can be partly explained by the bizarre (by todays' standards) ruling that required women to resign from their civil service jobs on marriage! This "Marriage Bar" was firmly in place until 1973, and shows how the past really is another country! The consequences of this is that many competent and talented women were lost to the public sector in those pre-feminism days, and have never re-entered the workplace at a similar level. Those who did resume work after children were reared rarely resumed similar work, and those who did were penalised by having to buy back missed years through either costly AVCs (Additional Voluntary Contributions) or equally expensive PNS (Purchase of Notional Service) payments.

No public servant has an opt-out option regarding their pension. The new levy which is a pay cut in any language is on a sliding scale based on salary, and is capped at 9.6% for those earning over €300,000. So there is inequity even there - it is easier to miss 9.6% at that earning capacity than to have a levy of 5.8% on €30,000 for a lower-paid worker.

So tomorrow there is a big rally in Dublin to protest at the levy and the inequity of targeting the public sector when the fat cats who were responsible for the economic downturn have got off scotfree. I will be there marching through Dublin city centre to Government Buildings, under the banner of my trade union, the INO - Irish Nurses Organisation - who are protesting along with all the other unions in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) and probably many who are non-affiliated.

The government is trying hard to drive a wedge between the private sector and the public sector by a divide and rule classic colonial ploy, and the unions are determined not to let this red herring undermine the reality of our anger. The levy is unfair and inequitable by excluding those top-earners in the banks and financial institutions who creamed it during the boom. The public sector is an easy target, and it is to the shame of the policy makers that they disingenuously state that this is the price we have to pay for job security and a guaranteed pension. That this pension can be a pittance for many who through no fault of their own spent many years outside the workforce is conveniently forgotten.

I will have photos from the demonstration for another post - meanwhile please show your support for our actions and if you can - join in the rally and be at Parnell Square at 2p.m. tomorrow, virtually or in person!