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Post by guillaume on Jan 13, 2009 18:57:14 GMT
Should our Prime minister resign ? Did he manage well this "recession" ? Does he have the guts to deal with it ? Outside Tullamore and Dublin ? Does he really care - and his party FF, about poor people in Ireland ? I don't think so.
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Post by Noelfitz on Jan 13, 2009 21:21:27 GMT
Guillaume,
Good question.
In Ireland we do not do resignations.
Cowen is our PM. However I doubt if he will be able to stand up to vested interests.
Is it right that the PM of Ireland should be one of the best paid in the world? All our politicians are over-paid, as are our public servants,who do very little work.
Our school year is one of the shortest in the world, yet our teachers are among the best paid.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jan 13, 2009 22:53:49 GMT
Should our Prime minister resign ? Did he manage well this "recession" ? Does he have the guts to deal with it ? Outside Tullamore and Dublin ? Does he really care - and his party FF, about poor people in Ireland ? I don't think so. Guillaume, my first thought was that this was just politics and not a suitable subject for the Irish Catholics' Forum, but when I read your post again I noticed that you were concerned with poor people in particular. You are right to ask the question. Some years ago, when I lived in Dublin, I worked with the Society of St Vincent de Paul. On Sunday, because I was going to Mass in Whitefriar Steet, by chance I walked past some of the flats near St Stephen's Green where I used to visit people. Glancing in the windows I saw rooms with cheap second-hand furniture, and people (most of them old), wearing cheap second-hand clothes, living just as they did when I last saw them ten years ago. In the meantime, other people have made hundreds of millions of euros from the building trade or from the kind of basically worthless activities that flourish when there is a lot of spare money to be thrown around. However I don't think it would change anything if the Taoiseach resigned and we had a General Election and perhaps a change of Government. We are stuck in this deep hole and politics will change nothing. If you have time to spare, I suggest you join your local branch of the St Vincent de Paul Society and do what you can. Unlike the politicians, they can make a difference to people's lives.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 14, 2009 15:49:26 GMT
I don't think Cowen should resign; it would simply be running away from his responsibilities. The only basis for resignation would be if he could no longer command a Dail majority and/or if there was a clear alternative leader who would probably do better. The electorate voted for Fianna Fail and its allies and are stuck with them.
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Post by Hemingway on Jan 14, 2009 16:36:49 GMT
I am not a fan of Brian Cowen or FF but in my opinion he should only resign if he is guilty of wrong doing or extreme incompetence. So far I see no evidence of either.
The recession is a world-wide happening and unfortunately we are only at the beginning of this particular one. We cannot put the blame for it at Cowen's door. How each government in each state handles the current situation remains to be seen.
I think talk of resignation at this point is premature for the moment.
My thoughts are with those people who have recently lost their jobs, especially the ones with 100% mortgages hanging around their necks.
Irresponsibility on the part of the banking community may have more to do with this recession than the governments of each sovereign state. Although an argument can be made that the government should have regulated the banking community in a more controlled and reasonable fashion.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jan 16, 2009 14:22:20 GMT
Guillaume, Good question. In Ireland we do not do resignations. In fact we have both resignations and sackings. Bertie Aherne did just that last April. I recall Charles Haughey's resignation in regard to Seán Doherty's revelations; Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh's after the infamous Donnegan speach; Kevin Boland's at the time of the Arms Trial. I also recall Albert Reynolds and Jack Lynch resigning. So we do do resignations. Maybe, maybe not. But quoting in dubiis, libertas, I would say generosity in doubt also known as the benefit of the doubt. Can you back this up? in omnibus, caritas I don't see too much charity toward either politicians or public servants. I happen to know many of both categories who are actually very hard working. in omnibus, caritasOur school year is one of the shortest in the world, yet our teachers are among the best paid.[/quote] I don't know if either ascertion here is true: the shortness of the school year or the over pay of the school teachers. In another post, you say a friend of yours campaigned against corporal punishment. I am not advocating corporal punishment - I don't believe in it - but in its absence, discipline in Irish schools took a nose dive making teachers' lives very miserable and affecting the overall quality of the education. During the Celtic Tiger years, bright and talented graduates steered clear of teaching and many teachers grabbed jobs in the private sector which doesn't say a lot about the financial rewards of teaching, something which is similar throughout the public sector, but the present low quality of Irish education doesn't bode well for the future, though education has never been as resource driven as now. To think that many old style national teachers boast that though working in prefabricated buildings with several age groups at once (the rule in two-teacher schools), no child left sixth class illiterate. Illiteracy and innumeracy are growing problems in Ireland of near universal second-level education right now. Health is another highly resource driven area of high public expenditure which seems to deliver less and less and if Brian Cowen (a onetime Health Minister) and FF care about the poor, this would be one area which they would apply radical reform. But it appears the health agenda is largely set by high powered consultants and administrators. To return to the substantive point, FF, eloquently described by Hibernicus in another post as a shower of power hungry opportunists (correct me if I am wrong), it does appear that power and the aquisition and maintenance of it is the sine qua non for FF. If 1979 (Lynch), 1992 (Haughey), 1994 (Reynolds) and 2008 (Aherne) are anything to go by, even the party leader is dispensable in this matter. Was it Winston Churchill who said all political careers end in failure? As for Cowen's current position, as Hemmingway says, it was largely dictated by an international situation, particularly by the behaviour of financial institutions. FF's cosy relationship with the construction industry historically is a worrying point, but none of this adds up to Cowen's performance being a resigning matter. Believe me, when his number's up, no one will be less backward about coming forward than the FF backbenchers queuing up to demand his head on a platter.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 16, 2009 18:34:51 GMT
There are two things about FF (a) It is a tribal party which has outlived its original "tribe" - the generation who followed de Valera and Lemass and who could point to genuine social and ideological differences between themselves and many Fine Gael/Cumann na nGaedheal supporters. (Oddly, enough in this it reminds me a bit of the IRISH INDEPENDENT which used to have an identifiable social/cultural identity and is now mainly a commercial operation, while the IRISH TIMES seems to enjoy a much greater degree of cultural continuity). (b) It does not really 'do' ideology - it swtiches left, right or centre as occasion dictates and when it is in coalition it takes its ideological lead from its partners, be they Labour Greens or PDs, because those parties actually stand /stood for something and FF does not. The Conservative and Labour parties in Britain or the Republicans and Democrats in the US change a bit over time, but they do seem to have some sort of ideological core rather than being merely tribal as FF is. I wonder woudl FF fall to bits like the Christian Democrats in Italy or some other simlar populist parties if it were out of power for a long period? The core vote is in a long slow decline.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 16, 2009 18:38:35 GMT
I wonder if the difficulty in getting/keeping teachers says something about the value of having teaching orders. If you want to keep people in what is often a pretty thankless and frustrating life it makes sense to have significant numbers who are recruited from ideological/religious commitment and know from the start that it involves major sacrifices, that they are giving their life to it. The old teaching orders had quite a few drawbacks, but I wonder if the assumption that teaching (or religious life for that matter) should produce happiness and fulfilment is not a bit over-optimistic.
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 16, 2009 18:41:42 GMT
Alasdair: Lynch retired rather than resigning, and the same is by and large true of Ahern (though admittedly he would have been pushed by the tribunals) O Dalaigh was President which means he wasn't really in the same position as the others. Reynolds and Haughey were forced out by coalition allies. The only really principled resignations I can think of, apart from those which took part during attempted leadership putsches, were Kevin Boland's and Frank Cluskey's.
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Post by Noelfitz on Jan 16, 2009 20:19:29 GMT
Maybe Cowen should not resign.
He is over in Japan and our Tanaiste seems invisible.
Brian Lenihan seems to be able to manage on his own.
We don't need Junior ministers, back-benchers or most of the cabinet. The Dail or seanad need not sit.
The problems we are facing are global problems.
We will vote in the right way in the next referendum and Europe will sort us out.
Alternatively 'We'll all be rooned," said Hanrahan, "Before the year is out."'
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