You gottahand it to Fianna Fail.  A tax package that costs those on low incomes more than those on higher incomes, cutbacks on the newly-made unemployed (that’ll teach them to price themselves out of the market), bigger class sizes, more costs the sicker you get; over the next few days as people peer [...]

IBEC’s Turlough O’Sullivan has an unfortunate ideological quirk but it is treatable.  It seems he can’t say the words ‘low-paid’ without inserting ’so-called’ before them.  In fact, he has trouble using the actual words ‘low-paid’, only managing to say ‘lower-paid’. Still, his condition dictates that he still inserts ’so-called’ before them.  Mark Hennessy describes this condition [...]

You can pick your friends but not your friends’ friends. Out last night with some of the former who brought some of the latter and, of course, their conversation turned to the recession. And those of the latter were real Euro-jockeys, propounding such thoughtful gems as ‘trade unions are sapping our vitals’. [...]

So, ‘curbing’ public spending growth is the only option. Thus spake Paul Tansey in last Friday’s Irish Times. Working from figures supplied by the Department of Finance, he attempts to show how public spending has ‘ballooned’ and now it has to be popped.
Let’s go through his apocalyptic presentation of numbers and see if [...]

Ah, the Sabbath and one is put in mind of Iris Robinson’s insistence that Governments must pursue God’s law. Now I don’t pretend to know more than the next congregant but I do have a particular background, having been engaged with American southern Christian fundamentalism in my early years. Yes, I learned the ‘good book’ [...]

It is a well-known fact that public sector workers are (a) greedy, (b) not productive (in fact they’re anti-productive), (c) over-paid and under-worked with big fat pensions, and (d) the single most important cause behind our recession and the poor showing of the Irish football team.  How do I know all this? Because I read the [...]

If it wasn’t great over the last few years, how much worse can it get?  Recently, we have had to endure a mish-mash of confused debates over the ‘middle class’, the ‘coping class’, the ‘aspiring class’.  I’ve gone over this ground before but in these recession days it is always well to remind ourselves of [...]

If you were to correct every misconception, every mistake, every misrepresentation - every piece of sloppy journalism regarding the economic facts that spews our every day in the Irish media, you’d gum up the worldwide net. For the sake of time and sanity, sometimes you let things slide. Until, that is, you come [...]

Here’s a thought courtesy of Cllr. Eric Byrne - a suggestion so common-sensical its’ frightening. Immediately after Bernard McNamara did a runner on the PPPs in Dublin city, Cllr. Byrne proposed that the City Council scrap all such ‘partnership’ proposals and do the following:
Dublin City Council already owns the sites in question. The Council [...]

Sometimes, it’s the little things that get up your wick. The Sunday Business Post produced one of those little calculations to suggest how expensive it is, how draining on our pockets it is, to increase public sector pay:
‘Each 1 per cent rise in the public pay bill costs the government almost €200 million.’
Geez, that [...]