U Turn Is The New Forward

While they've been around the reduced motor tax rates for cars with low emissions have encouraged people to buy new cars. This is a fact because the annual savings in many cases are substantial.

So how green is the actual manufacture of the car, how many fewer green cars would have had to be built if this incentive to purchase them had not been created? Think about the fabrication emissions that this skewing of market conditions and the building of these cars in the first place created.

If we're serious about being green why not incentivize people to maintain their perfectly fine older cars and keep them on the road longer, why not try to avoid having to build any more of the bloody things than absolutely necessary? That’s green. A solid first step here would be to scrap the ridiculous registration system that displays the year of the car and creates pressure on the more insecure amongst us to keep changing, regardless of need. That would be green. Crushing older cars, shoving them into landfills then squandering finite resources and filling the skies with toxic shite building replacements, with the blessing of state sponsored incentives and under coercion from the big hitters in the motor industry lobby, definitely isn't.

The current shower will probably change the whole racket because, ironically and confusingly, they're even more misguided than the previous lot. Go figure.

Contextual Healing

And we can see them clearly in our mind’s eye – the historians toiling to construct the appropriate narrative for the past fifteen years of the island story. Fifteen years into which so much has been packed. Fifteen years that, if dramatized, could easily be called The Rise and Fall of Paddy.

But the historians, the academics or the professors would not dare be so flippant when grappling with such weighty matters as sovereignty and self determination. No these lads will labour fruitlessly to formulate suitably leaden and impenetrable language for what has befallen the Republic.

And what I am proposing here is to save everyone a boat load of bother. I propose to be pithy and precise with regard to the lessons thrown up by the contortions of our recent history.

Shout it from the rooftops, teach it in the classrooms, put it on the Twitter - don’t give Paddy any money of his own or create conditions whereby he has access to anyone else’s. And that will be a mighty fine start going forward.

Words

Low, from the 1994 vinyl only album I Could Live In Hope. Recently re released on CD, by the way.

Panic On The Streets Of Portarlington

There was a time I thought I was going to read all the books that interest me. It recently dawned that I read, at best, fifteen in a year. So I’m not going to read all the books that interest me, I’m going to read, at best, about six hundred of them. I will spend the rest of my life reading the books that were published this morning. There are a lot of films I always assumed I would get round to watching. It's always been a given that I would at some point apportion an entire night to Mulholland Drive. Now ten years later it’s touch and go if it will happen at all. And things aren’t looking great for the This Is England box set. I mean when’s that going to happen, I won't have a minute for the next forty years. Jaysus.

Keep The Faithful

What a pitiful sight it is; the party worker, the party supporter hoisting the newly elected TD on his shoulder in the count centre when the results have just been announced. The volunteer party worker elated on behalf of someone else’s entry into the racket. Elation on behalf of someone else’s entry to the promised land of a hundred grand basic plus the same again in allowances for a hundred and fifty half days a year. The poor misguided volunteer soul and his emotional investment in the party man who is going to do the divil and all when he gets to Leinster House. He’s a breath of fresh air, he’ll shake up the old order. Four new wrought iron benches in the local park later and then; flatline. Until the count centre at the next election where the same red faced bottom feeding gombeen does the needful again.

The vicarious glee, post coital reverie; our new TD. Say nothing but there’s half a dozen brand new stainless steel bins heading your way shortly lads. Don’t mention it.

Letting The Side Down

Today throws up another great example. Mick Wallace wants those involved in the politicking racket up there in Dublin 2 to agree to a rearrangement of their six week summer holiday to take in the group stages of Euro 2012. Mick has been vilified from all quarters. The last thing those involved in the racket want is someone breaking ranks, letting the cat out of the sack.

Mick has been there less than a year and in that spell has quite rightly established that it does not matter a damn who turns up and when. And it won't matter next May, June , July or August just like any other May, June, July or August. Mick has recently migrated from the world of contracting where there is a strong tradition of the individual being expected to do something useful in return for being paid. So from where Mick is standing it must have seemed perfectly reasonable to ask for a bit of choreography in this regard.

But what Mick, in his naiveté, is forgetting about is optics. One look at Mick would confirm that he might not be a great lad for the optics. But the shower he’s surrounded by now love the optics, they live for the optics. So Mick was greeted with disdain in his perfectly reasonable request that proper status be afforded to the most important couple of weeks in our modern history.

Mick has been condemned by the commentariat who still have the horn for the daily ritualized bullshit that goes on up there. He has been roundly condemned by his colleagues in the racket who are collectively hell bent on never giving the slightest hint that what they are involved in is essentially grand larceny.

Mick oh Mick, call yourself a parliamentarian? Play the game mate.

Proleland Ukraine

And of course prejudice is everywhere, be it overt or subliminal. Over the last couple of days I haven’t heard a media type speculate on the numbers that will travel to Euro 2012 next summer without hearing the words credit, union and loan shoehorned into the report somewhere. Three words which, by the way, were conspicuously absent a few months ago when the same hacks were pondering the numbers that might make the trip to New Zealand to follow the rugby team.