Leo — I’ve got a little list. Time for us to grow up
So we have a new leader. I wish him well. It seems that we have stumbled from crisis to crisis, scandal to scandal, tribunal to inquiry, for decades now.
It is less important to me to agree with what Leo does than that he actually does things.
It is time to develop this tiny country from a dependent adolescent mentality to becoming a fully-fledged adult republic.
One constituency Leo identified was the fed up ‘squeezed middle’. These are the people who pay for everything including tribunals, Y2K nonsense, massive public service pensions, etc, and then, out of their after-tax income, they pay more tax on their car, NCT, road tax, petrol, insurance (hiked up because no one has dealt with the compo culture in 25 years), beer, wine, VAT on everything, ‘voluntary’ school contributions, bin charges, property tax…
Add in for many the mortgage on their negative equity property which they bought because the bank said it would be a great pension. The banks don’t cut any slack for little people. So what do I want Leo to do? The four most important things on my list are Education, Education, Education and Education, and after that are Health, Housing and the Public Service that he has inherited and which have an important role to play in the first three priorities.
Almost everyone I know has a more varied and interesting life than their parents. They got a primary, secondary and third level education. There is little I value more than good education and good teachers. To say we have excellent education is tommyrot. We have short terms, long holidays, Neanderthal unions and very little accountability.
Health. The budget goes up and up and the service goes down and down. I find it hard to understand, but it does strike me as painfully obvious that we need more nurses and have to pay them more. The plans to attract Irish nurses abroad back home did not work.
This tells me something blindingly simple about pay and conditions here and there. And it could soon be the same for GPs. I hope to live to see the day when people do not take out health insurance because a quality service is paid for from taxation. Some chance.
I am writing this in the France of Macron. I might be safer here.
Housing. I have lived in some real dumps in my time but I always had a roof over my head. Leo, don’t interfere in the housing market because governments always make a mess of it.
Enable your county councils to build, build, build and screw the red tape.
Families should not be raised in hotels and thirtysomethings should be long gone from the family home. The Public Service? Leo, you haven’t a hope. They will be there long after you have gone.