A menacing parade of huff and a dishonour to patriots of 1919
IT was Official Ireland at its most pristine. And its most venal. There they were, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and members of the Dáil and Seanad all decked out in their finery, spick and span, suited and booted to reflect their obvious importance as representatives of the people of Ireland. And there too in Dublin’s Mansion House on Monday to commemorate the centenary of the first Dáil on January 21, 1919, was our President Michael D Higgins.
The entire event was heavy with irony, cynicism and insult – a modern-day political elite determined to bask in the reflected glory of a revolutionary generation of patriots whose vision and sacrifice still goes unrewarded and, more importantly, unfulfilled.
And, horrifyingly, this is only the start of it. This menacing parade of bluff commemorations marking transformative political events of 100 years ago will drag on for another FOUR years. We really need a reset. The founding fathers and mothers of 1919 talked a comprehensible, more honest, more direct kind of politics. Their Declaration of Independence, delivered to the first Dáil, referred to centuries of English rule based on force and fraud and military occupation.
They looked to equality, peace and goodwill and democratic republicanism.
They declared the British presence as nothing more than an invasion and, despite the enemy’s obvious and overwhelming strength, they persisted – all the while knowing that they risked the hangman’s noose or a bullet in the back of the head for their troubles.
Those men and women of 1919 refused to be cowed by what they themselves described as ‘ruthless tyranny’ that had lasted throughout the centuries.
Yet, there they were at the Mansion House on Monday. Our modern politicians, shameless in the face of what this country has become. Brazen despite out-of-control homelessness. Audacious despite immeasurable suffering by countless neglected victims of everlengthening healthcare lists and women who have already lost their lives in the cervical cancer scandal.
Bold beyond measure by an unwarranted sense of their own importance despite their manifest failures as guardians of citizens’ rights and the tenets of a true republic.
We are all now casualties of a politics that is soft and superficial, vacuous and lacking in integrity. Welcome to social media, fluffy, puffy, instant gratification, Instagram politics of the kind favoured by our dear leader Leo Varadkar. Politics without depth.
And, it could all be so different if our Taoiseach just managed to listen.
A couple of hours before he delivered what was an entirely predicable speech at the Mansion House – one that was remarkable only for its commonplace nothingness – the Taoiseach should have been listening to Dr Carol Coulter on Morning Ireland.
The Director of the Childcare Law Reporting Project told how family homelessness was now a factor in keeping children in State care. Essentially, even when children may be returned to their families they can’t be – because there’s no place for them to live.
In one case a judge was compelled to inquire if a parent was even in the position to make a sandwich for the child forced to live in emergency accommodation. So much for ending ruthless tyranny.
On Tuesday, the Taoiseach’s ear should have been glued to the wireless to hear how homelessness is affecting children attending Temple Street hospital. Dr Ike Okafor said that last year 842 children were discharged to no fixed address, because they were going to emergency accommodation. So much for equality in this great new republic.
One in four of these children was aged less than 12 months. He said the scandal is getting even worse and children are being forced to live in what are effectively unsafe environments and are suffering from more infections than would otherwise be the case if their parents had their own homes.
The centenary commemorations are nothing but a mockery of the noble intentions of 100 years ago. They are all a sham and a despicable con-trick.
And, alarmingly, they’re set to continue until 2023 at least, 100 years after the end of the Civil War.
This insulting lampooning of longdead heroes and nation builders has to end.
The greatest tribute Leo Varadkar and President Higgins can now pay to the people who founded this State is to cease and desist.
They must stop attempting to steal the mantle of political giants upon whose shoulders they have scrambled.
End these commemorations and don’t allow them to start up again until this country is put right – until the torment that’s devastating too many lives has ended.
Only then would the Taoiseach and all his pals in the political class have earned the right to rub shoulders across the century with women and men who risked everything for a country that is, tragically, still only a dream.
If you think that the mortgage crisis has been more or less sorted then you need to visit the courts. Sit in for a Registrar’s Court and you’ll realise the full extent of a problem that has been under the radar for years.
Like Gerry Adams once said about his pals in the IRA, they haven’t gone away you know.
It’s nothing but a procession of misery, with unpaid bills, rolled-up debts, negative-equity disasters, house repossessions, hopeless cases and unspeakable heartache.
We need to pay attention.