Tough time

While January is probably everybody’s least favorite month events about to unfold are not going to augur well for the year, never mind the next thirty days or so.

January sucks as a time of year, it’s credit card pay back time, the dark winter mornings and nights, the time of most broken promises and resolutions, the time when many people realise how much they hate their jobs and long for change. In fact did you know that more seperations and divorces are filed for in January than any other month?

It’s something to do with being couped up with someone for two weeks at Christmas, too much food booze and familiarity. While Bertie Ahern tries to cling on to his political survival the country is going down the tubes, fast. How can a man properly lead a country when he is completley preoccupied with the events of his personal life, both past and present? Just like Ahern, Ireland too has got problems, lots of them.

The collapse, yet again, of the British property market made matters worse and the emergence from a long sleep of the Germans meant that Ireland’s days were numbered. But those are just some of the reasons I feel.

While the main one was greed, pure and simple, Irish greed. At every level we thought that we were on the pig’s back for life but any fool with an ounce of reason should have known that if you keep blowing up a balloon it will ultimatley burst. We got too cocky, with all our money, all our pseudo property developers, our flash cars and snazzy lifestyles.

More like all Champagne please and never mind with the pints. Fur coat and no knickers more like it. We were always a third world country but failed to see it for what it was, with a third world health system, a third world infrastucture and a third world political system.

While I have no personal axe to grind with Bertie Aherne it astonishes me that he is still in power, never mind politics. In any other country in the civilised world he would be long gone by now. But not Ireland. What will it take for us to wake up as a nation and get some passion and say we are not going to take this corruption and waste anymore?

Why are we so lazy and why do we lie down take it all the time? While what happened in Kenya was so terribly wrong and led to unforgivable death and bloodshed, let’s remember that the events in an otherwise peaceful country were sparked by a rigged general election.

Here with blatant cronyism and years of corruption and political favours, millions squandered by those running our health system where thousand die unnessecarily every year, what do we Irish do? Nothing.

We accept suspended sentences for drug dealers, aquittals for rapists and three year sentences for child killers. We do nothing, oh we whine for an hour or two and then forget about it all.

Except to order the brand new motor, head off on a week’s skiing and crack open another bottle of bolly.