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http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/ruair%C3%AD-mckiernan-natasha-eddery-has-shattered-the-national-silence-1.2428518
In the Irish Times Nov 13 2015 Ruairi McKiernan, begins his article on the late Pat Eddery: “Don’t wash your dirty linen in public.
This has been a mantra that has kept Ireland buried in shame for too long. It has caused untold hurt and allowed a culture of silent suffering to prevail. Why the collusion? Why do we not want to talk the national secrets that call out to us from the mirror?” Later McKiernan speaks of “a silence that permeates the country’s consciousness. It pretends silence is the same as respect, while pushing the pain deeper into the crevices of the national soul.”
When I was growing up Minister Mary Harney was going to solve the hospital trolley crisis, other Ministers were going to reduce homelessness and school prefabs and were shortly to deliver traveller accommodation and humane prisons.
Since then the elite of the country over-borrowed and went belly up.
The public representatives of the country decided that these elite borrowings should be paid off, over the next generation or so, by the working people, the travellers,the homeless and the prisoners.
We peddle myths to ourselves and to anyone else prepared to listen to them in the hope that the myths prove to be true. Sean Moncrieff
We might well ask yourselves how we arrived at an age of political policing. Growing up I witnessed Mary Harney being covered in red paint and being pelted with eggs but she understood that that was sometimes a small, perhaps unwelcome, part of political discourse. ( joke -Well she is a Trinity graduate albeit a Hist Auditor.)
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/cso-one-person-emigrates-from-irela however if you make can I take howevernd-every-six-minutes-29536854.html
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/d27e950a-10bf-11e3-b291-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3rMpX0x4n
https://www.education.ie/en/The-Education-System/Higher-Education/Higher-Education-Role-Value-and-Scale-of-Higher-Education-in-Ireland-Discussion-Paper-1-.pdf
http://www.oecd.org/edu/Education-at-a-Glance-2014.pdf
Era Dabla-Norris; Kalpana Kochhar; Nujin Suphaphiphat; Frantisek Ricka; Evridiki Tsounta (June 15, 2015). Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality : A Global Perspective. International Monetary Fund. Retrieved June 25, 2015.
During the 1930s to 1970s Keynesian economics was applied whereby government spending was used to increase aggregate demand, thus increasing economic activity via the multiplier effect. This resulted in the reversal of the great depression of the 1930s and resulted in the greatest standard of living increases ever experienced for the general population right up to the early 1970s. In the early 1970 this economic model was abandoned and a form of neoliberal “trickle down economics” was adopted or as George H.w Bush, described it “voodoo economics”. The “rising tide” was to lift all boats. To this day the only certainty about the application of this form of economic model is that everything trickles up rather than down. The rising tide lifted very few boats.
However, if you make the lie big, make it simple and keep saying it, eventually they will believe it. Moreover, if you have a sycophantic intellectual and media culture you can be guaranteed that your orthodoxy will prevail.
and there is simply not enough purchasing power left in the rest of the economy to generate meaningful economic activity
A 2015 report by the IMF argues that there is no trickle-down effect as the rich get richer:
If the income share of the top 20 percent (the rich) increases, then GDP growth actually declines over the medium term, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. In contrast, an increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with higher GDP growth.
***Now, another gratuitous aside, about some entirely different matters — skyscrapers in the countryside, housing estates where there are no people, office blocks where there is no public transport, regulators, gold plated regulations and wooden enforcement and other trifling matters.
It is indeed very tempting to direct one’s anger at the venality of the local dons, capos and hacks.
But that would, in my opinion, be entirely misguided.
If there is anger it should be more properly directed at those who were privileged, educated and in the responsible positions that enabled all of this to happen.
This type of thing has been chronicled throughout the ages from Aesop to The Emperor’ s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.
More recently perhaps Victor Klemperer, summed it up best.
In his remarkable diaries of his life as a Jew under Nazism — only escaping by living in an attic for years — “If one day the situation were reversed and the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had honourable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest; they would be left hanging from the lamp posts for as long as was compatible with hygiene.” Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, trans. by Martin Chalmers, (Modern Library, 1999), p184.
The significant difference being, of course, that the level hyper sycophancy here is surely at a far higher level as the sanctions for not going along or saying stop are minuscule compared to the sanctions that prevailed in Nazi Germany.
In simple terms, the gombeens are not really the problem.
One need not travel too far, therefore, to understand the true meaning of the words “enabler”, “comprador”, “lackey” or “”running dog”. The Burke guy was right but much too polite!
From “home” every hour over the past seven years four young people, some years five per hour, have left for a better life elsewhere.
Aside from the incalculable emotional cost the State’s accumulated educational cost of those departing, each hour, is over €1million.
Yes. Over €1million has gone out the door every hour of every day for the past seven years. €8-9 billion p.a or €50-60 billion since 2007.
Events, like Web Summit, apart from being a welcome boost to the local economy, can provide a useful platform to showcase Ireland as a potential tech hub to the thousands of companies that visit.
This could play some small part in stemming the outflow of our best and brightest and in encouraging some to return.
However, Web Summit, like so many other parts of the tech and event industries, can only survive if they are the best at what they do.
There is no second place in that particular business. It is weird, brutal but true.
Web Summit will survive and return “home” but only if it can remain the best at what it does.