National Maternity Hospital is a giant affront to memory – the government will pay high price
REMEMBER the Bertie Bowl, the fantastical government project to build a national stadium at a cost to the taxpayer of €1billion in the early Noughties?
The pipe dream of sports-mad former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was mercilessly ridiculed and ended up consigned to the dustbin when sense (which rarely won the day in the heady days of the Celtic Tiger) prevailed.
Our politicians flew close to the sun throughout the casino years of the boom. Their politics of wild abandon brought us to the miserable gates of the International Monetary Fund.
When you religiously pursue the economic theory known as “throwing money around like confetti” those things are inclined to happen.
It’s a course in the Harvard Business School these days. How not to run a country, by Ireland, 1997-2007.
Bertie, the finance minister who never had a bank account, is necessary reading if you want to ace your exams.
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“No one told us the banks were in trouble” was their response when the country went bankrupt in 2008 and we were forced to wear sackcloth while cradling the begging bowl.
You and I will be paying for the mistakes of the politicians who ruled with the blindfold on through the boom years. The Universal Social Charge — a promised “temporary measure” to help pay for the sin of worshipping at the bottomless well of credit — is still being levied at our door.
And be under no illusion, that unforgiving tax on every-body will remain in place until you die. Indeed, your children and their children will be paying it until they die, too.
Political incompetency cannot be cured unless the incompetent no longer rule. It’s a lesson that should be taught in schools from the age of five.
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But why dredge up the murky past that’s best forgotten?
Fourteen years later and we may be back on our feet economically (great if you’re rich and don’t have to sleep in your car because there is nowhere affordable to live) but folly still floats in the air like a foul smell through the halls of power.
The blindfold is back on and the common good is being ignored, again.
The government decision to plough ahead, against the wishes of most women, and spend €1billion building a maternity hospital the state will never own got me thinking of the stupidities of the past. The political party that brought you such hollow delights as the Bertie Bowl, and recession, is back in power, eager to repeat its mistakes.
The monstrosity this time is a plan to build the new National Maternity hospital with YOUR money and hand effective control to the church. It will be on private land and leased by the state for 300 years.
Effective ownership, Taoiseach Micheal Martin called it. I may effectively own my house because I pay a mortgage, but the bank is the ultimate arbiter.
Let’s call the government’s new castle in the air the Birthy Bowl. A colleague coined that in a lucid moment this week and it resonated.
The government has assured the women of Ireland that “all procedures that are legal in the state”, including abortion and sterilisation, will be available in the new hospital. Mmmm.
Forgive our women for not believing what they are being told.
Irish history is full of seedy connivance between church and state.
For countless decades, this country was kept in dark because those elected to uphold our Republic trampled on it instead and allowed the church to dictate.
So unmarried mums were sent to be slaves in laundries; babies were taken from them and adopted without their consent; nuns buried dead babies secretly in pits; rapist priests were moved around to hide their crimes; the archbishop (despot) of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid had a monkey called Adolphus shot dead in Dublin Zoo for engaging in repeated indecent acts; women silently died in pregnancy because proper healthcare wasn’t available; tens of thousands of women were forced to travel abroad in shame to access abortion, until May 25, 2018 when it finally became legal; raped children who tried to access abortion abroad were stopped and prosecuted as criminals; divorce was prohibited until 1995; it was a criminal offence to commit suicide until 1993; contraception was forbidden by law until 1985.
Dark days we all remember as if they were in our bones.
So forgive Irish women for being outraged that a national maternity hospital won’t be publicly owned and run. Instead it will be a facility effectively overseen by the very church many of them deeply mistrust.
When follies are forced upon them — and the National Maternity Hospital in its current guise is a giant absurdity and affront to memory — the Irish are an unforgiving lot. By stubbornly pursuing this project the government will pay a high electoral price.
THE Wagatha circus in the High Court in London tickled the ribs all week.
Rebekah Vardy’s reputation rests on the outcome of her libel action against rival footie wife Coleen Rooney.
Rebekah’s insistence she wasn’t behind the leaking of stories harvested from Coleen’s private Instagram account have been under fierce scrutiny. It resulted in some hilarious interactions during the trial.
One made me laugh out loud: Rebekah Vardy: “ . . . if I’m being honest.”
Coleen Rooney’s lawyer, David Sherborne: “I would hope you’re being honest given you’re sitting in a witness box at the High Court.”
DON'T GO TO POT PLEASE
HE’S a communications manager, she’s a hairdresser. They use a bucket in their hallway to collect the rain seeping through a leaky roof.
Now they are the biggest ever Euromillions winners, after bagging €215million.
Joe and Jess Thwaite, from Gloucestershire, in the UK, decided to go public so as not to force their friends and family to carry a secret.
They aren’t materialistic, they add, and plan to spend the money on “experiences”, except maybe for a new car.
The hairdressing business Jess runs is struggling, but she plans to still work. Joe will pack in his job, and why not? Life’s too short.
Humility is the most wonderful quality. But with that much wad, they’ll need help to retain theirs.
DESTINY isn’t written in the stars. Luck, more than anything, determines fate. When everything is going fine and dandy, that’s when you should worry things could go pear-shaped. Always do.
Arsenal were destined for a top four finish in the Premier League and a Champions League spot next year. Then Tottenham – and an awful referee – did them in the North London derby.
Fate was still in their hands despite that defeat, but the destiny many had predicted, retreated like the tide on a raucous night in Newcastle on Monday.
Two defeats in a row have sealed the deal. Never count your chickens. Beware of those who do.
SIEGE'S HEROES NEED US
AFTER three hard months, the Ukrainian heroes of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol finally surrendered to Russian forces this week.
More than 1,000 troops, including hundreds of wounded, were bussed to Russian-occupied areas.
An unknown fate awaits them. Amnesty International and the Red Cross have demanded Russia treat them as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
But Russia is keen to brand them terrorists, which will deprive them of the rights they deserve as enemy combatants under the Convention.
Moscow is intent on punishing the last defenders of Mariupol, but the world must do everything in its power to ensure that doesn’t happen.
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S plot to sabotage the Eurovision Song Contest to thwart a Ukrainian victory was a bit like his war – a damp squib.
Kalush triumphed thanks to a landslide public vote that took the win from the UK’s Sam Ryder, who garnered most votes from the expert juries. What do they know?
Within hours, the Ukrainian winners were back home and ready to help in the war effort again. Bravo.
A LOAD OF CROP INDEED
UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss channelled her inner Alan Partridge by saying the Irish are a nation of turnip eaters.
Partridge mocked us as potato munchers in his show. But it was funny because it was so outrageous. Truss’s attempt to make little of the Irish and our concerns about Brexit had all the humour of a dead rat on the pavement.
A former UK diplomat to the US, Alexandra Hall Hall (so good they named her twice) made the claim on Tuesday night via Twitter, just as Liz was preparing to break international law and tear up the NI Protocol (established to protect peace).
At a function in Washington DC in 2019, Liz promised Brexit would be a dream, adding with a giant dollop of pejorative sarcasm that only “farmers with a few turnips in the back of their trucks” would be concerned by the prospect of a No-deal Brexit. This has yet to be confirmed or denied by Truss.
In Brexitland, everything is impossibly rosy. Truss was, and continues to be, infatuated with the perceived “freedom” afforded to the UK by its withdrawal from the EU.
Never mind that Brexit, by dint of its insistence that trade barriers be re-erected on the island of Ireland to assuage the minority view in Northern Ireland, in fact threatens the 25-year peace that has led to a normal existence for the 1.5million people north of the border.
Politicians like Truss need to be armed with humility, and an understanding of the history of Ireland, if they are to be taken seriously.
BOTCHED REALITY
TELLY is awash with the bizarre. Reality TV became a thing after Big Brother. In the 1990s the Channel 4 show was considered wild.
It is quaint in comparison with the dross that consumes the screen these days.
Watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians is to accept evolution is no more. Like replacing your brain with a giant ball of Bubblicious.
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As is Botched, where unfortunates who subjected themselves to awful plastic surgery try to undo the mess.
Existence is stuck in a puddle.