Irish soldiers fed boxes of slop – €4.20 a day for forces’ grub while State coins €2BN a month is thundering disgrace
THE Government is AWASH with money, yet it can’t find a way to feed our soldiers a proper meal.
The state recorded a massive €7.9BILLION tax receipt surplus for the first nine months of this year alone, an astonishing figure during a time of world economic crisis.
So lucrative is the tax take from the giant multinationals — an average of €2BILLION a month is flooding in — that it outstrips what’s collected from the ENTIRE workforce put together (all three million of us mere mortals, taxed to high heaven with little in return, by the way).
Leinster House has Loadsa-money. But it’s NOT being spent the way it should.
Inequality — and prolific waste — is all around, despite the Republic (a misnomer if ever there was one) being so flush.
One example, among countless (I’d need the entire paper for a month to detail them all) serves to illustrate the yawning gulf between the haves and the have nots.
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PDFORRA, the body that fights for the basic dignity of the brave men and women in our army, revealed that their catering division is given the Dickensian sum of €4.20 a DAY to feed our soldiers.
That’s not just for one meal. No, the army is expected to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner for our troops for less than a fiver. A jaysusing FIVER.
Let that sink in, unlike the food that’s served up to those tasked with defending the integrity of the nation.
So poor must the daily fare of soldiers be, it surely goes in one end and out the other without so much as depositing an ounce of nutrition along the way.
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A thundering disgrace. Yet, despite YEARS highlighting what amounts to the provision of inhumane rations, PDFORRA continues to be ignored.
The Great Gruel scandal exploded in 2018, when images of what soldiers were expected to eat while on manoeuvres were exposed by this paper.
Have a look at the boxes of slop above. That was what troops deployed for more than 48 hours to guard the Pope during his visit were served.
The Breakfast of Champions, a hard-boiled egg, a cheap, frazzled sausage and cold beans. Later for dinner, toughened beef in gravy, enough to tempt the hardiest of stomachs to repeated trips to the jacks.
Nothing seems to have changed four years on.
'TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE'
PDFORRA president Mark Keane decried the €4.20 allowance as “totally unacceptable”.
He’s right, and trebly so seeing as the state allocates the prison service in the region of €15 a day to feed murderers, rapists and other low-lifes behind bars.
Mr Keane said: “Most of the people entitled to rations are young and active and this level of allowance simply cannot meet their needs.”
Morale among our troops must certainly be at rock bottom. Join the army. For what?
To be fed as they would feed the destitute and indigent in the workhouses of old?
MAKING ENDS MEET
And to be paid a salary that shames a country as supposedly wealthy as Ireland. First World for some. Third World for lots.
A soldier I know is about to leave the ranks. He told me: “I can earn more working elsewhere. It’s impossible to make ends meet each month. I’m not married, but if I was I don’t know how I’d be able to live without being a half a step away from poverty all the time.” Sobering.
Almost 270 defence force personnel left this year, THREE TIMES the number in 2021. There are 8,146 personnel in the Defence Forces, its lowest level since the early 1970s.
The Minister For Defence, Simon Coveney, has a tough job, him being Minister For Foreign Affairs at the same time, you know.
The war in Ukraine, the global energy crisis, Brexit and an EU under threat from the forces of the Far Right are issues that would tax the most hardworking of ministers.
His plate is overflowing, which may explain why his eye is off the ball with the army.
They deserve his entire focus and resolve, however. One thing’s for sure, money ain’t the issue.
WE CAN'T LET PUTIN OFF FREE
AFTER retaking Kharkiv in north east Ukraine from the Russians, troops discovered a torture chamber where the sadists of the Russian army had beaten and executed captives, many of them civilians.
In a chilling echo of the Holocaust, they also found a box into which had been thrown the gold and silver fillings wrenched from the mouths – undoubtedly with the most medieval of pliers – of those tortured. It is a picture that goes to the heart of Putin’s Russia.
As Ukraine advances and Russia retreats, in disarray, the sheer murderous barbarity of their seven-month occupation across the country is being revealed, village by flattened village.
Putin may live and breathe without a conscience, but he must be held to account as a warmonger as evil as Hitler or Stalin (his hero).
Otherwise, Russia can never cleanse its polluted soul.
PAINFUL MISS FOR HAALAND
ERLING HAALAND is as complete a centre forward as ever has been in football.
In the immortal words of comedian Gary Cooke of Après Match, who uproariously mimicked Terry Venables post-match when he said (in your best Cockney accent now, repeat): “He’s got an ’ead, two feet.”
He sure has, and a powerful frame that would have made him a god in Viking times.
Not only that, the 6ft 3in beast has the pace of Kylian Mbappe and the first touch of Marco van Basten (the six-yard marksman supreme).
Fourteen goals in eight games for Man City in the Premier League this season. He’ll get 40+ no bother.
Only damper is he won’t feature at the World Cup next month. And it’ll be all the poorer because of it.
NIGHTMARE REALM
LIFE is dull mostly.
The older you get, the slower the beat becomes in the humdrum of daily existence.
Sorry all you 24-hour party people out there laughing at me and my kind.
Remember, though, I was once like you and you will be like me.
What goes around comes around. If you let it, I suppose.
All of which explains why I’m looking forward to having the morosity knocked well and truly out of me when I visit – as you should – the Nightmare Realm in Dublin this Halloween season.
I feel the need to be scared witless in one or all of their five mazes (The Haunted Orphanage, The Sewers, Cannibals Playground, Attack Of The Clowns, and Death Row) so as to shake the blood up.
What else would you be at in the month of October?
Anyway, it’s well worth the trip, if you’re over 13.
Go to thenightmarerealm.ie for all your ghoulish needs.
HERE, IS THE NEWS
PEOPLE who get their news from Facebook alone are a growing tribe.
The idiocies that come out of their mouths in the wake of consuming lie-ridden posts makes my blood boil.
None of them reads a newspaper. If they did, their worldview might be more rounded.
Journalism is a trade. Those who practise it are taught to sift out the fictions and deliver the facts.
It’s a trade that, if lost, represents the greatest threat to democracy in living memory.
A gentle warning. Keep buying a newspaper.
NOTHING COMPARES
IT’S been seven hours and 15 days (and 32 years) since Sinead O’Connor made a name for herself with Nothing Compares To U, bagging her an MTV award for Music Video Of The Year and pop immortality.
She then tore up a picture of the Pope on US TV in 1992 and all hell broke loose.
Prince wrote the song in 1985, and the estate of the star who later changed his name to Squiggle, has refused to allow it to be featured in Sinead’s new film, Nothing Compares.
A bit childish surely, seeing as Sinead made the song famous.
PUB LAW TIME'S UP
IRELAND’S licensing laws have largely remained untouched since 1872.
The UK Parliament’s Licensing Act limited opening hours, fearful of the impact caused by the demon drink.
Ever since, our pubs, restaurants and clubs have endured the restrictions imposed 150 years ago. We’ve been independent for 100 years, for crying out loud.
The Government has long promised to overhaul them.
The night-time economy is strangled because most pubs must shut at 11.30pm.
New laws are coming, Justice Minister Helen McEntee has said, without detail.
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She said they would be passed this year. But now that won’t happen until the New Year. Nothing ever happens on time in Ireland.
And that is the greatest failure of governance.