Gratuitous Trump Image Section Bean and Bucket Theresa May is the most inelegant British leader since Gordon brown. It’s funny how the same person can be perceived as utterly unrecognisable in terms of elementary human characteristics, just by the unfair elapse of time. In office, these two leaders managed to entirely lose their reputations for frugal good sense. If brown was Mr Bean, May is surely Hyacinth bucket (pronounced ‘bouquet’, if that’s not French). The bill for their party Villager likes to consider how much the bailout cost us all, when he’s counting out the five-cent pieces from the jar at the end of the month, in a quest to find the price of a miserable cheese sandwich down at the Capel St Spar. Sometimes he swoons unmanfully. At the end of 2016 the cost of bailing out our domestic banks stood at €39.9 billion, with an annual cost of servicing the associated debt of over €1 billion. €66.8 billion was used to recapitalise the banks and €14.8 billion went in servicing debt. by the end of 2016, the State had recouped €25.1 million in income from the disposal of investments, income from the guarantee scheme, and other means. Subtracting one from the other yields a figure of €56.5 billion. The C&AG has estimated the residual value of our remaining investments in AIB (a 71 per cent shareholding), bank of Ireland (14 per cent) and Permanent TSB (75 per cent) at €13.6 billion. name is projecting a €3 billion surplus. It all comes to €16.6 billion. Irish bank resolution Corporation (Anglo Irish bank and Irish nationwide building Society) cost us €35.8 billion. you mean on judges Most of the money that might have been sprayed around in budget 2018 has gone on reinstating public-sector pay. Villager will be reading a good book when the unexcitable Paschal Donohue rises to his feet. Nothing to see here. Socks and Swimming pay off with undiscerning youth According to Irish Times/Ipsos/MRBI pollsters, satisfaction with Varadkar’s performance as Taoiseach is – for some reason – high, at 49 per cent. 31 per cent are dissatisfied and 20 per cent, presumably people who – like Villager – don’t know what to make of hipsters, are undecided. Varadkar is the most highly rated leader, ahead of Micheál Martin (down two points since May, to 37 per cent), Gerry Adams (down one point, to 30 per cent) and Brendan Howlin (down two points, to 20 per cent). Jayz, not another Healy-Rae on the Today programme Villager favours urban life and doesn’t like the rural perspective. nevertheless, Ireland’s most ostensibly serious broadcaster, Sean O’Rourke, continues to celebrate rural Ireland to the detriment of the capital and sport to the detriment of the arts. He is also the world’s leading user of the word wonderful. Villager caught it 15 times in one show, before the dial spun off the wireless. Women’s place Noel Whelan, barrister and political pundit, is a gentlemanly influence in the discourse but he has decided his schtick now is being unimpressed with the ephemeral machinations of the political process. Fresh from denouncing the serious attempt to impose identity cards for public-service users, as “silly season nonsense” over the summer, the second un-angriest man in Ireland (Colm McCarthy in this as so many other things remains unassailable) is dissing the attempt to visit a rake of referenda on an uninterested electorate as “a political stunt” from “a weak government trying to prove it has vision and durability”. but the man who found his progressive side during last year’s Marriage equality referendum campaign is surprisingly derisive of the likes of the attempt to remove purported acknowledgement of the special place within the home of (all women) from the constitution. Like the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the opening of bunreacht na Éireann the kinked vision of women taints the whole legal system. If you don’t get that you either don’t get equality, don’t get the point of the twentieth century or are from the ‘Fianna Fáil gene pool’. Arthur’s pay day Villager just loves development. And multinationals. When the two come together he loses control of his thesaurus. Diageo has announced plans to transform 12.6 acres at its St James’s Gate site in Dublin City to create a new mixed-use development, which will include residential units, and Villager says it is awesome. The maker of Guinness said that after “significant” investment since 2011 at St James’s Gate and advances in technology, it can now brew more second-rate beer with less, valuable, space. To this end it wants to transform 12.6 acres of the nearly 50-acre site it has been degrading for a generation to create a mixed-use development “a third residential, a third commercial and a third leisure”. called, inevitably, the St James’s Gate Quarter. During the boom Guinness talked of relocating to Leixlip where land was allegedly to be purchased from the ancient Guinness family for a “super brewery”. Oliver Loomes, country director for Diageo Ireland, told the Irish Independent that “it will be many, many years before a sod is turned on this site” for this latest development salvo. Villager therefore predicts it will not happen. parable of the Apple Villager is suggesting everyone should do in their own private and business lives what the Irish government is doing with our €13bn Apple loot. resist the pressure of the rich and powerful – the elite of Europe – to use if for ourselves. Give it back, we don’t need it. It’s Christianity in action and it’s endorsed by those always-just forces of global capitalism, the IT multinationals. Ireland is proving it is post-materialism. It just now needs to widen the ambit of its new strategic love for neighbour. beyond its stance on multinationals, to others. Neo-goldmanism Atavistic xenophobic populism has returned to German national politics with a ‘Knall’, in the unlikely form of a 38-year-old lesbian investment-banking economist, Germany’s own version of Ann-Marie Waters who once worked for Goldman Sachs. Alice Weidel is the
