Fine Gael TD Leo Varadkar decided to go for the comedy approach when dealing with NAMA on his website this week. He offered to sell NAMA his apartment for its Long Term Equivalent Value of €420K, despite it only being worth around €250K at the moment. Given that NAMA buys debts off banks and not property off people, I think he might be barking (deliberately) up the wrong tree, but it’ll prove a popular stunt to those who don’t understand NAMA at all. Irish politics at work, eh?
I don’t know if she’s doing a good job at home but by sacking the bank executives in the bank that the French government bailed out, I think I can safely say I’d prefer to have Christine Lagarde as our Minister for Finance rather than our own Brian Lenihan. As you can see above, she can hold her own with Jon Stewart, something I’d like to see any Irish politician do!
I did a quick Twitter post last night when I noticed a story on RTÉ News online about two anonymous paintings of a naked Brian Cowen that had appeared in two Dublin galleries yesterday. Underneath a picture of one of the paintings a sub editor had made a pun about one of the paintings being “well hung”. I was surprised but pleased that RTÉ could make fun of the situation.
I was more than a little surprised tonight then to hear that RTÉ issued an apology to Cowen and his family over their reporting of the story. Watching the report above, I really don’t know why they would have had to do so. I know our libel laws are amazingly out of date, but surely they couldn’t cover anything said in the report? The story on RTÉ online has also since been edited and the pictures of the paintings have been removed.
I look forward to hearing more about it tomorrow anyway. In the meantime, you can read the latest reactions by searching for #picturegate on Twitter.
“On last night’s programme we carried a report on the illicit hanging of caricatures of the Taoiseach in two Dublin galleries. RTÉ News would like to apologise for any personal offence caused to Mr Cowen or his family and for any disrespect shown to the office of the Taoiseach by our broadcast.”
To make matters worse, they’re also reporting that “Fianna Fáil TD Michael Kennedy last night called on RTÉ director general Cathal Goan to consider his position”. Seriously, I know things are bad right now, but Cowen and the FF party need to figure out when to laugh and roll with it. They’ve now achieved something I thought was impossible: to look even more pathetic than they already did.
[Update 25/03/09] Here’s the video of the apology.
It seems people are less perplexed about this than I am, but more angry. Damien Mulley, who posted the first video here, just wrote his own blog post about RTÉ’s apology, and other artists are now starting to publish more naked pictures of Cowen.
[Update 25/03/09] Nearly 24 hours have passed since I first posted here about what’s now just called Picturegate. It’s funny how fast things move sometimes. We now know that the artist in question is called Conor Casby. Apparently the pictures were hung in the galleries weeks ago, but it was RTÉ’s report two nights ago that made the shit hit the fan.
Today, Gardai visited Today FM trying to strongarm the contact details of Mr Casby out of them. He had been in touch with the Ray D’Arcy show for a couple of months. They didn’t give the Gardai his details, but, in a strange turn of events, Mr Casby contacted the Gardai himself and gave a voluntary statement. It just goes to show how out of hand the whole thing had gotten that there was talk of charging him with criminal damage for putting some glue on a wall and incitement to hatred (???).
The story has been all over the radio all day, and all over the world thanks to the BBC, The Times and the New York Times. I’m still pissed off that RTÉ were made to apologise, when no other media group in the world has even been asked to (to the best of my knowledge), and they’re all still publishing images of the paintings which caused such offence to the office of the Taoiseach.
I guess we can take some comfort in the fact that the creative types didn’t let us down. Check out some of their sterling photoshops of Brian Cowen over on the Creative Ireland website. This one is my favourite:
It’s a long held belief of mine that the party poliical system as it exists now doesn’t serve the people. It serves the parties themselves first, the politicians second, their cronies third, and the rest of us if we’re lucky. I understand how hard it would be to get a majority on difficult decisions if there were no parties, but would it be wrong to expect our politicians to work hard in our interests representing our opinions?
Right now our government is spending valuable time trying to keep itself in power, time that it could be using to directly address some of the many problems affecting the nation. As the country steers listlessly towards bankruptcy, the people have finally taken to the streets, and there’s a lot more to come I’m sure. The people have no confiedence in the government and it is only a matter of time before it falls.
Not before time the idea of an all party emergency government is being mooted, a step that would hopefully restore some confidence internationally in Ireland PLC. It will take a radical move like this to help us out of this mess, and when the dust settles and the history books are written and the fingers pointed, the party political system will hopefully go under the spotlight and be exposed as the flawed, anachronistic millstone around our collective necks that it is.
As much as anything else, this episode is showing us of the need for real political leadership, forward thinking decision takers with top quality advisers. Right now it seems like we have none of these. Not that I blame Cowen & Company personally for everything that has happened, the seeds of which were sown a long time ago (oh how Bertie must be laughing now…). However, this government has spectacularly failed to protect, manage or restore confidence in the banking system and the economy as a whole.
It’s clear to me that we, Ireland, need help. We don’t have the right people in power to get us out of this mess. A Dail without parties would have realised this a long time ago and done something about it.
[P.S. It's also time for an end to the libel laws as they stand, or for our journalists to take a stand and defy them. The unprintable knowledge they have could have put an end to this government a long time ago...]
Not that she wasn’t before, but Panti got politcal on her blog over the weekend, and as a result is stirring up a bit of a debate over the upcoming civil partnership legislation, or more specifically over the lack of marriage rights for LGBT couples. Hopefully there will be some additional coverage of the issues involved as a result. Take a trip over and leave a comment. I am.
Hopefully most of you in Ireland will be aware of this, but it’s worth talking about again and again and again. The government here are again trying to go backwards instead of forwards with the latest changes to the licencing laws with regard to the sale of alcohol. They are trying to move all closing times everywhere back to 2.30am, meaning the entire drinking population of the country will be forced out onto the streets at the same time, and will end up literally fighting for taxis, buses and burgers.
Added to this, they are also trying to close all bars and clubs at 1am on Sundays, apparently to encourage us to show up for work on Mondays…
There are so many flaws in this reasoning that it just makes me angry. Angry enough to go out today and protest about it in front of the Dáil, and write for the first time in my life to my local politicians. These are small steps by me, but part of a bigger concerted effort spearheaded by the great people at Give Us The Night.
If you have any regard for music, live entertainment, DJs, clubs, bars, and the people that work in them you really should spend a couple of minutes writing, phoning or visiting your local TD and raising the issue. The more of us that are heard, the more chance that they will listen.
