Unity

From Unity, 7 March 2009

Croppies, lie down

by W. Owl

Tom Kelly, who writes a weekly column for the Irish News, is no friend of the left and is certainly no friend of those thousands of people who demonstrated in Dublin on 21 February.
     In his Monday page of 23 February he made reference to the demo when he wrote: “On Saturday Dublin swarmed with an angry lynch mob of state workers baying for the blood of the diners still daring to eat in the bourgeois establishments on St Stephen’s Green or straying TDs brave enough to go to Dáil Éireann on a day off.”
     The demonstration, called by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, extended beyond state employees, as many workers see their livelihood going down the tubes, if they have not already done so. To describe them as an “angry lynch mob” is to treat them with utter contempt.
     To show his total support for the Irish capitalist class his article is entitled “Irish people must stop feasting on scapegoat.” He states that “Ireland is now irrationally amok with hard thinking, lynch mobs and hindsight policy making. People seem to forget that Ireland is still the world’s fifth richest country.”
     Whether it’s the fifth-richest country or not, the cold fact is that its riches are not now benefiting its people. It is also a fact that whilst the economy boomed during the days of the “Celtic Tiger,” so did inequality, and that’s despite Kelly’s claim that average income was €42,779 per person.
     So what were the rich averaging? Kelly doesn’t give us any figures for them. Like many supporters of the capitalist system, Kelly is quick to praise it when everything is going well, but when things go pear-shaped suddenly “human frailty” comes into the equation.
     He accepts that, of course, there has been a squandering of the benefits of the boom time, and, yes, there has been poor financial regulation, but “both at the top and the bottom of society there has been a blind spot, which is our human frailty.
     “This,” he adds, “unfortunately conditions us” (notice how the word “us” comes into play) “to take personal advantage when things are going well but which also makes it easy to blame others when things go badly.”
     In other words, it’s the people who are a bunch of ungrateful greedy bastards, although he does accept that “it’s the unfettered nature of capitalism that brings out the worst in Irish people.” Still, no real criticism of the rich; or maybe this “unfettered capitalism” doesn’t affect their nature.
     He then comes out with the classic comment of the apologists for capitalism when he states that “Ireland as a nation is not standing together, braced to collectively shoulder the responsibility to see through this economic maelstrom.”
     Whilst he accepts that “commercial, corporate and individual greed exacerbated the problem, so too is community, corporate and individual greed fuelling the downward spiral.”
     An example of this is the workers in the public sector “complaining” about cuts in their pay and conditions.
     We are all to blame, then.
     He comes out with the usual classic about “much maligned so-called greedy developers,” who created thousands of jobs with their investments.
     For them, creating jobs was secondary; it was the return that was the primary thing.
     A couple of weeks later he is at it again when he wrote in the Irish News on 2 March that whilst he was taking a client round Dublin (he owns a PR company) public-sector unions were picketing outside the various Government buildings they were visiting, and newspapers were “dominated” by news of strikes by bus-drivers, gardaí, taxi-drivers, factory workers, and farmers.
     His client was an English businessman “with Irish roots,” and he wondered what thoughts were doing through his head.
     I wonder what thoughts are going through these workers’ heads when they read Kelly’s comments. No doubt they will go back to the Lisbon Treaty referendum when Kelly lambasted those who voted against‘ indeed one of his SDLP colleagues labelled the No campaigners as head-bangers.
     Somehow the term “Croppies, lie down” comes to mind.
     Should the Croppies lie down?

Home page > Publications > Unity > Croppies, lie down

Baile > Foilseacháin > Unity > Croppies, lie down