STRICTLY POLITICS & IRELAND
The elections are coming and your vote is necessary and counts towards finding something NEW or continuing on with the old.
The decision is entirely yours and your opinion and vote are needed to get what you see as fit for our country, this beautiful land of Eire.
What will you consider as important to you as you cast your vote this year?
I have no desire to influence how you think about anything in politics and felt important to make such a disclaimer early on in my blog post today.
The things that I am considering are countless to be honest. There are such an array of issues that need considering and where does one begin? I do get it when I hear people mention housing and homelessness and the need for more housing. My thoughts though veer away from the housing quite quickly when I begin to think what good is a house to anybody when their wages barely covers the mortgage payment? That means jobs then becomes more important does it not?
And if I am to consider jobs and the workforce of Ireland I am taken off on another route and begin to think of education being pivotal to the labour force market. Education is perhaps the key to raising and bringing up new young people in to the work force. What kind of skilled people will we need and are we providing adequate education platforms for those who are coming behind us? Imagine a 50 year old person who has no children and is not married, perhaps comfortable in their job or profession and easily making a mortgage repayment, would they ever begin to focus on housing or jobs market or education for that matter? Probably not! My example of that person just there is to make the point that we all have different areas of concern depending on where we are at in our own life and what is going on in front of our own nose. These are what can be called our own important areas of concern and some of the politicians available to us today may actually be speaking in the proper tone when it comes to issues that are important for us and our own issues. Is it within ourselves to have some empathy for others, not any ordinary others though, “paisanos” so to speak. Our fellow country man and woman who needs housing and who needs education and a jobs market available is also our own concern too.
For me it is not good enough to call myself Irish and not consider all of my Irish brothers and sisters. I can proclaim I am a proud Irish man and then I can see the current head of government walk to the podium on the auld 6 one news and cringe to myself with disappointment. Am I a hater of some kind? Not really to be honest, I do however think that the current political body has had their say for too long now and the country is in some serious need to wake up and make progressive, educated changes.
Ah yes back to the education avenue of thought, so if we are to provide educated people to a jobs market then it is also fair to say that we must look at our health care system. Why so? Without a radical overhaul of the health care system in place in our country, how do we ever provide for the young people to gain strength and rise to be as great as we wish them to be? The health care is not just for the elderly and the dying or the sick. We as a country must provide for our children, we must be able to treat effectively sick persons and not have a single mother wait 34 hours to be seen by a doctor while she is stressing even more by how or what way will she get her children off to school because she is stuck in a waiting room at a hospital. The stress factor perhaps contributing to the ailment or illness and or the cause of the accident that brought her to the A & E in the first place. We cannot call the “system” a proper functioning system while people wait 9 and 10 months or even up to a number of years for treatments. The powers that be may be very much at fault for lining the pockets for the higher paid personnel within the health care system and have left very little for the ~”grunt workers” who actually do all the heavy lifting anyways. Yes, I am referring to the student nurses and the people on the ground dealing with the patients directly.
Scenario 1.
How does a student nurse pay her way through training and work in the hospital for free to count as hours served towards here course or career and find any time for any part time job to bring much needed funds to live?
Then to top that off, how will a young nurse begin a family and afford their own home? Remembering of course that the auld 2nd hand car that they could barely afford must be put through a yearly NCT test with a fee and then pay motor tax and be told at the testing centre that a shock is gone on the car and needs to be repaired and re tested within a month? Oooops! Small pay check gone on the repairs and the little car pulls out of the re test at the testing centre and as Irish as it gets, bang, straight in to a pot hole. Shocks broken again. Yes potholes are a result of a wet climate country that experiences a little frost every now and again. The climate is not the responsibility of the Government of Ireland, although the climate action plans have Irish Government commitments up the Yazoo!
Simple answer is an overhaul to the healthcare system in Ireland that sees fair wages for a qualified nurse and just pay and terms of work for those wishing to train and become a nurse. Imagine making such radical changes that a nurse would or could afford to train and become qualified and know that a job here in Ireland is available and no need to head off for Dubai or Australia because the Irish Government found the simplistic way of providing for our very own home grown nurses. A nurse has the right to own a home here in Ireland, so why the hell is it not the case for them?
One is then drawn to take a look at where or how the money is spent by the #Government and in very rapid fashion the jay may hit the floor when we see that any person in a prominent position of politics is receiving a very large salary. What has gone wrong here? A person who is an assistant to a minister or an assistant to an assistant of a minister is entitled to a large salary; yet, the lovely nurse who is caring for your own sick family member is not entitled to such luxuries? And not to harp on about the medical care system, though (big long inhale here) Is it not correct to or make sense of how the pillars of our society are not a Government who are making decisions on our behalf and might I add, making a consistent run of poor decisions over the most recent decades?
For example;
I am a government who grant fund you to adapt solar energy to your home. You will receive a higher price tag for your property too by improving your BER rating. This is great and thank you for the hand out to help me reduce my monthly bill expenditure and increase the value of my home. My confusion is that there are many rural roads around our country where the good old pot hole is alive and well and the reason we might break a steering rod or some other important part of our car while driving anywhere other than 3 or 4 major motorways in Ireland. Reason being? The beautiful roadways of Ireland are very poorly lit. Can we not find a way to use this great technology of natural power source of wind energy and solar energy to power our roadways and light them up? This issue does sound very automobile orientated, I know. Though it is more about safety and well being of our people to be honest with you. Light up the road ways and there will be less catastrophic accidents. Less pressure on a hospital emergency room too.
The cycle of things follow many avenues and round about ways of getting to focus on some key areas of concern for our Government of the future. HEALTH CARE is huge and I will tie it together in a few sentences;
Raising children and making them become the healthiest possible that they can be will in turn result in better educated children, better educated children will enter the jobs market at a reasonable level to be able to afford a lifestyle and raise their own family. And so the cycle can continue to improve through the generations. Did you know the nutrition of child from early years can determine the health of the person in adult life? Go look up the studies, they are out there of how the direct correlation of malnutrition in childhood manifest later in life of the same child as serious illness. Healthier children now, mean fewer burdens on the hospitals later. Yes indeed these things will take a generation or more to cure, though the time to implement is now.
Which of course means that our Government spending on children now makes for a much better country later? Though poor old Mr. or Mrs politician is kind of like you and me, they only understand what is in front of their own nose too. We the people of Ireland fail each other each and every day by turning our blind eyes on the areas that deserve improving and focus in on whatever is ailing us right now at this moment in time.
Let us go back a moment and consider what is just and fair as a salary for any person in politics. There is no need to create or make attempt at creating some Elite crowd around politics. This is a Civil Servant position. The salary cap must come in to play and no politician or assistant or junior assistant needs any more pay than 120k per year Maximum. The position or job is over due for a salary cap. The excess that has been spent by Government must come to a halt. The money is much better spent on the youth and the health of the young people if Ireland is ever to be a proud, stand tall nation. Salary cap on all positions within Government will stop attracting the bull shitters as a way of career choice and only the passionate will push forward to want to make a difference and know that there exists a salary cap before ever going in to the job in the first place.
We mentioned housing earlier. What good are 500 thousand new homes to people who cannot afford them? What is okay about banks charging a few cents on every transaction and then clobbering people over the head with monthly fees and quarterly fees? You will hopefully never encounter such things as having to make an insurance claim ever for any accident at home and then & only then will you discover that the insurance game is all about taking in as much as they can in premiums and paying out a little as they can and not paying out as often as they possibly can. Who allowed all this nonsense to happen? The thought process of recent years ahs been to make the insurance market as competitive as possible and we might be able to keep premiums at a cheaper level by competition. What ends up happening? The new companies form and come in at the market rate or just below and call themselves competitive….. Yeah right! Nice way to reduce the insurance costs alright. This is why I had the pleasure of visiting the Aviva stadium recently, the money from all you premiums needs to be spent on something, might as well let the insurance firms keep on investing your money for some good to their own property portfolios etc. There is absolutely no way in the universe it is possible to justify that a car driver with a full Irish drivers license and who is under the age of 25 years of age needs to find money to insure a car in the range of 3 and 4 thousand Euro. Such premiums do harden down on the fact that the young person will not afford to save anything to strive to become a home owner. And yes building houses. Homes and starter homes in the price range of 450k Euro, did I just type that correctly? Surely it cannot be so?
Let us circle back, the houses will be built and cost an arm and a leg, then what facilities will come with the new developments? What young baby care facilities will be available to these new family starter homes? What facilities will be available for the youth of these new developments? Oh wait a minute nobody considered ten years down the road from now?
New housing with huge price tags and no facilities for young people. So we wish to focus on one area, Housing and give no thought to medical care, support services or after school activities to nurture our young to become the healthiest and most educated possible to, in turn through time develop our beautiful country in to the Best Ireland that we can be?
Nope!
The Government of recent years has helped their own circle of friends to develop housing and capture as much profits as they can so that they can be in the breakaway Elite group that has been desperately making attempt create itself as a stand alone group in our society. It is not who we are Irish. We are not European yes men and we have not hand to bow down on one knee for more than 100 years. Again we miss the opportunity to make better for our youth and we continue to allow greed and money to rule over us in our political world.
We currently have more offices of Government than we have ever had and the spin offs are all taking pay checks each and every month for doing less. The salaries of the positions rise and some benefit from nice pension deals at the end of their tenure, yet do less and less to deserve such. How can any of this make political sense? Oh but wait….. We go to Europe and sit in cabinets there and show how we can puff our chest out and brag how wonderful we are and how we are doing so much to remain in line with our European brothers and sisters. We are desperately in need of Ireland first as the primary attitude of our political body. Do I wish to be rebellious to Europe? No!
We witnessed Brexit and how weak Europe actually is a multinational stand alone body.
We witness Wars and see that Europe is weak as a multi national stand alone body.
What do we get in return, a super deal of 100 Euro plus a month for SKY TV?
We, yes you and me because our vote is what puts these people in their position of power each time an election comes about, so it is very much WE. We facilitate the nonsense by not taking serious issue and holding the political body accountable. Why so? Because we are Irish, we have been trained by the British many years ago to be “thankful for small mercies”. Do not upset the apple tart; speak when you are spoken too and so on. And NO absolutely not to say that I have ever experienced anything of our historic past personally, though I am aware what generational traumas are and the residual effects that we have remained resilient to. We became happy to take that which we were given and formulated an attitude of “there is no point in complaining”. I do get that entirely.
This does not excuse that every local council in the country has boarded up houses while they offer private land holders monies to purchase lands for social housing.
This does not excuse how we allow people to remain locked up in jail for expressing their opinion and sticking by it. Censorship at its finest.
This does not excuse poor roadways with potholes and poor lighting in our country.
This does not excuse anything over 4 plus hours waiting time at a hospital emergency department.
This does not excuse permitting politicians to canvas and create literature and posters all over the country at whose expense? Who actually pays for all of the campaign nonsense that we have seen spring up over night?
A few years ago, one party head spent 1 million Euro on print material for their annual meet up in Galway. A million here a million there, be it a printer for an office of Government or a bike shed or a toilet as is the recent mess.
If a hotelier cannot make it in the business of hotels, who are we to line his pockets with “refugee sanctuary” monies?
If a bank cannot make it in the world of banking, who are we to allow them slide in to banking business a model of ridiculous fees?
All the while we have numerous health and safety and safety and health offices providing new great ground breaking ideas of how to make things better. Yet we do not provide safe roadways, well lit roadways around our entire country.
The powers of the police force An Garda are not to be made special or increased to make ring fences around politician’s homes. This is ridiculous. We do not safe guard the failures of a politician and allow them to use the authorities to remove our right to protest. No, the opposite is what is required. When anybody does their actual job, then there is nothing to fear by way of back lash.
The only people who might be in fear of doing their job could be a judge or somebody like that because they have to pass punishment on people. Other than that though? Mr. or Mrs. politician, do a better job and represent the people of the country and not your own “cronies” then why would any have a need for An Garda to protect you?
The Garda thing and the locking people up who take stand against is a method of creating an Elite society within our own country. The only time we have had this before was the thousand year long saga of being occupied by the British and their aristocrats. Our politicians have always lacked accountability and our society suffers for this.
Policies for my running in the next election.
1. Health and safety for ALL Irish people.
2. Those who are immigrants, very welcome. Cead Mile Failte, though with not all the same rights. If you wanna come here, there will be stipulations. Printed clearly for you to know before you board that plane or ferry.
3. Youth from day dot become the entire priority of our society. Nutrition and health.
4. Safety first in every aspect of Irish life.
5. Health care of the highest standard with salaries to bring back home our own.
6. Housing that is affordable. Mr. builder cronies, NOT INTERESTED anymore.
7. Salary Cap on all Government positions.
8. Health of our society and children MEANS PHYSICAL & MENTAL.
9. Services that can provide and serve and salaries to make the career choice a no brainer for those who really care.
10. Hold ALL companies who enjoy large profits from our society accountable for “proper services”
11. Those who wish to do nothing in their job or position. Bye, bye, if you are not contributing to the better of our society, time to step aside and allow someone who wants the job and wants to work to improve our country first to taker that position. It is the old saying, not part of the solution then you are contributing to the problem. Please do not stand in a public office and roll your eyes to heaven and tell any person “it is just the way it is”. That is not the case as each individual who makes up said office is contributing to the failure one little grain at a time.
12. Support services to all of our country in all areas of health and wellness. No 12 month waiting lists.
13. Education of the young only when nutrition has been of the first priority.
14. No more yes sir and no sir to Europe. ~Ireland first and foremost. Irish citizens first and foremost.
15. Development priority to all home grown industry first and foremost.
16. Craic agus Ceoil to be on every persons mind always. It is who we are.
Now, when 10 thousand people endorse this post I can go a run in the elections…and more than likely win.
You will not though because and not of any fault of your own though, because I am not under your own nose every day reminding you that you must consider your fellow Irish men and women also. Oh by the way, did I mention how all welfare payments would have random drug testing? Not to worry, it would also be mandatory for all Government workers too. Treatment facilities would be provided of course. In our history it has always been the british who have never wanted us to rise. When our own fellow Irishman does wish to see us rise, then we must take note and alter our course accordingly. Yup british was spelled with a little “b” on purpose.
For more random thoughts….
A.McNallyauthor.com 