WE ARE letting our politicians and top civil servants away with blue murder.
We have been curtsying and kow-towing for too long.
It has become part of a nasty tradition that our hospital wards are packed to capacity every winter, that beds are cramped into corridors and that people of all ages are consigned to trolleys, aka makeshift beds.
Opposition benches shout and bawl, Government does nothing to prop up our dastardly run Health Service and continues with a disgusting status quo while increasing its army of pen pushers and rewarding its high ranks for failure after failure.
How we put up with it all beats Banagher.
How our nurses and younger doctors on the frontline cope has to be a medical miracle.
Yet the cycle of disgrace continues.
So who is at fault?
I won’t apologise for being blunt, but we as a people are among the culprits.
We put up with the battering, we watch our loved ones lobbed from trolley to corridor to packed wards.
We moan and whinge but our inaction makes us accessories to what must be bordering on criminal negligence.
HAUNTED US FOR GENERATIONS
Most do absolutely nothing to reverse a wrong that has haunted us for generations
Aealth service, or rather the lack of a proper one, has become a blight on our lives as politicians duck and dive, civil servants turn the other way and when the medical profession, or a member of, highlights inefficiencies, he or she is given a deaf ear.
If our people don’t get serious about their own lives and welfare, then who will?
Like caged lions, we will simply have to cut loose or accept the consequences.
We are not suggesting that we should take a leaf out of the obnoxious book of Vladimir Putin.
But we must get serious.
We must tell, not ask our politicians what we want, reminding them that we pay their wages and also root out the draconian measures that bigwig civil servants use to feather their own nests as they edge us towards a third world health system.
As in all walks of life, there are good and mediocre medics, active and useless politicians, along with a strange mix of civil servants, most of them promoted on years of service rather than ability.
As a result we have a dangerous cocktail of incompetence in our corridors of power/shame.
SOME JOURNALISTS FAIL US
We hasten to add that too many journalists are also failing us, reluctant to ask the pertinent questions.
That so many members of the Fourth Estate looked on and said nothing as doctors sacked doctors who had the courage to speak out during the ongoing pandemic, leaves many scribes in a cloud of cowardice.
Tánaiste Varadkar had no problem telling our pensioners that he wouldn’t write blank cheques to heat their homes at the heart of a cruel winter.
He pulls no punches.
As 89 year old Callan Boxing Club coach Jimmy Walsh might say to a young boxer, dodge the punches and then land a haymaker.
If politicians feel they have a right to hurl manure in our direction, it then behoves us to give them a harsh lesson in the realities of life.
Since the time of Adam and Eve the world has never been a two-way street.
We have always had the haves and have-nots and, sadly, with some notable exceptions, we seem prepared to be whipping boys for those who would call themselves the privileged classes.
WHEN THE CAT IS AWAY
Too many of us have become apathetic, accepting cruelty and insult with the old adage of ‘ah sure, what can we do about it?’
When the cat is away, it is well known that the mouse will play.
Next time our politicians call to our doors groveling for votes, we need to make sure that us mice are at home.
We must be ready, willing and able to tell the public representatives of all hues, along with wannabe politicians, that the time has come for us to make the rules, to level the playing field.
Otherwise we can simply lie down and supply a direct debit of our wages to pay exorbitant taxes.
We are walking blindly into a dangerous world that has the full backing of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Greens and for whatever reasons we are reluctant to take off the blindfold.
The lingo and actions of ruthless professors of arrogance like Varakdar and Martin, and God love us all, Ryan, will lead us from being a neutral country to a little island that not only supports but fights alongside the war mongers of Europe.
A European Army is being mooted, another road to Boot Hill.
If we let this one fall on deaf ears, then we are doomed to the horrific life that is already common in many several countries.
There are thousands of family funerals where the boy or the girl in the coffin is a beloved son or daughter, the latest victim of war, initiated by weapons’ manufacturers and vulture profiteers, with the blessing of Govrernments.
The powers that be are slowly but surely emptying our pockets, controlling where we can go (reference the pandemic) and, make no mistake about it, Martin and company will continue to doff their hats to the EU regardless of what hardship and atrocities come our way.
We can save ourselves from Dystopia.
We can get up off our fat arses and, like Jimmy Walsh’s boxer, fight our corner.
We can also treat politicians just as they deserve to be dealt with.
After giving you his or her list of promises at the door during election time, you can later deliver your ultimatum to a local yokel.
‘I am sitting in the smallest room in my house.
‘Your manifesto is in front of me.
‘In a matter of minutes, it will be behind me.’