O'Donoghue - A Good Start?

So that fat cheating bastard John O'Donoghue has left. Big deal! One down, 165 to go.

The fact that a barefaced freeloader like O'Donoghue has been made to relinquish a 200k job for his old 100k job isn't a matter for rejoicing. Instead, the tortuous evasions of his Dail colleagues before letting Gilmore get rid of him is the real story in this saga.

Once again Enda Kenny was about as effective as the proverbial organiser of the piss-up in the brewery. His increasingly desperate attempts to make hay out of O'Donoghue while simultaneously propping him up, came a right cropper when Gilmore saw his chance to be the leader of the opposition and took it.

It's great that Kenny and Fine Gael were caught redhanded in their duplicity, but I've noticed that the press and TV don't seem too interested in finding out why the largest party in the Dail tried their best to kill the O'Donoghue scandal, before it blew up in their faces.

Just like Fianna Fail (who usually take the media flak for their crimes) Fine Gael too, are up to their necks in all the corruption crap as well. Enda (longest-serving TD in the Dail) has presided over this culture without a squeak, while sermonising on everyone else's faults.

This is fact: on Enda's own front bench, sitting there holier-than-thou, is a man who put in expenses for mileage for a four month period in 2004 that were actually travelled by his parliamentary assistant in his own beat-up, 10-year-old Nissan Micra while the said TD was lying on his back doing nothing. Was his assistant offered any petrol money for doing all his clinics for him? What do you think? The money was pocketed by the same person who howls across the floor in moral outrage at all those bad boys in Fianna Fail!

So now Brian Lenihan has been stung into promising "reform" of the expenses system. This is the same man who last week promised a Commission to "examine" irrational rates of pay at the top levels of public sector organisations. Another report commissioned, another attempt to buy time until public anger cools and events are forgotten, and then it will just be another costly report gathering dust on a shelf.

Here's a suggestion for Brian and the Department of Finance - How about doing the work we pay you for and writing your own reports? Or even better, how about making a decision once in a blue moon instead of outsourcing it to Price-Waterhouse-Deloitte-Uncle Tom Cobley etc.?

If Lenihan is serious about reform he needs to stop fiddling around with pay rates and severance packages etc, and just take a bloody axe to every quango and semi-state body in this ripped-off land. That's how you claw back four billion smackaroos in double quick time, or don't they teach that down the Four Courts?

So O'Donoghue has stopped fouling the Speakers Chair of the most spineless, venal parliament outside darkest Africa, but his rotten carcass is still stinking-up the Dail and his corrupt hand can still be found in our pockets. But don't ever make the mistake of thinking that the other Gombeen men on the far side of the aisle will be any better. Sorry for the rant. But I suspect I'm not alone.