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Dublin City – Major building site! LUAS and Grafton Street!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Dublin City – Major building site! LUAS and Grafton Street!

You heard that it is expected that the LUAS interconnect building work will begin at some stage this year? And that for a long long time, Stephen’s Green, Dawson Street, Kildare Street, College Green, Westmoreland Street, D’Olier Street, O’Connell Street and Marlborough Street will be dug up/building sites/a mess!? For the LUAS work last time it took YEARS and shops and pubs closed down because customers stayed away.

Now it has announced that the Grafton Street “revamp” will also get underway soon. From July until November 2014 the paving in Grafton Street will be replaced. The (I think) nice red paving will be replaced with grey granite stones. It is a pity, I find, as Grafton Street looks a lot nicer than the new look that will be like Henry Street. The paving in Grafton Street needs some repair, but I am not sure if it will be NICER afterwards. Either way, the impact will be huge! Did you read that? 2014!?!?!?!! Ok, they are taking a break for 8 weeks over Christmas and New Year, but 15 months to re-pave a street???

And the other impressive part: The closures of Dublin Castle, Farmleigh House, the Museum of Modern Art and now Grafton Street de- and re-construction all happen during that oh, so important year for tourism? Inviting people to come to a building site!? You call it “Gathering”! www.dublinpeople.com/article.php?id=2418&l=100

Dublin, , ,

Labour Party Minister hurts his voters and sides with the rich

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Labour Party Minister hurts his voters and sides with the rich

The previous government was bad and we all thought that it can only get better, but it is amazing how incompetent and useless the majority of the Irish politicians are. Many were hoping that the Labour Party would give a social component and a balance to the policies of Fine Gael, but then Pat Rabbitte became Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and he just seems to screw up everywhere.

I had hoped that a Labour Party Minister would be a little more careful with Ireland’s Natural Resources, but identical to his Fianna Fail predecessor Rabbitte just gave licenses for oil and gas away for nothing, squandering the few resources that Ireland has and giving them as a present to big commercial companies. But if you thought that was enough of a screw-up you were wrong. Rabbitte, who is also responsible for RTE and is in charge of the TV licence re-organisation is again showing his incompetence. I dare to say that apart from the job holders, nobody thinks the ridiculous salaries in RTE for people like Pat Kenny, Marianne Finucane, Ryan Tubridy, Joe Duffy etc are justified. Nobody apart from the people themselves AND Pat Rabbitte. Because instead of sorting out RTE, reducing their budget and forcing them to justify their existence, he wants to give them MORE money.

The TV licence fee should be a thing of the past. It might have had its justification when the TV and radio stations were not commercial entities, but RTE is as commercial as TV3, just that RTE delivery in a lot of aspects even worse quality. So, the TV licence fee should be reduced or abolished OR if it stays in place then ALL TV and Radio stations should be allowed to apply for part of the funds and get fair subsidies. It is ridiculous that each household is financing a commercial Radio and TV station with EUR 160 per year.

But it comes worse! People that can’t afford licence fee and cable TV charges etc currently have the option not to have a TV and then don’t need to pay. Rabbitte wants to change that. Probably from around middle of this year he wants to force everybody to pay a “Broadcast fee”. And all that money goes exclusively to RTE! So even if you never in your life watch RTE or listen to RTE, you will have to pay them a minimum of EUR 160 per year. The justification that Rabbitte uses is that we don’t need to have TV anymore to watch RTE. But has he not realised that young generations are not interested in RTE in its current form anymore?

Now, who are the people that currently don’t pay the licence fee and will have to pay it in future? The majority is people that have limited financial means. The rest has a TV and already pays the licence fee. So the Labour Minister has left his social principles and ideologies in the cupboard and instead sides with the rich and overpaid in RTE. Odd!!

Interestingly RTE has estimated that up to 15pc of households do not pay the TV licence fee – even though 99pc of houses allegedly have a TV. So that means the government is incapable of getting the money and for that reason they a new fee is introduced. If the RTE figures are right, then Rabbitte’s argument that the new fee is needed to capture the people that have no TV is a lie. He even claims even those without a TV, benefit from “publicly-funded, public service broadcasting”. Nonsense!
www.independent.ie/irish-news/broadcast-charge-to-hit-all-homes-even-those-with-no-tv-29096806.html
www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/kim-bielenberg-why-the-breaking-bad-generation-wont-pay-rabbittes-broadcast-charge-29098836.html

Politics, Society, Taxes, , ,

Mayor of Limerick – What an eejit!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Mayor of Limerick – What an eejit!

I am of the strong opinion that Irish Mayors are a waste of space. This is not necessarily (only) their fault, but they all are complicit in keeping the nonsensical alive.

However, it is one thing to be in a nonsensical role and it is another thing to to come up with stupid ideas and to promote them in the media. The new mayor of Limerick, Gerry McLoughlin, seems to have superseded all of them on the stupidity scale this week, when he suggested that Limerick’s street signs should also be in Polish and in “African” to make foreigners living there feel more at home.

www.limerickleader.ie/news/local/mayor-of-limerick-wants-polish-street-signs-1-4011509

Do I even have to say more to that? I am sure everyone sees that there is sooo much wrong with even just the idea.

Oh, by the way, there are an estimated 3000 (!!) African languages!

Elsewhere, Politics, Society, ,

Don’t get sick in Ireland! – Emergency Department

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Don’t get sick in Ireland! – Emergency Department

I was once in A&E waiting from around 14:00 until after 01:00 to be seen and it is not a good experience. At the time, my GP was clueless and sent me to A&E hoping that they had a better idea, but luckily I felt fine and therefore the 11 hour wait was just boring and annoying, but had no bad impact on my condition.

A few years later I had to go to A&E in Germany because of a suspected pneumonia and the experience there was that I arrived at the hospital and was seen INSTANTLY. Now I know that that is not the case in all hospitals and not always (I only needed an X-Ray, I didn’t need to see a doctor.), but since then I would rather jump in a plane in an instance to leave Ireland if I needed help, than to to to A&E here.

The Emergency Department situation has been and still is a serious challenge for any Irish government and the HSE has now released a 560-page report about the situation and how to improve it. It seems there are a few good suggestions in in it, but I couldn’t believe when I saw that this report on the future of emergency medicine makes that ground breaking suggestion that patients should be assessed and either discharged or admitted within six hours of arrival in an emergency department.

Sure, 6 hours is better than 11 hours, but I can’t believe that this is the best they can aspire to. It should not take more than 1 (ONE!) hour to assess a seriously ill or injured person and it should take at least 15 hours or better more to look after someone with a cold /and wastes therefore the A&E resources) or (even worse) someone who is drunk.

www.rte.ie/news/2012/0619/emergency-medicine.html

There is, however, a disconnect between the article on rte.ie and the headline. In the article a few suggestions by National Clinical Lead with the Emergency Medicine Programme Dr Una Geary are mentioned and they all sound good and positive. Only the headline mentions the 6 hours, nowhere in the article is it mentioned (and I didn’t read the 560-page report). So maybe the headline is not really fair?

Health System, Society,

Mick Wallace Stole Taxes!

Written by Joerg Steegmueller
Mick Wallace Stole Taxes!

According to a TV and newspapers, it seems to be clear that Mick Wallace knowingly underdeclared VAT. And in the year he did that or in the year his company went into liquidation, he increased his own salary from EUR 148,141 to EUR 290,000.
That creates an interesting situation, because people that bought apartments from Wallace paid VAT to him, which he was obliged to pass on to the Revenue Commission. Instead passing that money on, he kept it in his company. This sounds like clear theft!
Wallace now claims that he had intended to pay the tax at a later stage and only kept it to save his company and to save jobs. But it is very easy to claim that when you have been found out. There is a good possibility that he would nave never voluntarily given back the VAT. And even if he had genuinely planned to pay it back, it would be unacceptable because VAT belongs to the state, i.e. the tax payers and the state is not a bank for Wallace.

So, it all seems to indicate that he stole money from the state/the tax payers.

To makes things worse and to make his story even less credible, he increased his salary, so he used part of the VAT that he took from apartment buyers and stuffed it into his own pockets. To save the company? To save jobs? No way!

Should Wallace resign! Absolutely!

But we have to ask ourselves what a screwed up parliament we have in Ireland, if the other members don’t have any means to kick him out! …many even think he shouldn’t resign. Are they afraid they might sit in a glass house too and don’t want to be the first to throw the stone?

Politics, Taxes, , , ,
 
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