Read an interview with John Crown where he said that the universal health care system in Ireland (similar to Germany) already exists in the form of the VHI and forty per cent of people have it and challenge is to roll it out to all.
Makes an interesting point about consultants on public contracts being more accountable for waiting lists and money needs to follow patient so somebody should be paid per procedure//consultation rather than hours worked
Mary Lou would bate Micheall with her beret
The health system is Irelandās most chronic institutional mess. It is an incoherent amalgam of competing forces, part private business, part religious charity, part national service, part insurance scheme. It is a chimerical creature with the head of a capitalist, the body of a socialist, the feet of a missionary and the tail of a professional interest group.
Great paragraph
Problem there would be theyād all want to do ingrown toenails and the handy risk free quick stuff
Meehawl has overarching points. Mary Lou is like a shrill LGFA head
I actually sheās ok at debating. Michael gets too thick
āHold on a minute nowā in shrill Cark tones + hand-waving
I bumped into MicheĆ”l at a funeral yesterday. The man is Stately, has a great way about him. A man of the people who is tall and a good straight back. If it wasnāt for him being part of that cunting organisation that is FF youād give him a vote.
do they play the klaxon instead of the last post down there?
Turns out the Garda who lent the bike was helping a whistleblower in the months leading up to the bike loan
I knew there had to be more to it.
Ah hereā¦heās a big part of the reason you are still paying USC. Heās a cunt!
Leo promised to get rid of USC, he welched on that.
Leo is a massive cunt also. Iāll not quibble with you on that.
I think April Fools caught a few here
Fintan no like Simon
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Simon Harris faces five big problems as the leader of a centre-right party. Photograph: Leah Farrell / Ā© RollingNews.ie
Tue Apr 2 2024 - 06:00
It is no great insult to Simon Harris to say that he is very unlikely to be up to the job of rescuing Irish political conservatism. Itās not clear that anyone else could do it either. There are five big problems for an Irish centre-right party such as Fine Gael. Any one of them would present a formidable challenge. Together, they make the challenge look insurmountable.
First, thereās what we might crudely call the religion problem. The conservative nexus that governed independent Ireland for most of its history was formed by the fusion of nationalism and Catholicism. The combination of political machines with spiritual force was what made it so successful. But that double act has now been sundered.
There is still a large body of socially conservative Catholic opinion. The referendums of the last decade would suggest that it probably makes up as much as a third of the electorate. And it doesnāt really have a political home.
So it might seem obvious that Fine Gael should just make itself that home ā put the Christian back into Christian Democrat. But how do you so that without alienating urban liberal voters? Could Harris, who was at his most popular with those voters when he was one of the faces of the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment, become the face of a Catholic party? Computer says no.
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It is possible to imagine an Irish version of Polandās Law and Justice Party that successfully fused reactionary Catholicism with expansive social welfare provision ā but very hard to imagine how you might get there from where Fine Gael is now
In other countries, conservative parties have tried to solve this problem by becoming culture warriors ā manipulating āwedge issuesā such as trans rights to consolidate a conservative religious tribe. But thereās not much evidence that such issues have any purchase on Irish electoral politics.
[ Will TikTok taoiseach Simon Harris succeed in his promise to fight populism? ]
And the deeper dilemma of conservative Catholic opinion is that much of it may be āconservativeā only on issues of family, sexuality and reproduction. It may actually be left of centre on economic issues. It is possible to imagine an Irish version of Polandās Law and Justice Party that successfully fused reactionary Catholicism with expansive social welfare provision ā but very hard to imagine how you might get there from where Fine Gael is now.
Second, thereās the agrarian problem. Fine Gael has deep roots in farming communities. And farming is under huge stress because it has to adapt rapidly to a system of food production that can sustain itself in the era of climate crisis. Thereās a disgruntled constituency there, one that has been increasingly radicalised across Europe. So go back to the grassroots.
But then you face the question: how ya gonna keep āem down on the farm after theyāve seen Pfizer? We have 165,000 people employed in agriculture. Thatās about 4 per cent of the labour force. And those farmers are very heavily dependent on subsidies from the European Union, which has to meet massive carbon reduction goals. There are severe limits both to how potent the farming vote now is and to the political sustainability of an agrarian, anti-green movement.
[ The hottest year ever, yet Harris is only talking about climate in the context of helping farmers ]
Third, thereās the tax problem. Cutting taxes is always the first resort for right-of-centre parties looking to make a simple and direct appeal to the apparent self-interest of voters. āMaking work payā is the euphemism of choice, and Harris has already cited it as a core value to which Fine Gael will return.
Shifting revenue away from taxes on income is indeed a very good idea. The difficulty is that in order to do so, you have to move much more of the tax burden on to wealth and property and increase the social contributions by employers that are, by international standards, very low. To which one can only say: good luck with that. Fine Gaelās base among property and business owners would be quick to reach for its gold-plated pitchforks.
Fourth, thereās the Big State problem. A rapidly rising population and a vastly expanded private economy mean that the State must keep growing for the foreseeable future. The demand for public services and infrastructure canāt be turned off. Even if you think the private sector is the source of all virtue, it canāt survive without more and more State investment. Small-state rhetoric just doesnāt work in the Irish here-and-now.
For reasons that are still hard to fathom, Fine Gael abandoned, after it came to power in 2011, the basic trajectory of middle-class formation: get a good education and a decent job and you should then be able to buy a home
Fifth and most fatal, thereās the housing problem. One of the big reasons why traditional conservatism is in trouble in Ireland is that it has turned off its own generator. What do you do if you want to create a stable middle class with a stake in society it wants to defend as it gets older? Itās home ownership, stupid.
[ Simon Harrisās vacuous ālive, laugh, leadā online persona leaves me cold ]
This really is conservatism 101. Since the 1920s, the touchstone of modern conservatism has been the idea of the āproperty-owning democracyā. For the vast majority of voters, by far the most important pieces of property they will ever own are affordable houses. Build them and the cautious voters will come.
But Fine Gael somehow managed to skip that introductory class. For reasons that are still hard to fathom, it abandoned, after it came to power in 2011, the basic trajectory of middle-class formation: get a good education and a decent job and you should then be able to buy a home. It decided, without a mandate or even an explanation, to replace the property-owning democracy with a rent-paying democracy.
This has not created stability ā it has created a literally unsettled generation. There are European countries in which renting is secure and predictable. Ireland is emphatically not one of them. Fine Gael consigned a generation to precarious housing ā and broke the link between conservatism and home ownership. That link canāt be mended quickly.
How do you deal with this multidimensional crisis of the centre-right? Leo Varadkar realised that he couldnāt and his obvious successors in Fine Gael (most strikingly Paschal Donohoe) seem to have tacitly accepted that they couldnāt do it either.
Which leaves the big question. Is Simon Harris left holding the baby because he is the only one smart enough to know how to feed it and calm it? Or because he was the only who doesnāt know that the motherās name is Rosemary and the baby is called Damian?
As expected, Coveney ie gone. Jumped before he was pushed by the sinister Harris faction.
