SNAPS ON SATURDAY

British broadcasters say to would be too complicated having
a lot of leaders for debates. Irish ones seem to manage that.
Probably they are just cleverer.

We'll give you this day your daily vintage champagne.
Sod the tax payers.

Or maybe it could feed its kids?
No. I suppose that's a silly socialist  idea!
Sorry, I brought it up.

Obviously.

Then they demanded that the SNP do set up a fund for the oil capital.
They didn't think it worthwhile to set up a fund for any
other area of the country suffering.

Tax fiddler Thatcher. Just like Gary Barlow, you'll not hear Osborne decrying her.

You know it makes sense.

She stared lovingly into the side of his head as he looked in the opposite direction.
And, on this occasion, who could blame him?
Is this not the most nauseating photograph of the last year?

Don't believe you. You up for a peerage for suggesting it?

Oops Tories. You've been caught out lying. Again!

I wonder how this creepy woman came by a damehood?

George is on it... unfortunately, the debt, not the bomb.

Probably the wrong thing to have a go at FMQs about...
given that under the funding available from the UK, Scotland
is doing the best of the four nations.

Is there anything even vaguely socialist in their agenda?

Margaret Hilda Miliband

Ha ha... you know we were only joking
We didn't mean a word of it.
That Blair McDougall made it up.

BONUS PIC 

(COZ YOU'VE BEEN GOOD THIS WEEK)

There is nothing like a dame.
Don't say I'm not good to you.
If you behave we'll get John Major to pose next week!

GOOD QUESTION... DON'T BREAK THE LAW, BUT DON'T PAY THE LICENCE FEE. WATCH CATCHUP

Laughable: The British authorities couldn't cope
with more than 3 or 4...But they can elsewhere...
Fortunately for democracy, not everywhere is as crap as the UK
(or as corrupt).

Norway

Netherlands

Sweden

Eire

I urge you to read the interview that James Stafford conducted with the First Minister on behalf of Oilprice. It answers a lot of questions you might have wanted to ask. James, at Scot Goes Pop has their permission to print it in full here
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Barney Thomson, who has posted here on occasion, was kind enough to provide the figures for the Arc of Prosperity (Ireland, Iceland, Norway) that the First Minister suggested that we might join after independence. 

We all know that both Ireland and Iceland suffered some financially embarrassment pretty soon after that, and that the then Scottish Secretary in the London government, Jim Murphy, and his colleague, the leader of the Labour Group in the Scottish Parliament, Iain Gray, insulted both Iceland and Ireland in their attempts to ridicule the Government's position. (Murphy was called out by the Foreign Minister of Ireland and invited to debate the subject with his on RTE. Mr Murphy said he was too busy. He was also criticised by the Icelandic government when he called their country backward looking!)

The last laugh of course is with the First Minister. Ireland's most recent figures show a growth of 1.4%; Norway shows a growth of 4.1% and Iceland, a growth of 4.2%. The most recent figures for the UK show growth of  minus 0.2% and minus 0.8%. George Osborne blames all this on the Euro-zone, of which Ireland is a part, and with which both Iceland and Norway trade, just like the UK does. Goodness knows what their figures for growth would show if only the Euro-zone were not "dragging them down".
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Carwyn Jones has now officially said that Wales is happy to host Britain's Weapons of Mass Destruction when Scotland becomes independent. He had previously hinted at the offer, but now it it is reported to be in the Cabinet minutes of the Welsh government. 

I had this weird idea that real Labour (not the effete Blair/Mandelson version) disliked WMDs, but it seems I was wrong. 

I wonder how this will go down with traditional Labour voters in the principality. There are precious few jobs involved in it, and it costs a lot of money in local security. 

Plus of course, there is the downside that if someone decided to blow them up, say by flying an aircraft into them, the explosion would wipe out half your country.

I wouldn't wish that on the Welsh, but I'll be glad to see them out of Scotland, no matter where they go.

I wonder if Mrs Lamont has any opinion on this, or indeed on anything else. Where the hell is she?
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This photo isn't related to anything, but a friend from Uruguay sent it to me, and I thought it was beautiful and wanted to share it.

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I was amused to read this article in yesterday's Guardian, and very happy to realise that this will not be happening in Scotland.

WE NEED THE RIGHT TO CONTROL OUR OWN TAXES: WE ARE LOSING OUT TO IRELAND

I see that Dublin is to be the European home of Twitter.

Enticed perhaps by the lowest corporation tax in Europe, the American internet technology company has decided to look no farther than Ireland.

This will be a smack in the teeth to Davie Cameron and his mate Boris, who were determined to secure the company for London. London you'll note; not Cardiff, nor Belfast, nor Edinburgh, but London.

The Irish Development Authority has been working flat out to make Dublin the Digital Media capital of Europe, having already succeeded in persuading Google (2200 employees), Facebook (300), LinkedIn (140), Zynga (100), Paypal (1,300) and eBay (1000)....5,000 jobs in all from just these 6! Edinburgh could do with 5,000 jobs of that kind.

The 12.5% corporation tax certainly seems to clinch deals for them.

Edinburgh needs the right to vary the corporation tax in Scotland. It's too late for these companies, but not, perhaps for the many others that will be looking for European bases. These other countries are at such an advantage being able to juggle their taxes to suit their economic needs. Would that we were.

It appears the Irish don’t much care for Tony Blair.

His appearance in at Eason’s bookstore in O’Connell Street, Dublin, for a book signing was met with jeering anti-war protesters.

Eggs and shoes (a huge insult in the Arab world) were thrown at him, but none hit him (which makes him a damned sight luckier than many of the poor, utterly innocent Iraqis he managed to kill with his enthusiasm for believing every word his friend George W Bush told him, not to mention the British troops who, but for him, would be alive today).

Around 300 flag carrying and banners waving protesters clashed with gardai, pushed down barriers and chanted “arrest the butcher Blair” or “hey hey Tony hey, how many kids have you killed today?” and “Tony Blair war criminal”. All of which seems fair enough to me. I mean, if you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.

The only thing I was dubious about was that the protesters abused people who bought his book. OK. I wouldn’t read it, never mind buy it, and the thought of meeting him and having him sign something that I own is repugnant to the point of nausea, but Ireland’s a free country, and if people want to meet him, fair enough. They didn’t send planes to wreak mayhem on the streets of Baghdad. They didn’t kill and maim kids.

One woman tried to make a citizen’s arrest on Blair, but for some reason the garda didn’t seem to want her help in arresting this particular crim. She told of being grabbed by 5 security men and dragged away. I image that these will be security people paid for by the British state. The woman, Kate O’Sullivan shouted: "There are half a million people dead in Iraq. How can you live with yourself? You've committed war crimes."

Needless to say Blair appeared unaffected by this.

Four men were arrested during the protest and charged under the Public Order Act although not, it would seem Ms O’Sullivan.

People like Blair live in a bubble, far away from us little people, transported in first class cabins, chauffeur driven Mercedes limos, presidential or royal suites at hotels. Today Dublin, tomorrow Cairo. They are entertained in presidential palaces or prime ministerial residences. Their routes are planned for them; they wait for nothing. The “ordinary”people they meet are handpicked to say exactly what they are told to say, and in his everyday life he will be surrounded by toadying lickspittles. Blair will have little, if any, grasp on reality.

I’m delighted that the Dubliners shone a little light on that particular reality for him.

He may find, if he has an extended tour of signings, that that reception will be repeated wherever he goes.

Actually, given that we went in Iraq to (excuse number 6) liberate them from the tyranny under which they lived; given that we went there to bring them democracy and freedom, can we expect Mr Blair to be signing his book in Waterstones in Baghdad? Or not?

YET ANOTHER INQUIRY INTO THE IRISH CHURCH'S SHAME

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, Emeritus Archbishop of Westminster, is going to head up a team of Catholics chosen by Pope Benedict, to investigate, yet again, how the Church in Ireland was able to cover up decades of sexual abuse by priests.

There have already been two inquiries and basically what they found was that in Ireland the Church was above the law, or indeed a law unto itself. I’m not sure that another inquiry, specially led by a priest who has himself been implicated in the cover ups, will be helpful or will in fact uncover anything that the previous inquiries by the Irish authorities has not.

Cardinal Murphy-O’Conner, when a bishop, was involved in appointing a paedophile priest to a job at Gatwick Airport, in which he would have contact with children. When the priest, Michael Hill, was jailed in 2002, victims sought Murphy-O’Conner’s resignation. He of course refused to go and instead issued an apology.

It seems that when senior people get it all wrong, and in this case seriously wrong, they issue apologies. When junior people make a mistake, they pay with their jobs, and sometimes their freedom.

In any case, I wonder if inaction on the part of the Vatican all these years will be seen to have been somehow mitigated by the amount of weeping, praying (instead of preying) and gnashing of teeth that has been seen to come from Rome in the recent past, since the horrors of what went on all over the world, and the complicity of senior clergy in hiding it, has become public knowledge.

Frankly I wonder that any senior clergy in, it seems, any country in the world, can walk about the streets with their heads held high.

Photographs: Cardinal Murphy-O'Conner; Pope Benedict

JIM MURPHY HA HA HA.... ICELANDERS THE MOST CONTENTED PEOPLE IN THE OECD

The Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) an international organisation of those developed countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and a free market economy has published a list of countries whose populations are content with their way of life. The top 12 are illustrated to the left <== (click on pic for larger image).

Now I don’t know how this organisation gathers its information, but I imagine that it is in as respected a statistical form as would be expected from a world body and no more or less so that the well known polling companies in the UK. (The ones that predicted a hung parliament with a Liberal/Conservative coalition.) The figures relate to 2009.

So, in view of that, I was interested in three things about the figures... and I thought that maybe Jim Murphy might be interested in them too. As a supposed socialist, after all, he should be interested in ordinary people’s satisfaction with life, rather than the state of the nasty Tory markets (snigger):

• His beloved UNITED Kingdom, with its supposedly wise and prudent government, steering us through the economic downturn with Mr Prudence Brown at the helm, does not appear on this list, suggesting that after 13 years of benign Labour rule, the people are not as content as he would have had us believe;

• Ireland appears as number 7 on the list. Despite Mr Murphy insulting Ireland’s economy and by association its government, the people of Ireland are 7th most content of all the OECD countries;

• The country at the top of the list is Iceland. Mr Murphy fair got ladled into Iceland; the failure of it, the basket case nature of it, backward looking and so on... and his boss Dr Brown, perhaps spoiling for a war that he might just win, used anti terrorist laws against this country, because an Icelandic bank’s English subsidiary, registered in London and regulated (or not as the case may be) by the FSA, went broke.... Well anyway, its people, despite the financial meltdown.. and an errant volcano or two, or three.... are the happiest in the OECD.

After Liam Muppet Byrne giving the Liberal-Conservative government an excuse for tax rises by admitting that he had left them not a penny piece in the Treasury, today it is the turn of Jim Spud Murphy to eat crow.

Cardinal Sean Brady is still Primate of All Ireland and the Church is disgraced

Incredibly, Cardinal Sean Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, has admitted that he witnessed two children who had been victims of paedophile Father Brendan Smyth being ordered to sign agreements, under oath, that they would not disclose his sexual abuse of them with anybody other than an approved priest. And he is STILL Primate of All Ireland!!

It is beyond belief. But it gets more incredible

The Cardinal defended his role saying that he had been part of a process that resulted in Smyth having his licence removed. He said that three weeks after he submitted a report to the Bishop of Kilmore, Smyth was suspended from practising as a priest in the diocese and across Ireland. But this was in 1975, and the paedophile remained free to abuse children until 1993.

He did not report the allegations about the priest to the police because, he said, he was not the designated person to do so. Amazing isn't it?

So for nearly 20 years more, although he was no longer a priest, Smyth went on with his filth. So awful were this man’s crimes that in 1994 the matter brought down the Irish government. Smyth was imprisoned and shortly after died, but only after 40 years of abuse. An unbelievable record of horror.

Cardinal Brady was in the Vatican last month with all Ireland’s bishops for a meeting with the Pope to discuss the findings of government-appointed inquiries into the Irish Church’s record of child sex abuse. One of these reports found that the government along with the Church and legal authorities had covered up a sad and sickening history of 40 years of sexual abuse and beatings by priests and nuns of thousands of children in state care.

The other report showed the extent to which senior clergy had lied and deceived to protect the Church’s reputation. Just what the Church is all about really. Oh no, wait, it’s all about truth and honesty.... silly me. Still, it’s an easy mistake to make.

Wherever you go, the Roman Catholic Church, like many other churches, has a wide remit to break or override the law of the country in which it operates. It can, for example demand that its priests are all male, which is against the sex discrimination legislation of most countries; it can also insist that any people working for it, in any role at all be followers of the faith (even if they are eg, a cleaner, administrator, teacher of non religious subject at one of their schools, and have no Clerical function).

It seems that in Ireland the Church being above the law was taken to a higher level. The Cardinal was, at the time of his collusion, a recorder with a tribunal which meant that he took the notes of evidence on behalf of the bishop at the tribunal sessions. He also questioned witnesses and recorded their answers. The hearings were held behind closed doors at a Dominican friary and at the Norbertine Order’s Holy Trinity Abbey. They were presided over by three canon lawyers.

So they were religious courts which dealt with matters which were quite clearly civil law offences (a little like the House of Lords in England, but in this case much much more serious matters).

This man should immediately be fired by the Pope. How anyone in Ireland can have even the least confidence in sending their children to anywhere that this man has charge of is beyond my comprehension. Quite literally God only knows what he continues to hide.



Pictured: Cardinal Brady and The Vatican City State, to which he was summoned by His Holiness Pope Benedictus

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IRELAND OUT OF RECESSION, UNLIKE, ERM, THE UK

Gordon Brown faced further embarrassment today over Britain’s recovery after it emerged that Ireland's beleaguered economy has emerged from recession.

Irish economic output rose by 0.3 per cent between July and September compared to the second quarter, official figures showed today, leaving the UK as one of the few Western economies still mired in an economic downturn.

The technical definition of a recession is two or more consecutive quarters of falling gross domestic product. A number of countries emerged from recession in the third quarter, including America, Japan, China, Germany and France.
However, Britain’s economy continued to shrink, falling by 0.3 per cent in the third quarter according to the most recent estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Perhaps Mr Murphy would like to address his apologies to the Irish President and the people of Ireland. A letter from Dover House maybe, or a television appearance?

If there are any Irish readers here, I’d like to apologise on behalf of Scotland. On the several occasions when Murphy came out with his ill-thought-out, rude, rubbish about how backward looking and sad Ireland was, I cringed. Please believe me, we’re not all like him.