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Fianna Fail’s Fifty Ways to Laugh at Voters

I’d like to reproduce the entire list here, but that wouldn’t be fair to Michael. Be sure to read it all on his website, whether you voted for them or not. Go on, don’t just read the stories that back up your politics, read something contrary once in a while.

That’s Ireland: “so far they have gotten away with at least fifty ways to laugh at voters, including taking the highest-paid political salaries in the democratic world, Bertie Ahern’s incredible fairy-tales about getting dig-out loans from plasterers, giving £30,000 to someone he can’t remember and getting briefcases of cash from future landlords who were at dinners but didn’t eat the dinners, Frank Dunlop’s stash of bribes for buying councillors, Liam ‘Mr Big’ Lawlor being jailed three times after chairing the Dail Ethics Committee, Michael Collins being found guilty of tax evasion, Michael ‘Stroke’ Fahey being jailed for fraud while chairing a Prison Visiting Committee, Ivor Callely having his house painted for free and John Ellis owing money to farmers yet both being made Senators after the electorate voted them out of the Dail, €52 million so far spent on unused electronic voting machines, using taxpayers money to make secret deals with scandal-hit independent TDs, creating new Junior Ministers with salaries of €150,000 a year, appointing people to State boards because they are your friends, Willie O’Dea posing with guns pointed at cameras, Jim McDaid drunk driving on the wrong side of a busy dual carriageway, GV Wright drunk driving and knocking over a nurse, Conor Lenihan referring to Turkish workers as kababs, Ray Burke accepting corrupt payments from property developers and radio station owners and being jailed for breaking a tax law he had helped to pass, Beverly Flynn helping people to evade tax and suing RTE for telling people about it, PJ Mara failing to co-operate with a Tribunal, Ned O’Keefe voting on issues his family had business interests in, Joe Jacob giving comical interviews on radio that resulted in useless iodine tablets being sent to every house in the country, Charlie McCreevy nominating a disgraced ex-judge to a £147,000 job as Vice President of the European Investment Bank, Denis Foley ‘hoping against hope’ that his £100,000 was not in an illegal offshore account, Padraig Flynn complaining about the difficulties of maintaining three houses in 1999 on ‘just £100,000 a year’, and a Tribunal finding that Charles Haughey took €45 million in todays money and granted favours in return.”