The Hard Conversation

Politicians lie in the same way that birds sing. It’s an uncontrollable urge that becomes second nature to them once they have participated in the democratic process of being elected. Human beings have enormous potential as individuals and yet collectively we can be incredibly stupid and naive.   Governments have become shameless in their lies and manipulation of the masses. Dr Fauci has contradicted himself so many times at this stage that I’m sure he’ll meet himself coming around the next corner. His decision to fund the lab in Wuhan and then his attempts to deflect attention away from them have now been fully exposed, yet he is still secure in his government-appointed position. Why? I would suggest that had this happened even 25 years ago the outcry would have been such that his resignation would have been inevitable. Not so in today’s world of keeping your mouth shut and don’t step out of line or you’ll get a high tech modern version of a knock on the door. His email communicat...

I always knew that Michael Martin was limited. I just never realised to what degree. His comment that COVID had exposed income inequality and then to suggest that some employers had actually been quite good is to imply that many have not. If his key takeaway from the COVID crisis is that employers have not been acting in a manner that meets with his approval is very tough to take. SME businesses across Ireland have been and are fighting for their survival. Many won’t make it. They have been crushed under the weight of these lockdowns and now our Taoiseach is going to turn the screw even further by addressing what he perceives as a key priority coming out of the pandemic. After all it’s good vote getting rhetoric. It’s no secret that in the corridors of power nobody cares about the business people or ordinary SME’s. Despite being the sector which creates the largest number of jobs and generates the largest slice of the tax take that funds government they are seen as almost a nuisance va...

There’s something very sinister going on behind the scenes in the world present. I haven’t wanted to believe it but everything that’s happening currently indicates that it is so. We cannot and should not ignore it any longer. There is a famous line in a Clint Eastwood movie- “ Don’t P..s down my back and tell me it’s raining “ It’s very apt when considering what’s going on at present. Society is at serious risk of never again being able to interact as we did 8 or 9 months ago. All this for a disease that is no more threatening than the flu about which we do nothing because we realised long ago it wasn’t appropriate.   The simple social interactions such as giving somebody a hug or shaking hands could be a thing of the past. We may never again be able to enjoy different cultures or even different customs and atmospheres within our own country. It will all be controlled and sanitised to the point that it is unnatural to us making us more robotic in an unnaturally controlled environme...

  “Imagine if you are as free now as you will ever be for the rest of your life” Most people are not even considering this and refuse to countenance that it could actually happen. Governments have a pretty good track record in making a bad situation worse, the financial crisis of 2008 being a recent example. There are those amongst us who would like to control our every move and this pandemic has presented them with a golden opportunity. In the 1950’s under the threat of an atomic bomb children were taught Duck and Cover Techniques to protect themselves. This typically meant hiding under their desks as if that would protect them from an atomic bomb landing nearby. Nevertheless teachers and pupils alike did it religiously. This was a fear based response which made people feel they were doing something to protect themselves when clearly they weren’t.   The measures being adopted by society today in terms of the lockdown are similar in nature. The mask has become the ultimate sym...

The current obsession the world has with trying to eradicate risk from our daily lives is not a result of the pandemic. The pandemic has just taken it to another level. In fact this desire to alleviate all risk from our lives has been at the core of how society has been changing over the last 30 years at least. At some point we transitioned from seeing structure and control as a mechanism to maintain our freedoms to a situation where we impose controls as a means of eliminating as much risk as we can from every situation possible. At the same time modern technologies were being developed at a rate which the world has never experienced before. This meant that the tools were increasingly available to allow governments and their offshoots to impose greater and greater control. It’s hard to know which fed which but the outcome is clear. To facilitate this trend legislation was required. Rules and regulations had to be imposed. This led to an avalanche of bureaucrats and consul...