That I did not see, Patrick, as I was there for these things myself http://foodieswatcher.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/rowntree-fruit-ice-pop.jpg

Actually, censored, I think you’ll find most of the country is fairly happy in their everyday lives at the moment.

The most common complaint I’m hearing is about the weather, so there’s obviously not too much going on really. Apart from that, most people are just getting on with things so maybe the crowd who want to rant all the time, about subjects they don’t really understand and blame everyone else for their lives problems.

Oh wait, I just described Sinn Fein, People Before Profit and the SWP. You’ve loads of choice!

What a load of shit Winston …

I’m not sure if my calculator is working correctly.
Can someone confirm
€336 million spent to create 9000 jobs.
Does that mean €37,333.33 to create one job?

@Winston
I know a lot of people who emigrated and it wasn’t for a 1 year holiday. You are so far out of touch of reality it’s scary. edna kenny is nothing but a compulsive liar and the fact that you stand up for him proves how deluded you are. fine gael shouldn’t be in power, people voted for them because they wanted change and they believed the promise they made but well over a year later they have broke 95% of their promises, they stole peoples votes. Do you honestly believe in what edna is doing? Or are you profiting of it so you don’t care about the people who are suffering in Ireland???

Oh, no I’m quite in touch with reality thanks. I know plenty of people who’ve “emigrated” too, they’ll be back when their visa runs out though, like the overwhelming majority of them.

If parties are put in power purely on the back of the promises they make pre-election then Sinn Fein would be in Government now. Their manifesto is full of fantastic sounding ideas that in reality are way up there with the birds, where the air is thinnest. They’re not though because people vote for things with a little more substance than good sounding talk. So please, spare me it.

We’ve the best people available in Government at the moment. When a better alternative steps up with its offering, it’ll be elected.

@Emer
I’ve been trying to post links of some of the lies fine gael told us to remind winston but they haven’t appeared. Do you know why this is?

Pretty irrelevant, Toirealach. I voted for FG but I had supported FG long before that election anyway so what they said was largely irrelevant.

Point stands, if the success of a party depends solely on promises made before the election then SF would be in Government and would never leave it. They’re not and will most likely never be, which would indicate that the electorate make their votes based on a lot more than just what is said in the run up to the General Election.

If you can’t debate that point then don’t bother replying.

@winston
Why do you always talk about sinn fein???? fine gaels only defense seems to be to ridicule and belittle sinn fein.

“if parties are put in power purely on the back of the promises they make pre-election then Sinn Fein would be in Government now. Their manifesto is full of fantastic sounding ideas that in reality are way up there with the birds, where the air is thinnest. They’re not though because people vote for things with a little more substance than good sounding talk. So please, spare me it.”

Do you not remember all the BS fine gael told people??? They promised everybody everything, it wasn’t financially possible for them to keep all their promises. fine gale whole campaign was full of good sounding talk with no substance.

“Pretty irrelevant, Toirealach. I voted for FG but I had supported FG long before that election anyway so what they said was largely irrelevant.”

So you are a blind supporter of fg and no matter how much they destroy this country you’ll still support them. I can’t believe your mentality, you didn’t even know what their plans were and you voted for them???????????

Uhh ohh Winston, don’t you know that optimism and support of government are expressly banned on thejournal.ie’s comment section. FG/Lab are bad, look at the banks, there still paying the bondholders, Germany have become our masters what will we do ochón ochón. Do people think we are really worse off than when that drunk butcher BIFO was in charge?

If you want to see some of their lies winston just search these titles on youtube. I tried to post the links for you but it won’t let me for some reason?

Irish Government lies on water charges
Are Promises Made To Be Broken ???
Not Another Cent!!! (According to Fine Gael)
John Perry lies about cancer services
Broken Promises

Winston, Obviously people are leaving by choice they are not getting deported, the choice is grim dole life or a life in a country that might appreciate you and not tax the bo#@ox out of you and leave you enough to actually have a life !
86% employed 60/70 % of us are struggling to keep our head above water now never mind the budget coming and the one after that..
What a rosey picture you paint but sadly deluded.

Blind supporter? No, not quite. You see, I’ve been interested in politics here for a lot longer that it seems the anti-government crew here have been, since my memory of politics goes far back beyond the last general election which is the point where most here seem to have gotten interested in the subject. Interested, but not *too* interested, I’ll add.

I’ve watched, met with and talked to the TDs and people who are now our Government ministers a pleasant number of times over the years and am happy with them as people and as representatives on a local and national level. I’m happy that they’re doing it for the right reasons and are trying to represent those that elected them the best that they can. I’m happy with how the party has done and believed at the time of the last two GEs that they were the best party available to be in Government. I still firmly maintain that they are the single best party available and all the results of opinion polls conducted on a fair sample show that I’m certainly not alone in how I feel.

This isn’t restricted to FG, I’ve met councillors and tds from Labour and FF over the years. One TD from FF, Seamus Brennan, was an impossibly nice man who was very much let down by the antics of his party and he served his local constituency extremely well in his time. I couldn’t vote for him, however, as I’m not a fan of FF and certainly not a fan of those who lead the party. I’ve never met a bad person in Labour and have nothing bad to say about the people involved, they are most certainly in this for the right reasons. However i find some of their affiliation with the unions to be regressive and preventative, which is why I couldn’t vote for them myself.

I’ve met and interacted with people from SF and PBP, the former which was preachy, the latter was polite but both parties suffer from an extreme lack of policies. The only time I ever got a bad vibe off someone in a party was from a few FF people who shall remain nameless, but appeared to be in it to sort out their friends and family and give everyone else the finger.

So no, not “blindly” voting for anyone. I make my choices based on their past performance and anticipated future performance. My foray into politics didn’t come from anger and amount to me changing my name to appear more Irish and then spouting anti-governmental nonsense on here and politics.ie all day. I’m not accusing you personally of the former, to be clear, but I do get a laugh out of all the Sinn Fein supporters who post here and elsewhere with their name turned to Irish, yet aren’t addressed by it offline nor speak more than a few lines of the language that they learned by rote. It’s extremely pretentious.

With regards to your point, yes I remember the pre-election campaign. I’ve no doubt that everything was said in good faith and likewise I’ve no doubt that our representatives are disappointed that the plans they had couldn’t come to fruition because of the sheer bleakness of the state of the country.

What you seem to either not know, or perhaps be too young to know, is that FG stepped in and pulled the country out of the hole previously. It was tough, their measures lost them their place in government but they did what was needed.

Regardless, the point STILL stands that if elections are won and lost solely on the promises made by the parties involved in that election then SF would have won that general election due to the promises and fairy tales it was telling people at the time. The support FG had at the time remains to this very day, they are polling as strong as ever.

Destroying the country? As I hinted above, yes, if you only got into politics here at the last general election then of course that is what you would know. The reality is very different, however, so I’ll clarify it for you. Fianna Fail “destroyed” this country by deregulating the banking system and then issuing a blanket guarantee on those banks. Now, the night before Brian Lenihan issued said guarantee, he was told by the EU that “no bank would be let fail”. If anything has been made hugely apparent, it is that there is a massive knife held to our governments back and that no matter who is elected, that knife will be there until they get what they want. Lenihan gave them what they wanted and we are now continuing to do so, meaning that whatever is going on behind closed doors is obviously enough to put the government off messing about with those involved.

Do you want to know something about these quiet investors that we are dealing with? A lot of the same people, the ultra-wealthy investors, dealt with René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet in investing with Bernie Madoff. When asked what would happen if Madoff turned out to be a scam, Magon de la Villehuchet said that they would kill him. When Madoff was exposed as a scam, Magon de la Villehucet killed himself, presumably in anticipation of the backlash from said investors.

So, what is the point that I am trying to make? That the government is most certainly doing the best it can right now for the people here, but it limited in what it can do for some reasons that we aren’t being told about. There is something going on in the background that is being kept so quiet, but is so serious, that the Government feel it better to pay off the un-guaranteed bondholders and get on with things than not.

Enda has, as you may well have read, asked that we begin moving towards debt sharing in the Union. Merkel basically said “over my dead body”, but to say Enda is not doing is part is simply ridiculous. He has represented us extremely well so far, much better than anything we’ve had in a long, long time, and will certainly continue to do so.

@JohnBurke: Heh, yep, it seems any positivity towards anything, or even trying to deal in reality with the subjects posed, is completely bad form. It appears that the only accepted interaction is ranting about the government, regardless of what’s going on or how good it may be, ranting about the weather, ranting about Europe, etc.

With regards to the question about BIFFO, I don’t think most people on here remember BIFFO. I think most blew in at the last general election or the last dole cuts, to be quite frank.

@Shayno, no, choice does not mean not by force. It means they could have either stayed and worked here or moved abroad and enjoyed a better quality of life. I don’t blame them for it, but the reality of the situation is that most, if not all, of them will be back and we’ll be hearing of “yeah, when I was in Oz…” stories for years to come. To claim it’s long term emigration or emigration out of sheer necessity is utter nonsense though.

Winston, my views and your views are both true on why people are leaving, I can only give my view which you do not accept, don’t railroad your view as the only one that is true as it is quite ignorant.

You also lambasye people for ranting and pull out a super rant yourself which I do not blame you for as you yourself have said you know quite a lot of these politicians so it rises you to it. Its that same frustration that rises us about what we feel is happening or not happening these days so give up the hypocrisy.

Yes, calculators working.
It is €37,333.33. per job.

@Winston
I’m highly impressed by your knowledge of the past but I’m highly insulted by your misinterpretation of me and I strongly disagree with a lot of your opinions. I’m no teenager, I’m a thirty year old man, I’ve been called Toirealach since the day I was born and I’ve been a life long ff supporter, but I’ll never vote for them again for what they done to this country. I have no alliance to any party, although I did attend the ff ard fheis this year but I seriously didn’t like what I heard. My father has been canvassing for ff his whole life, my sister is married to the brother of a former minister and my boss is the brother of a former minister so it’s safe to say that I had a life long interest in politics.

I believe that this party politics type of democracy has failed and we need to move to a real democracy as it is defined in the dictionary.
“Democracy is an egalitarian form of government in which all the citizens of a nation together determine public policy, the laws and the actions of their state, requiring that all citizens (meeting certain qualifications) have an equal opportunity to express their opinion.”
How does that sound Winston? Direct Democracy is one form of it form of it but you’d have to change it a bit to suite Ireland. Here’s a link so you can watch, just click on the highlighted line below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5W45Va0cPE

How would you change it to suite Ireland Winston?

Toirealach, I wasn’t targeting you specifically with regards to the name and “blowing in”, it’s just an observation on the trend here with young Sinn Fein supporters who’ve Irish-ized their names, including names that come from Britain, have Facebook profile photos of English soccer league stuff and then bang on all day about politics where it’s obvious their actual knowledge of politics extends as far back as the 2011 election and is limited even then.

Fair play on admitting to having voted for FF, it’s rare to see someone do that these days. I personally know people who 100% voted for FF up until at least 2011 who now swear they never even gave them a preference, get quite animated in insisting on this and now only insultingly refer to FF voters. Very hard to find an actual FF voter these days!

Anyway, with regards to your comment on party politics not working and the proposal of direct democracy. I’m absolutely not against the idea, that’s for sure. What you could do is have local elections on laws/issues a few times per year throughout the country, combine the votes and then act on the results. Hard and costly to administer though, I would imagine.

With the system with have at the moment, my biggest issue with it is the whip system. It infuriates me and completely destroys the power of representative democracy.

1: Scrap the whip system, create a government level whistleblowing entity and fine any party found to be pressuring TDs to vote on way or another
2: Make turning up to a vote mandatory for all members of the Dail
3: Make the votes anonymous

At the moment, if for example the constituents in Dun Laoghaire are against X and express as such to their local representatives, those representatives should be able to go into the Dail and vote against X. At the moment, however, those representatives have to tow the party line on the issue and face recrimination if they’re seen to be going against it. This doesn’t suffice in my books and although, as an FG voter, I generally agree with the direction they’re going in, I would like the option to rally locals to talk to our representatives and have something voted against if we felt it wasn’t in our interest.

Removing the whip system and allowing the TDs free, anonymous and mandatory voting would take a huge step in the right direction.

Miserable muppet

@toirleach why don’t you emigrate somewhere that doesn’t have the Internet so you can stop writing such crap here

@Graham
Nice to meet you too! What exact part of what I said did you not understand so I can explain it to you?

@Winston
I’m after replying to you but it hasn’t appeared. I wrote to Emer to see if they have it, if not I’ll try to write it again later when I have time. I really liked your 3 ideas btw.

No, Shayno, being “well heeled” does not make me superior.

What does, however, is not spending my entire day filling data bytes with angry anti-government rants on subjects I’ve little to no understanding of on Irish internet community sites, pointing the finger at everyone else but myself for the situation I’ve found myself in. It’s easier to stay logged on, giving out about how X screwed you over or Y caused this to happen you, instead of getting up and doing something with your day.

The sheer bitterness and resentment on display from people who are entirely in control of their own fate is really incredible and the fact that they’re happy to sit here all day, every day, ranting and ranting instead of doing something productive is how they got termed the “bitter, spiteful little people”.

Sheltered from realities? I don’t think so, I interact with a very broad range of people from all backgrounds so I’m certainly not “sheltered”. Realities most people are facing? Cop yourself on. 85.3% of the country is employed, the forecast for consumer spending is that it will contract a mere 1.7% in 2012, retail sales decreased a mere 1.5% year on year and education is still highly accessible when compared to other first world countries to our left and right.

It’s not “most” people who are facing (implied to be negative)”realities” of life. This attitude needs to drop off the place of the f**king planet, success in this country is now becoming stigmatized by a bunch of loud mouthed lay-abouts who have the gall to tell hard working people how “lucky” they are to have a job at the moment or worse, implying that they only have said success due to their connections.

Your attitude and ethic towards life, those around you and the things you take pride in, such as the work you do, judge your worth as a person, not whose womb you came from and in that regard yes, I am very much superior to some lay about who’s claiming the dole, not applying for jobs because he believes them to be beneath him or won’t work for an entry level salary and is going online and blaming everyone else for the position he’s in. I am immeasurably superior to such a person.

I’m not implying that person is you by the way, but it’s certainly characteristic of a lot of the ranters and ravers on this site.

Well heeled my f**king arse.

Richard, the last census showed we’ve more people in the country than ever and this is despite the fact that a lot of our imported work force have upped sticks and left for home when things took a turn.

Lets not be dramatic for the sake of being dramatic.

Harry, the synopsis of the report is a bit confused. The export numbers quoted are only for Enterprise Ireland supported businesses. The actual cost per new job created is a little over €12,000 not much more than the cost per job 15 years ago. nHowever what the Journal failed to report was that EI supported businesses also lost about 9000 jobs so the net gain in the period was just 6, yes 6 extra jobs.n

Stop digging winston