got this last year from Brody Sweeney / fine gael.  Brody’s .ie/.com are gone  as is his ambition of a Dail seat to young gun Terrence Flanagan who is busy delivering retraction notices to every door in Sutton Park over storm drains & Brickfields.

the card needs a caption. Out in the cold for 5 more years? flat on my face? “will I give Labour back the red hat?”

dónal writes over on workers play time

Why do banks still chain down the pens to the table, the banks make billions of euros by taking in our wages and charging us to take the money back out of a hole in the wall. Could they not just give us free pens like in Argos or the Bookies,

not for the first time dónal is a few weeks ahead of me on a blog topic. I saw such chains in the EBS and thought the same. Never got round to posting it. Sometimes I think I read his blog as I sleep surf. But he writes so infrequent this is not possible.

Miss-Quotation-Marx

“The Banks have nothing to lose but their chains” and our money at the casino stock exchange

I heard David McWilliams steal Joe Higgins clothes and lines on Morning Ireland this morning MP3 [time code 37:45 - 39-04] “a financial coup .. (by) a cabal of property owners in cahoots with the government. ” I was there the night Joe Higgins debated McWilliams but I didn’t think we had such an effect on the guy. BTW  750+ downloads of the debate on MP3. my god who needs RSS, when an audio blog will do. 750 wow thats more than twice the 350 that stuffed into the packed Teachers Club in Oct 2006.

A field full of bricks? who knows, the council never checked, when i was growing up in the area it was a marsh, a swamp and an illegal dump. For all we know the dumping could be asbestos dumping like what happened down the road on the N32.

Now it remains zoned amenity land thanks to the efforts of the local community, residents associations & community sports groups and the socialist party locally who saved it from rezoning in the county development plan 2005 - 2011. Plans are underway to rezone it again by means of a variation to the dev plan.

please forgive the photo quality but all i had was a 1.2mp camera and the surveyors with staff were on site a few weeks back. I have recorded a piece for radio about this site. Its due to broadcast December 3rd but you can hear it now below.

While not fully explored here there are other issues regarding the glut of housing stock in the County, the amount of already rezoned land that will take this development and the amount of mixed type infill that has already happened in the Baldoyle area.

audio recorded for future use on enviro on Near 90 FM

Bank officials ‘not paid’ to be confronted by armed robbers

if this Judge was in the Labour Court he could also award the bank officials a pay rise as long as banks have money it will attract robbers.

“People who work in banks, shops and stores are not the best paid workers. They are certainly not paid enough to be confronted by armed robbers” said Judge Tony Hunt

But the Judge is out of touch with the pay scales in the banks The chief executive of Bank of Ireland, Brian Goggin received a total remuneration (pay plus bonus and pension) of in excess of E2.5m 2005 & near €4M for the financial year just passed.

Rather than a minimum wage that creates an under class (where the minimum becomes the maximum a low pay employer will pay) lets have a real MAXIMUM WAGE where Goggin’s of this world are capped and all workers are to be paid no less than the top executive in a company inside an agreeable national margin.

But there are other kinds of theft. Thousand of people will be homeless today as banks retake their homes. Its no comfort but Bank of Ireland share price on the ISE tumbled over 6% to €9.18 today and the ISE lost €7.2 billion in value over the past 5 days or 36% over the last 9 months.

Our pensions I hear you cry. At the crazy cash casino of capitalism some players are asked to leave the table early. thats the game. the system sucks you dry all your life and then leaves you high and dry.

Tags: capitalism, banks, robbery

“I am only a child, Yet I know that if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this would be. In school you teach us not to fight with others, to work things out, to respect others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not be greedy. Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do? You grownups say you love us, but I challenge you, please, to make your actions reflect your words.” Severn Suzuki

“You only pay for what you throw away”

Swords based Socialist Party Councillor Clare Daly Chairperson of the Fingal Anti-Bin Tax Campaign has slammed the proposed introduction of a new flat charge for environmental services, linked to the extension of the green and brown bin service.

* FINGAL ANTI-BIN TAX CAMPAIGN WILL VIGOROUSLY OPPOSE THIS DOUBLE TAX

Councillor Daly said, “After six years of propaganda from Fingal County Council to establish the tag system for the collection of the grey bin, they have now dropped the sham environmental cover and moved to charging directly for recycling facilities also.

All of the statements from Council management and the pro-bin tax councillors when the charge was originally brought in, that it wouldn’t rise, that it had nothing to do with generating extra taxation but was about encouraging people to recycle, have now been exposed for what they were – TOTAL AND UTTER BLATANT FALSEHOODS.”

She continued, “The Fingal Anti-Bin Tax Campaign has been absolutely vindicated in the stand that we took opposing that charge. Not only has the charge increased massively every year, but now the Council’s own catch-phrase has been shown up as a con. Residents will remember the Council’s slogan “You only pay for what you throw away”, and all the nonsense that if people recycled the charge would be negligible. The new proposals would mean an average household based on leaving out the grey bin fortnightly, as having paying a bin tax of €300 per annum. This is an absolute disgrace.”

Councillor Daly said, “The bin tax has always been about generating extra revenue for the Council against the backdrop of falling percentages of government support. Tens of thousands of new taxpayers have moved into Fingal County Council over the past 5-10 years, yet the amount of funding from central government equates to only 13%.

The introduction of a bin tax has made waste big business the private operators are earning millions from the present situation while PAYE taxpayers and pensioners are levied on the double. Meanwhile, while recycling has increased, the actual amount of waste per person has also increased during the lifetime of the charge.”

She concluded, “This debacle will only be halted through the elimination of a direct charge and the reinstatement of waste collection as a public service. We will vigorously oppose the introduction of this new tax by every means possible, starting at the Council Estimates meeting next Tuesday.

a competitor’s site says ‘the revolution will be podcast’. Well I don’t want my revolution to be time-shifted and under 45 minutes in length. 51 years ago news (film) from Ireland had to be sent to the UK to be processed before being broadcast again back in Ireland (on TV).  Nowadays every phone user is a walking cameraman within ear shot of a story. Record ~ Stop ~ Upload. but are we using this power to greatest effect? the Marcos Government was the first to be toppled with aid of txt msg, Tienanmen square china students used the FAX to get news out. we are overdue a new media political faux pas of a revolutionary scale. Students Minitel Paris ’68. - discuss…….

[photo lifted from here without permission but with gratitude in advance]

Built in Dublin ahead of time ahead of budget and ahead of U2 Tower

Stephen Collins in today’s Irish times (page 13) writes about an anomaly where the number of TDs per constituency is set by the population size via census not by the citizenship of the constituency.

1. this is only an anomaly if you want to disenfranchise non Irish citizens and Irish babies, children and youth up to the age of 18

2. Collins holds up an anomaly, there is none, the constitution says population and the boundary commission uses population, No anomaly there!

3. Should a non Irish citizen be less represented than an Irish Citizen? No.

4. Are there more Irish Citizens that stay at home and don’t vote than the “anomaly” Collins thinks he has uncovered? yes.

5. All the population are entitled to representation.

6. So the two Constituencies that are least represented are Dublin West & Dublin North which should return two Socialist Party deputies at the next election. Memories of Gerrymandering.

7. Collins argues that areas that have had decreasing populations (i call it empty nest syndrome) have higher proportion of Irish citizens than DW & DN, this is an “anomaly”?

8. The votes are secret ballot. All TDs / Councillors in my area represent me. But they wont should I disagree with their policies and planning ideas etc. So in general the best way I have of getting represented, and particularly for marginalised population is to have a public representative that is voted in by me/them, ideal with STV PR and not ideal in a first past the post system. Much more possible if the number of TDs is proportionate to the population not the voters (over 18) or Irish citizens.

Perhaps the real anomaly is that we take your Income Tax, Value Added Tax on your mars bar (and Irish Times), road tax TV licence, waste charges tax, capital gains, stamp duty, but if your not an Irish citizen living here you can not vote, so we will give your area less TDs! Perhaps Collins should look into the vote for the non Irish Citizen, rather than think that the constitution has an anomaly and that areas really are not under represented.

No taxation without representation becomes ”all tax no representation“ anomaly