Saturday, February 14, 2009
IN the midst of all the negativity, it is nice to read something positive for a change.
This must be one of the worst weeks I can ever remember, between the job losses, the Government’s incompetence, the finance minister loaning billions to the banks without bothering to read a report about some of those he was trying to help being engaged in a deception that involved not just millions, but billions of euro.
A traumatic brain injury (TBI) research group headed by neurosurgeon Jack Phillips completed a two-year study of brain injuries this week. It has some positive findings, which makes a pleasant change in the midst of all the doom and gloom.
In the 1990s Beaumont Hospital in Dublin found that 48% of TBIs were a result of traffic accidents.
This week’s report, which was based on a two-year study from 2002 to 2004, found that the level of TBI among road users had dropped to 22%.
The road safety campaign launched in 1998 has clearly been a success. The monthly fatality rate dropped from 39 per month in 1997 to 23 per month in 2008.
Various factors contributed, including enhanced safety features such as the requirement to wear seat belts and the introduction of airbags in cars, as well as the requirement for motorcyclists to wear a helmet.
In 50% of the cases in which there were TBIs, however, the injured parties were not wearing seatbelts.
People who suffer brain injuries in crashes now have a better chance of survival, but this should not be allowed to mask the tragedy of those who survive but are dreadfully disabled for the rest of their lives. With the drop in the number of fatal road accidents, however, the proportion of brain injuries suffered as a result of assaults has increased from 8% to 11%.
The great preponderance of the victims (90%) were men and two-thirds of those were between the ages of 16 and 24. The TBIs resulting from assaults in this country are now higher than levels in Europe, the US and Asia, where the level is 6-7%, or 9% in Australia.
Alcohol was reportedly involved in 80% of the assault cases admitted to the country’s two neurosurgical units — at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin and Cork University Hospital. About 38% of TBIs occur in the home, due mostly to people falling or bumping into things. Alcohol was involved in 24% of those cases. Will the consequences of more drinking in the home be our next nightmare?
During the week I dozed off during Morning Ireland and woke up to the spurious indignation of Defence Minister Willie O’Dea, trying to stand on both sides of the fence — denouncing the behaviour of Irish Life and Permanent (ILP) for secretly depositing €7 billion in Anglo Irish Bank, while at the same time seeking to defend his colleagues.
"The Government now owns this bank and it’s absolutely imperative that we find out what was going on, and that we find out as quickly as possible," the defence minister said.
And I bet you thought the Government should have found out what was going on before it assumed responsibility for the bank. O’Dea was effectively trying to excuse the incompetence by suggesting that they did not know what was going on.
This must have been the greatest case of financial distortion ever witnessed in this country.
Anglo Irish Bank loaned €4 billion to ILP which then deposited €7 billion in Anglo Irish for a few days. This cosy financial arrangement was clearly made to deceive people.
The finance minister was notified, but he did not bother to read the report informing him of the fancy financial footwork of those banking institutions. Some weeks ago there was the controversy over the minister for children not bothering to read the report into clerical sex abuse in the Cloyne diocese.
Before that we had the case of the Taoiseach saying he had not even read the Lisbon treaty, but calling on the people to ratify it. And that came after Micheál Martin had admitted, as Minister for Health, that he had not read the report on illegal fees on nursing homes.
Let’s face it, there are none so stupid as those who cannot learn from their mistakes. This Government has become a joke — a terminally sick joke.
Whether the report that Brian Lenihan did not bother to read was a highly technical document or not, surely he has people in his department who can read and recognise the importance of such financial finagling and inform the minister.
This betrays either a frightening degree of incompetence or gross negligence. Thousands of diligent, hardworking people have been losing their jobs all over the country, through no fault of their own, while the Government persists in retaining a collection of flunkies who are merely mirroring the ministerial incompetence.
Why have more heads not rolled at the banks? The minister is apparently waiting for the boards of the banks to do something. This is symptomatic of disease in this Government. They are all waiting for somebody else to do their work. This includes even the Green Party. John Gormley is waiting for An Bord Snip Nua to do something about the useless 7,491 evoting machines that cost €204,000 to store last year. They have squandered €54m on those machines already. They could not use them in either of the last two general elections. Do they really need advisers to tell them what to do with those machines?
When waste and incompetence have been exposed within the public service, the Government just funks the issue and allows the incompetent individuals to retire with golden handshakes — like Rody Molloy at Fás and Patrick Neary, the financial regulator.
THE latter stepped down under a cloud late last year, but he was given a golden handshake amounting to €630,000. He got €202,000 in a special pay-off, plus a €428,000 lump sum on retirement, and he will be on a pension of €142,000 a year on top of all of that.
One can only wonder how sick this must make the people at SR Technics or Waterford Glass who have been laid off without even the pensions to which they subscribed.
We should recognise there is a palpable anger out there, and this could well explode into violence, which has its own way of begetting further violence. If this explodes we will all be the losers. Nobody should underrate the incompetence of the current Government.
The people have caught on to them. In the latest public opinion poll 80% of the electorate are dissatisfied with the performance of the Government. Fine Gael enjoys 32% support and Labour has 24%, compared to 22% for Fianna Fáil, which is in third place for the first time in the history of polling.
Brian Cowen made a hard-hitting speech in which he talked about the necessity of making hard decisions, but talk is cheap. Rather than take any hard decisions and lead by example, they have fobbed them off on others. What we have been witnessing is government paralysis.
If they have any patriotism there is one hard decision that they should make now in the national interest — Get out.
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