Voters end up paying the price for Fianna Fáil’s political strokes

By Ryle Dwyer OVER the decades Fianna Fáil has pulled a series of political strokes on the electorate, such as Charlie McCreevy’s promise during the last general election that there would be no budget cuts, or the election before when the party promised zero tolerance on crime.

If the government were judged on its delivery on those promises, it could only be considered a dismal failure.

We are still paying for greatest political stroke of all the party's 1977 election manifesto. Remember how they promised to abolish rates on dwelling houses and the road tax on motorcars?

Both are back with a vengeance. The car tax was quickly reintroduced, while the rates on dwelling houses never really disappeared.

That was the greatest Fianna Fáil fraud of all. They were supposedly shifted to businesses, which were always going to pass those on to their customers.

Thus all that happened was that the business community played the part of rate collectors.

In addition to the hidden charges being raised by businesses to pay their rates, the householders have also to pay water and refuge charges.

The Tralee Urban Council was asked to implement a charge of €380 a year for refuse collection, which would have amounted to over €7.30 per bin.

At the insistence of councilors this was cut to €300, or €6 per bin. Does that seem outrageous?

An enterprising individual from Killarney offered in February to collect rubbish for €200 for the remainder of the year.

He has signed up a sizeable number of households in Tralee some suggest as many as half of them. As a result, Tralee UDC will find that their €300 charge will bring in only a fraction of what was expected.

Will the council then find it necessary to double charges next year so that everybody sends their rubbish to Killarney?

Don't ask what he's doing with the rubbish in Killarney with what he's been paid he probably could export it to Germany and pay the Germans to solve the problem!

The irony is that the officials of Tralee Urban Council actually asked for 90% more than what the Killarney operation are charging.

The councilors had decided to charge €300 and collected the other €80 by increasing parking charges.

Until late last year the largest car park in town had free parking, but a €1 fee was introduced last autumn.

This had to be paid on leaving, which effectively meant that it cost that much whether one stayed for two minutes or two weeks.

Within little more than six months the price has jumped by 150%, and they are now charging €2.50, and the minimum charge for parking on the street is €1.20.

Driving down town to buy a newspaper could cost one anything from €2.50 to €4.

They council are already making it cheaper and more attractive to drive to one of the new shopping centres on the verge of town, where there is free parking.

What is going to happen should be obvious to even a fool, but then when it comes to business matters, Tralee UDC and Kerry County Council are the crowd who stood by while the Jeannie Johnston project was allowed to run amuck.

Business savvy was in short supply. Money was squandered on all kinds of junkets on that project.

But the local government people have learned nothing. The council paid for at least two councillors and the County Manager to go to New York for St. Patrick's Day.

They were too important to stay around for any of the parades. You would think the parade in New York would not be the same without them.

They obviously learned very little there. Go to most American cities and one finds the downtown areas run down, because most of the better quality shops have moved to shopping centres on the outskirts, largely because of the parking situation in the downtown areas.

The same thing happened closer to home in British cities. Take Sheffield, for example. It used to have a booming city-centre shopping district but the local council killed it with parking charges that drove customers to outlying shopping centres.

Very soon the main shops moved out, and now they have free parking in downtown Sheffield, but few want it because all the action is in the outskirts.

The same will happen here unless town centre shopping is made more attractive. Instead of aping the mistakes of others, we should learn from them.

We have already followed the example of the worst of America in imitating their drug and crime scenes. Now we seem to have our own homegrown criminal and drug gangs in Dublin and Limerick, and how long will it be before the rest of the country is plagued with the problem?

From the standpoint of public health, the Americans have one of the worst systems in the developed world.

Bill Clinton tried to do something about it during his first term as President, but it nearly up scuttled his Presidency.

Then he got into so much zipper trouble in his second term that he never had time to tackle the health situation.

We are imitating the Americans in the area of runaway health costs, and for this we are getting pathetic service.

In the area of cancer treatment, for instance, there are only eight radiotherapy oncologists in the 26 Counties, while there are 12 in Belfast alone.

People here have to wait as much as twice the recommended time for cancer treatment. This is an outrage.

A lot of money could be saved if the Health Boards were modernised to get rid of the professional meeting attendees those political hacks who go to meetings just to collect expenses.

Those who have so little respect for their own time that they would attend meetings to collect expenses, are a waste of space and money, with nothing to contribute.

In reality the government has only so much money to distribute. South Kerry is already getting more than its share. €50,000 is allotted for Killarney and there's a further 350,000 for the Summer Fest, on top of the €485,000 it got last year.

This is the most shameless celebration of conflict of interests in the country.

The Rose of Tralee Festival has not been allotted any money. RTÉ let it be known this week that Marty Whelan is being replaced.

There is some confusion over whether the suggestion for a change came from Tralee, where he has been particularly popular. If RTÉ allowed itself to be manipulated by amateurs, it does not say much for its professionalism.

If the suggestion came from the powers in RTÉ, on the other hand, one must ask why are they fixing the programme, if it is not broken? It has been about the only aspect of the Festival that was going better than ever.

Maybe Charlie Bird could replace Marty. After all he was RTÉ's answer to Comical Ali (the Iraqi Information Officer).

Charlie must be the first chief reporter who ever went abroad to report on a war from countries at peace.

He could have done just as well with a satellite dish out on a rooftop in Ballymun, and he would probably have seen a lot more action.