Our politicians are a barrel of laughs

IT really is a hoot — if you’re in the mood for laughing.

The Dáil was in recess for 40 days over the Christmas past in the middle of a national meltdown.

We have part-time politicians on oh-so-generous full-time pay which includes emoluments for even turning up at the people’s parliament if they’re in the mood to do so.

Well, they have those “clinics”, don’t they, but I’m not really sure about their diagnostic skills or whether they know anything about injections, apart from injections of cash.

Even the most garrulous so-called independent deputy seems to take a vow of silence once elected while the six Green TDs have turned a whiter shade of pale, piling on the platitudes, the thin gruel of people who have nothing else to serve up to the people who elected them.

Health Minister Mary Harney once boasted her preference for Boston over Berlin but it’s now eastward we need to look to be salvaged from foolishness and grandiosity.

Boston doesn’t care about our survival as a people, despite all the shamroguery associated with Patrick’s Day and the attendant grinning Irish minister of this, that and the other.

We need people like Diogenes, a philosopher from ancient Greece, who was said to live in a barrel which he rolled up and down the streets to show that he was busy, too, while the politicians were preparing for war against Philip of Macedonia.

Diogenes was also said to carry a lantern in broad daylight, searching for one honest man.

He was certainly eccentric, but he was no hypocrite.

Whether he found that honest man isn’t recorded, but when Alexander the Great decided to meet him, Diogenes’s response was to tell that powerful man to get out of his sunlight.

I don’t think he would have been cowed by a bunch of bankers.

Maureen O’Donnell

Haig Gardens

Ballinlough

Cork