Orwellian Ireland: wake up and smell the slop

WHO remembers Hall’s Pictorial Weekly on RTÉ television? That was long before they scrapped Scratch Saturday and delisted Bull Island.

Those TV classics made the politicians look somewhat stupid. Nowadays they do a very good job of making themselves look completely foolish without any outside help. We would laugh if it were not so serious. The reality is funnier than the parodies. Bluff and bluster masquerade as competence. Image is more important than substance. Truth is stranger than fiction.

History repeats. We never learn. We are back to the days of printing billions of Weimar money. Soon we will be paying our taxes and our bills with tiddlywinks. Wake up and smell the slop. The economy is a tragic comedy. Government departments swan about with grandiosely Orwellian misnomers. The Department of Finance has become the Department of Debt. The Department of Agriculture has lost the plot. Who will protect us from the Department of Social Protection?