Shut the Seanad and put health of the nation first

Last week in Clonmel Hospital 20 people lay on trolleys in the corridors while 60 members of the Seanad are paid to be on holidays.

The proposed referendum on the abolition of the Seanad as promised in the programme for Government is being constantly deferred. The Labour senators, including our own local senator, are fighting to retain the Seanad. The Seanad consists mostly of politicians who failed to get elected to the Dáil, and 43 are elected by TDs and councillors and senators, and 11 Government nominees and four university representatives. It costs approx. €50m a year to keep those people in highly paid positions while our health service is falling to pieces.

We bailed out the banks, paid the bond holders and suffered the cuts. Households have been sucked dry and our young people have been forced to emigrate. Businesses have gone belly-up. Our helping hand to the less fortunate and the sick is being pulled back all the time. Families have been broken up, towns and villages left drab and empty. Parents lie awake at night worried about their jobs and how the mortgage will be paid. Yet we have gone with the flow, happy to get the pat on the head from the troika.

Our senior bankers continue to earn in excess of €800,000 per annum, and the senior executives in the semi-State companies, our judiciary and many more at the top, are still on the €500,000 plus incomes. Nothing has changed. We in Ireland have paid to the banks €64bn, which is €13,956 for every man, woman and child in the country compared to Italy who have only paid €71 per head.

Today the banks continue to bully people. They continue to lie to us about giving loans and credit as they try to re-feather their empty nests. This is a financial war and the Government should declare that this is an national emergency for three or four years. The Government should start at the top with the wage cuts and declare a maximum wage of €200,000. Then and only then will the people come on board.

The banks seem to think somehow the people will be able to come up with the money to pay off this huge debt; the country will continue and the banks will live on a hand-to-mouth basis until there is a rational policy of debt settlement. The day of reckoning is fast arriving and something will crack.

Our politicians sit idly by, too subservient to the troika and afraid to express the views of the people. How else can one explain the proposal to hit people with the most ruthless budget measure of all, the property tax. We have household charges, septic tank charges, high costs of motor fuels, motor taxation, income tax, Vat, and a clatter of hidden charges for everything you go to do. We have jobs losses on a daily basis and a continual flow of emigration. I now hear myself beginning to shout “Stop. No more”,

I know the time is fast approaching when, as a nation we will all have to join together, left and right, young and old, working and middle class, religious and otherwise and shout together “Stop. No more”. You can’t take from the people what they don’t have.

Yes, I would close the Seanad. Surely hospital beds and the health of our nation come first?

Cllr Pierce O’Loughlin Independent

Main Street

Carrick-on-Suir