Smoking mirrors and revolving doors

For me this is an island staked with smoking mirrors, revolving doors of duplicity, to barefaced lies stripped of any pretence it is anything else but that.

It is an island surrounded by predators in the form of bank and middlemen calling themselves bankers and politicians and anything in between.

The most amazing thing about it all is we as a people still do nothing about it, and by the looks of things, we never will. That will be our ultimate failure. Crime is encouraged by it.

Crime is like a hyena prodding a wildebeest to see if there is any fight left in it, or to see will it at least try to make a run. Then it soon realises this is a feast of plenty, yet the wildebeests outnumber the hyenas thousands to one.

Even a wolf would be confused by this turn of events. The same mantra will always apply: when are the people of Ireland going to stand up?

Anyone, no matter how ignorant of the facts of why we are in this financial abyss, could not fail to get very angry and outraged — unless, of course, they do not have a pulse — at the tapes of bankers laughing all the way to their banks.

More importantly, they were laughing at us.

They had figured rightly that we, as a people, would do nothing about it.

One can only marvel at their unerringly accurate prediction that not only would we roll over and do nothing, but that the Irish Government would became appeasers and accomplices in their crimes. The only mitigating factor for the Irish people was that we were kept in the dark until it was too late.

Our crime now is that we are appeasers hoping we will be eaten last. While we remain in that deadened state, rest assured we will.

Barry Clifford

Oughterard

Co Galway