A short message to Bertie and pals,
“The Government has raked in €1.8bn more tax than expected in the first nine months of this year, it was revealed today.”
Great!! Well, with all this talk of gifts and loans and so on I just want to remind you, before you stick half of that cash in your pockets, that there are other ways you could use some of that money. Here are some hints …
• we have the second WORST health care system in Europe
• Child care is Ireland is the most expensive in Europe, it’s forcing mothers to stay at home and making it difficult for many families to survive
• 6.8% of Irish people live in consistent poverty with a further 19.4% at risk of poverty; 9.5% of children live in consistent poverty with a further 21.2% at risk of poverty [2004]
• there are approx 2015 homeless people (220 homeless families WITH children) in Dublin alone [2005]
• there are well over 150,000 lone parents in Ireland; about a third of them live in consistent poverty; about half of them have only the Junior Cert level education
• the International Adult Literacy Survey carried out in 1997 claims that 25% of our population has only level 1 literacy i.e. they can barely read or write, that’s half a million people! This figure is still the estimate as of May 2006
• 431 people died through suicide in Ireland in 2005; hundreds of thousands of people suffer from forms of depression, I think these people could use some support or guidance
• many of our Gardaí are facing physical dangers every day yet have to rely on donations from police forces in the US for basic protection like stab vests
• hundreds die on our roads each year yet our Gardaí are under resourced and ill equipped to deal with many of the causes such as speeding etc
If I thought about it for another minute I could probably add a few items to that list, it wouldn’t be hard. The bottom line here is while you’re all clapping yourselves on the back for a job well done [screwing the Irish population] all is not well in this fine state of ours, far from it a chairde.
I didn’t know about all of these problems you listed here!
Visiting Ireland as a tourist doesn’t help understand the real problems of your country!!!
Next time I’ll try to keep my eyes open on these aspects of life as well…
Antonio,
Sometimes it looks like thigs have gotten worse as Ireland got richer. Maybe the politicians got lazy, thinking everything was ok.