Silk Purse, Sow's Ear

It is utterly reprehensible that certain politicians, backed up to the hilt by elements within the media, are doing their level best to play the race card in the run up to next year's election. That bile-inducing, poorly-disguised fascist, Mairead McGuinness is the latest inevitable fellow traveller on the racist bandwagon. On Questions and Answers last night, she tried to cause a furore regarding the news that Cowen's one-off 1000 euro payment to parents of under-sixes would extend to Irish parents of children who resided abroad.

Big. Deal.

Ignoring the reality that this is COMPLETELY in line with EU law and practice, our crusading militia-miss from the midlands bemoaned the cost to the exchequer, arguing that this measure, brought in to lift the burden off parents crippled by creche costs was not achieving its objective, i.e., bringing down creche costs in Ireland.

To play the race card under the guise of budgetary considerations - considered negligible by those in the know, as it happens - is not simply wrongheaded. It is sick. McGuinness, while denying explicitly that she was analyzing the issue from a racial perspective, qualified her inferences with the telling line, '...but it must be said that there is a growing concern on the ground regarding immigration'.

I would like to state, and I hope I'm not alone here, that I am fully aware of the implications of our comparatively lax immigration laws. I am prepared for the reality that, when jobs get scarce, we will all have to compete with those who have arrived over the last few years, and in many cases, we will lose.

Welcome to the real world.

The behaviour of the Opposition on this issue is symptomatic of a political movement starved of new ideas, dynamic figures and justifying its existence as a workable alternative on the pathetic, narrow grounds that it's better than another five years of those other fuckers. I'm beginning to believe that, for all their tangible faults, FF and the PDs are streets ahead of McGuinness and her braindead ilk.

I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence. But let's be realistic here. Bertie, McDowell, Cowen, Harney and Hanafin vs Kenny, Rabbitte, Bruton, that rabid bitch Olivia Mitchel and Liz McManus.

Who would you take home to meet the parents?