PDs drove and promoted the gluttony, rather breaking the mould

Dear Editor,

This week's Grassroots Insider seems convinced Fianna Fail are the core and sole hoax perpetrated on our people. As an outsider I would like to suggest his assessment is a rose-tinted underestimate of the extent of the problem. Perhaps s/he is too deeply embedded in the minutiae of local party competition to have noticed the parallels across the periphery of Europe, and even, some say, to the north African and western Asian turbulence. Have the politics of the US, and the mission-creep escalation of the Bush/Cheyney wars and their part in our economic downfall all been put down to the fevered denials of the now scapegoated but recently idolised Bertie Ahern?

The fact that the article is bracketed by references to deputy Noel Grealish and his late unlamented PD party machine, and the suggestion that the rump of Fianna Fail might now consider joining him is akin to the recent self-delusional 'Gilmore for Taoiseach' fantasy which has metamorphosed into 'Blueshirts have Fine Gaelmore for Tea Shock' that woke the Labour Party 'grassroots' to the reality of their leaderships' desertion of the class the party was originally established to represent. The rise and rise of their displacers on the ground is proof for any who doubt my contention. It seems fitting that the crowd scene chosen to illustrate the piece shows a placard of Pearse, Clarke and Connolly way down at the back over the slogan 'They Won Your Freedom'.

Connolly may have gone into the GPO against his better judgment, but is anyone seriously suggesting he would have led Labour into the present remnants of the century-old relics of the 'republicans' who have become the establishment of our increasingly Orwellian corporatised politics?I suggest your Galway Insider re-read his Liam Mellows if he is to get to the full extent of the long-running hoax perpetrated on the exploited population of this island; the substitution of the superstition of the infallibility of the 'invisible hand of the market' for the selectively interpreted deity of a self-serving set of Roman priestcraft practitioners, a set of dog-eat-dog competitive mantras denying the very existence of society and overtly promoting the elevation of a creed of 'greed is great', designed to fit that 'god-shaped-hole', and which was by no means confined to the Insiders of Fianna Fail. The gluttony was ubiquitous, among those who already had more than enough, and infectious even to those who should have been the watchdogs of our democratic practise, the national media, both public and private.

For a brief recap, recognising the value of your space, I would simply wish your readers to be reminded that this creed was promoted and driven by the tight-knit cadre of 'radical or redundant' Progressive Democrats who set out to 'break the mould' of whatever legal constraints channelled the natural anarchy of market forces into democratic service to our population, rather than the increasingly dynastic ascendancy aspiring to Beverly Hills luxury and the exit ramp for the hindmost losers; where the value of everything was replaced by its price, in a still continuing tornado of commodification of the planets resources to swell the gambling coffers of the 'players' in the globalised Wall Street casino. And it was inserted as the thin edge of a program to 'clean up' the sleaze of the Haughey corruption they then amplified. Anyone who deludes themselves that the change of shirt represented by our recent electoral dismissal of the immediate culprits will solve the problem or halt the hoax has failed to see the cultural and ideological roots of the hoax, and will remain, as the old song put it, part of the problem rather than the solution.

Increased fiscal rectitude to a corrupt and numerologically hypnotised oligarchy of centripetally acquisitive bankers will have the same result as re-borrowing from the ghetto loan-shark. That they wear pin-stripes rather than crass bling does not differentiate their brass-worship. We will not cure the sickness until we stop swallowing the ideological toxins.

Yours, as per,

D Flinter

The Regressive Hypocrite Party

Castleview

Headford