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I don’t know if AynRand.org runs an annual awards ceremony, but if they do, I’d like to nominate Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair chief executive, for the Hank Rearden Award for Top Quality Businessman of the Year. Check out this piece, in today’s Telegraph.
Just to tempt you, here’s some quotes:
We are never paying a dividend as long as I live and breathe and as long as I’m the largest individual shareholder.
It gets better:
Go to Waterside [BA headquarters] and tell Rod [BA’s chief executive] he’s going to grow profits by 12pc this year and he’d have an orgasm… God speed [Rod]. You’re doing an outstanding job. Keep it up.
Our friends, the EU, are also thinking of prosecuting Ryanair on some spurious grounds of whether Ryanair received state aid at Charleroi airport, its Brussels’ base. O’Leary describes this as:
Regulatory bullsh*t.
Excellent! Michael O’Leary has also said that if the EU rule against him, he will shut Charleroi down, and sack its 3,000 workforce. He rounded off this promise, in typically uncompromising fashion, with the following statement:
I’ve no intention of making life easy for bureaucrats.
Bravo, sir! Unfortunately for Dagny Taggart-style ladies everywhere, multi-millionaire Michael O’Leary is getting hitched soon, though he’s not letting it put him off his financial stride:
The reception is going to be cheap. The honeymoon is going to kill me.
Though recently, his thoughts have also strayed to politics and sport:
I think a right-wing dictatorship led by me would not only improve the Irish economy but the Irish football team too.
What a dude. I’ve got some Irish blood in me. If Michael O’Leary ever becomes Prime Minister of Ireland, I wonder if they’ll let me swap passports? I quite fancy Dundalk, which remarkably, is also the home town of The Corrs.
Brendan O’Neill has been lamenting the postponement of elections in Northern Ireland, pointing out this is profoundly anti-democratic. He is of course entirely correct.
However as long as the state is allowed to have more or less unlimited potential power over civil society, it cannot be unexpected that in a tribal place like Ulster, folks in a given community are going to be terrified of The Others having their hands on the levers of power. I suspect trying to share so much power is at worst a futile hope leading to more violence and at best, a Mexican stand-off.
Surely at least part of the solution is to simply bind ALL political power in Northern Ireland hand and foot with a written constitution that places pretty much every aspect of life that really matters off-limits to the vagaries of democratic politics. Worried about those ‘dirty Fenian Tagues poisoning our schools’? So abolish state educational conscription completely and leave it to churches, community groups, socialist-group-hug-collectives, business guilds, whoever, that way the ‘Tagues’ do not have to worry about the ‘stinking Orangemen’ doing the same to their children. Just apply this to all the centralised power functions (such as planning and land use) for full juicy goodness. Once you have done that, it would seem to me that much of the reason to try and bomb people into/out of power becomes… well… pointless.
Democracy is fine, just as long as the people being voted for cannot actually do anything. Think outside the (ballot) box. Be a radical.
There will be no ticker-tape parades for the returning heroes of Gulf War II and, given the current political and cultural climate, I suppose that is understandable. However, one would have thought that Mr.Blair might at least see the benefit of a suitably discreet pause before publicly shafting them:
Tony Blair is prepared to radically scale down the Royal Irish Regiment as part of his proposals to persuade the IRA to destroy all its weapons and halt all paramilitary operations, army and political sources claimed yesterday.
So it appears as if the Royal Irish Regiment, whose members fought with such gallantry and tenacity in the Battle for Basra as far back as…ooh, let’s see…a few days ago, are to be issued with a whole new set of marching orders. Thanks very much, chaps, now fuck off!
The irony can surely only be desribed as breath-taking. Whilst neither Saddam’s Ba’athist thugs nor his Republican Guards could put so much as a dent in them, their very existance as a fighting unit is about to be sacrificed by a government that will stop at nothing in a (vain) attempt to appease the brooding war-dogs of Sinn Fein/IRA.
Members of Sinn Fein/IRA have been protesting against the war in Iraq, both yesterday and today, as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair meet in Belfast to discuss the shape of post-war Iraq and the Northern Irish peace process.
For some strange reason,
Ba’athist Socialism’s crimes do not get any mention…
I wonder why?
That the Marxists of Sinn Fein/IRA should be making common cause with Iraqi Ba’athist Socialism should be no surprise, but that they should be publicly supporting them at a time when the torture chambers and corpse filled warehouses of the regime’s victims are now coming to light is very revealing not just of the true character of these people but is a measure of just how out of touch they are. To be honest I can hardly contain my delight at their public display of sheer unalloyed stupidity.
As US and British soldiers fight and die together in Iraq to overthrow a mass murdering tyranny, I wonder how this scene in Ulster will look on television screens in Boston? I look forward seeing what happens the next time someone tries a little fund raising for the Irish Republican ‘Army’ across the water.
Hello America! We love you!
As stories of the Irish Guards operating skillfully in Basra with tactics honed in Northern Ireland are recounted, I hope a few more noisy protests from the Sinn Fein supporters also make their way across the world’s computer and TV screens as they make an interesting contrast.
Irish Guards snipers in Iraq demonstrate the true meaning of Anglosphere solidarity
Irish Guards in Basra
And British eyes are crying.
The Irish have voted ‘yes’ in the second referendum on endorsing the Nice Treaty.
Depressing, but predictable given the weight of the government support and the quantity of EU bribe money behind the ‘yes’ campaign.
I don’t suppose a ‘no’ vote would have scuppered the EU or even slowed it down in any material sense, but it would have dented their own sense of inevitability. Seems now that resistance is, indeed, futile.
The bad guys are winning.
Bugger.
It had to come out eventually. This week “soldier 027” gave testimony on the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry. He is under careful protection for now so his buddies won’t get a chance to silence him.
Those events of long ago were target practice. The Para’s were told by an officer before they went out “they might get kills”. And they did. They opened fire on unarmed civilian demonstrators and killed thirteen people. Intentionally. With careful aim. Soldier 027 said he believes one soldier was responsible for up to ten of the body count. While his buddies were dropping demonstrators, he was scanning the line of them with his scope, unable to find any threat.
His buddies agreed to a story. His own statements after the event were modified without his knowledge. This shows his superiors were involved and culpable.
It is as if the US National Guard sent to Selma, Alabama did so in hopes of either getting their first kill1 or adding to their tally, shot a bunch of civil rights workers… and then Johnson claimed the unarmed NAACP demonstrators fired on them… and then by the time an inquiry of “appropriate persons” was convened, the US Army had forged the written record to back up the claim of innocence.
One must note the Paratroop Regiment simply did not belong in Derry. They are an elite war-fighting group intended for serious kill or be killed combat, not police work. I should like to see the persons responsible for that deployment tried and hung for the cold blooded murder of 13 people and the responsibility for all of what came after.
It is not hard to understand why a community would rally around those who would fight back, and I know from discussions over beers in West Belfast that back in those early days of the insurrection the Para’s were particular targets.
And they brought it on themselves.
1 = Unfortunately the Ohio National Guard corrected this oversight. The State is not your friend.
In the aftermath of what has been bizarrely described as a landmark speech by Prime Minister Tony Blair (or ‘The Naive Idiot’ as he seems to be known in IRA circles), we are now told in no uncertain terms that the IRA will not disband. Gosh, what a surprise.
As has been the case since British Prime Ministers started making ‘landmark speeches’ about Northern Ireland from 1968 onwards, and republicans started replying to them, “Sinn Fein’s” political spokesmen would have people believe that the Marxist Nationalists of the IRA and the Nationalist Marxists of Sinn Fein are not in fact one and the same thing, regardless of the manifest absurdity of the claim:
Pat Doherty, the Sinn Fein vice-president, said: “The IRA is not Sinn Fein’s private army. Sinn Fein is in government because of its electoral mandate and its absolute commitment to the peace process.”
And I suppose the SS was not the Nazi Party’s private army either. The difference in objectives between the IRA and Sinn Fein are what exactly? Sinn Fein is in government in Ulster in order to induce the IRA to stop setting bombs off. Although it has been manifestly within the capabilities of the British state to achieve a drastic military solution to the main problem of Ulster, the post war British system has ensured that the sort of people who find themselves with their hands on the levers of power in Westminster lack the ruthless Imperial disposition to actually do what would need to be done to put that into effect. Similarly arming the Protestant majority and allowing a bloody ‘domestic’ demographic solution (i.e. the way it was ‘solved’ in the former Yugoslavia) is simply far beyond the mindset of modern British polity. None of that is going to change in the foreseeable future of course, as Sinn Fein/IRA are well aware.
So let us not pretend that the persistent terrorist violence of the IRA has not been successful politically and that Sinn Fein is both the beneficiaries and authors of that violence. Accept that and just get on with the process of managing Britain’s incremental surrender and withdrawal. Of course if my Green and Orange Northern Irish relatives are anything to go by, what Sinn Fein/IRA will actually get in a post-UK Ulster will be rather different to what they hope for. The Protestants are no more going to disappear under republican pressure than the Nationalists have under British/Loyalist pressure, regardless of what Britain does in the future. The current situation is an Indian Summer, a comfortable delusion that in the long run will be seen to mean a lot less than it currently appears to.
I have always thought it will end extremely badly in Ulster and nothing has changed my mind in the last few years… but to be honest, if I did not know both communities so well I would care a lot more than I actually do.
In what can only be the yet another indication the the EU intends to ignore even the semblance of democratic norms when it does not suit them, whilst at the same time wrapping themselves in the cloak of legitimacy that the European ‘Parliament’ allegedly brings:
Günter Verheugen, enlargement Commissioner, said on Wednesday, that it would be difficult to interpret a second No by the Irish: “If a treaty is rejected twice in a country and that country knows exactly that this treaty is a precondition for the conclusions of enlargement negotiations, the outside world cannot make the judge whether the rejections means enlargement or something else.”
So if Ireland votes NO to EU enlargement, Günter Verheugen feels it might in fact mean something other than NO to enlargement. I suspect I understand the source of the misunderstanding: When translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into Greek and then into Danish and then back into English, the result was:
A pint of Guinness please
However when translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into German and then into Swedish and then back into English, the result was:
Top of the morning to you, Mrs. Murphy
Yet when translated by official EU translators from Irish accented English, into Portuguese and then into Italian and then back into English, the result was:
We are just a bunch of Paddy jokers, pay no attention to us
No wonder poor Günter Verheugen is confused as to the meaning of the word NO.
Not surprisingly the UK and Irish media are filled with the rapidly developing crisis in Northern Ireland. On the face of it, the situation is fairly simple: Following a lengthy investigation by the Police Service of Northern Ireland, culminating in a high profile raid by uniformed officers of the PSNI on Sinn Fein’s offices at Stormont itself (the seat of the Northern Irish assembly), Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, has been caught spying at the highest levels of the Northern Irish coalition government of which they are a member. The Ulster Unionists are outraged, the British and Irish governments are stunned and the Northern Irish peace process stands on the very brink of collapse.
And yet…
Can it really have come as a surprise to anyone that Sinn Fein, a Marxist party dedicated to the end of British rule in Ulster and the stripping of the Protestant majority’s democratic political power, would be using the fact it is in a coalition government to compile information on its British and Protestant Irish political enemies? Clearly anyone with at least half a brain would expect them to use whatever means presented themselves to acquire information to gain political advantage. The leadership of Sinn Fein are also the leadership of the IRA, which is to say they are people who have gained their place at the very heart of Northern Ireland’s government because they have ordered large numbers of people killed over the last few decades. Are these the sort of people who would not use covert means to continue to advance their political agendas?
So if that is hardly unexpected behaviour from people who have got where they are now by the successful use of violence, then why the shock and outrage? Also, are we really to believe that all this information has only now come to light in spite of the fact Ulster is riddled with informants and undercover assets of Britain’s rather effective security services? Nonsense. It just does not add up.
Here is what I think is happening:
- Tony Blair can pretend to Labour dominated Parliament and the readers of the Guardian that the IRA has decommissioned more than a tiny fraction of its weapons and they it had stopped using violence within the Catholic communities of Ulster to maintain their authority, but no one in Northern Ireland really believes that.
- Yet Tony Blair was so loath to see his peace process go down the toilet the way of so many before it in Ireland had, that he would overlook almost anything the Republican side did if that was what it would take. As a result Sinn Fein could see all their dreams coming true, in gradual incremental installments.
- The Ulster Unionists had been making it clear for quite some time that they have had enough. David Trimble was facing progressively more discontent from within the Ulster Unionists and the crunch point was fast approaching: if he intended to remain as the party’s leader, given that the British government of Tony Blair did not have the stomach to face down Sinn Fein, Trimble himself was going to have to pull the plug on the Northern Irish settlement unless Sinn Fein actually lived up to its promises. This would involve him in effect taking the settlement and telling Tony Blair to stick it up his arse.
Result? Tony Blair gets the blame and is shown to have simply been too weak to force Sinn Fein to do what it had promised for real… Political disaster for Labour of the highest magnitude.
So… Given that consummate politician Blair has realised that nothing can now save the Northern Irish peace process from exploding, he decided the only way to minimise the political damage that Trimble would inflict on him is to blame the whole thing going down the crapper on the bad faith of… Sinn Fein. Thus all the information that Blair has in reality known about for years is suddenly ‘discovered’ following a high profile raid, he washes his hands like Pontus Pilate and says “It’s not my fault, oh if only those wicked Sinn Fein people had just been as honest with us as we had been with them”.
Of course if Tony Blair, like John Major before him, had not allowed the likes of Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness to get away with telling a never ending stream of porkies for years in the hope they would eventually ‘play nice’, we would perhaps have seen a more stable agreement reached… but the fact is there was bad faith on all sides.
There is an excellent article in the Telegraph which serves as a splendid example of just why so many libertarians regard democracy, as it exists in most countries, with profound ambivalence.
So they are being frogmarched back to the polls to reverse the decision they reached just 15 months ago. This is European democracy, Henry Ford style: you can reach any answer, as long as it is yes. In simply refusing to recognise the outcome of the first referendum, the government makes the point of the No campaigners more eloquently than a thousand speeches.
[…]
Mr Ahern and his supporters are relying upon the electorate accepting that there was something wrong with the June 2001 referendum. Although it produced a clear 54-46 victory for the No side, the turnout was just 35 per cent. This mandate is considered sufficiently unsatisfactory for another to be sought, although nobody for a moment believes that Ireland would be holding a second referendum had the same numbers produced a Yes vote.
If you ever wanted a demonstration of the fact the last thing democracy is about is ‘the consent of the people’, this is it. It is about justifying the actions of political elites.
As Paul Staines mentioned below, the Irish Young Progressive Democrats explicitly state they are not libertarians and just a glance at their agenda reveals that they are not friends of liberty by any stretch of the imagination. This party is just another bunch of statists pushing the conventional theft based ‘welfare’ politics of old, claiming responsibility for:
· Introduction of a minimum wage
This is tantamount to saying it is better for you to not have a job at all than to have one at wages that offend someone else.
· Huge increase in overseas aid
In other words ‘we have been taking money from you by force and give it to people overseas that you did not choose to give it to via one of the vast number of voluntary international charities’.
· Taxi cab liberalisation
Oh right them… I guess at least someone in the YPDs might have read a book review about a book at about some unpronounceable Austrian free market economist
· Increased social benefits especially pensions
i.e. theft by the state
· Increased funding for education
More theft by the state to fund an activity in which the state has no legitimate role whatsoever
I look forward to being invited to Paul Staine’s next garden party with food cooked over a barbecue lit with both his Tory Party and Progressive Democrat Party membership cards.
Paul Staines has views on Irish politics and economics
Whilst I’m very disappointed that Ireland’s Progressive Democrats (PD) are campaigning for a Yes vote on the Nice treaty again I noticed Milton Friedman in an interview in this month’s Central Banking (sorry, subscription required) excusing Irish membership of the €uro because they are a small country with an export orientated economy, he thinks the same can also be said for Central and Eastern European countries eventually joining the €uro.
But the PD’s ‘Yes’ campaign coupled with the Young Progressive Democrats putting out a policy paper explicitly stating they are liberals, not libertarians, makes me wonder if I’ll be throwing my PD party membership card and my Tory party membership card into the fire.
But I’ve just heard something that strikes me as an indictment of Gordon Brown and a tribute to PD leader Mary Harney’s tax cutting agenda. As the Tories tour Europe looking for policies, perhaps they should just dust off some of Thatcher’s old manifestos. Mary Harney did just that; she implemented major tax reforms, cutting Ireland’s basic tax rate to 22%, substantially raising tax thresholds, cutting the number of those liable to pay the top rate of tax, as well as cutting the top rate of tax, exempting the low paid from tax altogether, and finally slashing capital gains tax from 40% to 20%! State spending went from over 50% of GDP down to 26% today.
Lo and behold, guess what happened? The Laffer curve smiled on Ireland and the Celtic tiger roared. So much so that Ireland, which was an economic basket case a little over a decade ago, now has lower tax rates than the UK, higher economic growth rates and, unbelievably, higher per capita income than the UK. Bejesus, would ya believe that?
Come April, Gordon Brown will be putting up basic UK taxes 2% as we move into an economic downturn. Thick Scot, smart Paddies.
Paul Staines
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