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Corporate Welfare Will Sink Ireland...

FF's parting gift of corporate welfare will sink the country... A farmer told me he had just taken €53,000 out of the local bank and put it under his bed YESTERDAY was the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In many other Catholic countries, particularly in Belgium and southern Holland, this is also the week that Santa comes and leaves presents in children's shoes. For many, both the Immaculate Conception and Santa Claus are simply not believable. For me as a child, December 8 was a day off school and that's all that counted. What would Christmas be without Santa, or Catholicism without the Immaculate Conception? You can't have one without the other. Even if you don't believe, sometimes it is easier to pretend. The Budget was akin to the Government playing a big game of 'let's pretend'. Let's pretend that the banks are solvent. Let's pretend that the problem in Ireland is 'social' welfare rather than 'corporate' welfare (because t...

Irish Property Crash Is The New Porn...

The crash is now the new porn... Fair play to the Irish, we'll knock a bit of crack out of anything. The property boom, for all that the official line now says it was the worst thing that ever happened to us, we treated as one huge game in which everyone could be a player. Even people who weren't investors as such, but who just happened to own a house because that's where they lived, had a great ride for 10 years as they constantly calculated how much their house was now worth and how much more they had made in the property game last year than they made by actually working. Most people were never going to sell their houses, and if they were they were going to have to buy an equally overpriced one, but people just enjoyed the feeling of getting ever richer on paper. What other nation could come up with a whole new type of porn, based on fully-clothed people standing in their kitchens, often flanked by their cute children? And the sight of a Miele kitchen in a period house ...