Daft Property - Irish Property News

While the rest of us work, TDs get three months off... THERE are ordinary people and then there are the people in the Dail. Dr James Reilly made the distinction while arguing against a three-month summer recess. Ordinary people, he said, could not fathom how the Government could take a three-month holiday in the middle of the biggest economic crisis in the history of the State. The Fine Gael deputy leader was doing his best to distance himself and his party from the perception that they and all the other extraordinary people in the Dail exist in some sort of parallel universe , untroubled by reality . However, the Opposition's attempts to absolve themselves by objecting to the length of the recess rang a little hollowly. In the end, they shrugged and went off on holiday anyway. Would it be too cynical to suggest that it doesn't matter a curse that the Dail will be inactive for three months due to its general ineffectiveness? When we are told that the Dail has decided this or th...

They've gone, but are we safer?... IT's a sign of the times really. On this weekend in previous years we would have, by now, worked ourselves into a frenzy of outrage about the fact that, as the country faces its greatest challenges yet, our leaders are about to embark on the kind of summer holidays unknown outside the teaching or TV-presenting fraternity. Indeed, many of our leaders are teachers and one can only assume they took to politics because they knew it was one of the few other professions where grown adults get two or three months off simply because it is summer. This year the outrage is muted. This year we are all half relieved that they are all heading off for a good stretch. "There, there", we think, "let them have a little holiday and see if they feel better after that." We even secretly hope that they might be different when they come back, that they might come into contact with the real world over the summer months, and that such a shock migh...