Pat Lawlor speaks out against health cuts

By John Quigley

Although the fans of Derry City knew that the club was in financial difficulty, the decision to throw them out of the FAI League has sent shockwaves through the city.

The concerted might of the strongest and largest military force in the world, that of the US, is failing to defeat the disparate and crudely equipped Taliban militias in one of the poorest countries of the world.

This is despite the US leading a force of nearly 120,000 troops fighting an estimated 28,000 Taliban, and having spent a phenomenal £190 billion over the nine years of the war so far.

Afghanistan WikiLeaks

Thousands of workers took to the streets of Belfast on 23 October in probably the largest non-sectarian demonstration in Northern Ireland since the anti-war movement. They marched in opposition to the £4 billion cuts to public spending in Northern Ireland which were contained in the comprehensive spending review.

In the vast acreage of print devoted to last week’s two political retirees, former parliamentarians George Lee and Deirdre de Burca, there was little recognition of the real lessons which are, that personality politics holds nothing in the way of a solution to either our economic or political problems and secondly that ordinary people should not put any faith in establishment political parties or politicians.

For some the spectacle was highly amusing. As the air thickened with recrimination between the pair and their political parties, for some reason the writer Flann O’Brien came strongly to mind. Perhaps it was that I remembered reading that his fractious relationship with his political masters caused him to resign amid, it was said memorably, ‘a cacophony of f**ks.’ Or maybe it was a subconscious association of the departees with the title of one of his famous books, ‘At Swim Two Birds.’