Ireland remains corrupt – no matter who’s in charge!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Sometimes it’s great being an outsider. Over a quarter of a century, I’ve tried to understand and assimilate into Irish culture in many ways, but where justice and accountability are concerned, my adopted home remains to this Englishman a foreign country.

For a moment last week, I couldn’t remember what it was that Garda McCabe had originally blown his whistle about. Barely surprising really, when you consider how depraved the affair has become since then.

Penalty points: that’s where this matter started, and while the UK drips with vice and scandal, when the finger of blame is pointed at public figures, they either step down or go inside.

Ex-cabinet minister Chris Huhne and his wife Vicky Pryce were both sentenced to eight months in jail for conspiring to swap penalty points. Job done.

Here in Ireland, a conspiracy to help bigwigs avoid penalty points has gone the way of all Irish scandals: she said that he told her that they never spoke about what didn’t happen, never, not a word was uttered, not a paragraph written, no report made or memo sent, until the other fella says well, now that he thinks of it again, he did say that, in person, and actually in great detail to both himself and herself, many weeks before, but when he’d said they’d said that, he really didn’t want to say it, because they were not only misleading the Dáil, but oh now isn’t it terrible, they were misleading the Irish people themselves.

Meanwhile, the real Irish people stare hopelessly at their TVs, wondering when these feckin’ gobshites are ever going to pull their heads out of their backsides and get their priorities right.

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.