Priorities for Department of the Taoiseach

Says a lot for the state of this country when the head of government and/or his office spends time on this...

1- RTÉ apologises for news item on Cowen nude portraits
2- Gardaí visit radio station in Cowen painting inquiry

A general election can't come quick enough!

Huff, puff and build your house

I signed the deeds on July 7th and went straight to the library to learn everything I could about roofing, plumbing and electricity. Six weeks later the house was built. It cost, as I say, €6,000 (I could probably build it for €10,000 today). The walls were made of bales of oaten straw, laid like Lego blocks on to a thin band of concrete.

I squashed the bales down tight with bands of wire looped from the foundations and up over the wall plate, and then I built a roof on top. Everything wobbled a bit at first, but I kept tightening the wires until it firmed up, and then plastered the walls with lime and sand. Erecting the walls took five friends and me a day, and another four days for the roof. Then we left it all to settle for a while before I began plastering.

Building a basic house should be no more complex or expensive than this. Unfortunately, a lot of vested interests ensure that it is. Governments, banks and employers all benefit from having a society yoked under mortgages – it ensures control, compliance and vast profits through taxes and interest payments. Now might be a time to reconsider all this. A house should, and can, cost the price of a car – something you repay over a year or two, instead of your life.

Read On...

awe-inspiring desert storm

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Crunching numbers

From Celtic Tiger to Bob the Builder - this place is vaporising!

[Morgan] Kelly expects the economy to contract by 20%. And his latest prediction - to which he attaches a 25% probability - is that Ireland will default, and that Anglo Irish Bank, the recently nationalised bank that has become a reviled symbol of rampant lending and corruption, has not only underestimated its loan losses but has a swelling book of derivatives contracts gone bad.

The result, he warns, could be bank losses at Anglo Irish and other banks that supersede the Irish government's promise to guarantee all liabilities in the banking sector. What would follow would be a run on the banks, inability of the government to finance its 12% budget deficit, and ultimately a bailout by the European union.

"That is the optimistic scenario," Kelly said, arguing that his worst fear is a collective economic failure of several countries in eastern Europe, along with Ireland and those on the southern periphery of the eurozone - Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal - that would be beyond the capacity of any government or group of governments to stem.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/01/ireland-economic-crisis