latest pronouncement on the moribund state that France is in.
He pointed out the other day that since M. Hollande became president last year (it seems like forever!) more than 80 tax rises have been imposed on the French people. Quite incredible, no wonder people are so fed up! Forsyth also pointed out that the corollary of all this bad governance in France is that countless young people with talents and qualifications, are opting to emigrate rather than make a career for themselves in France.
It’s all a very depressing picture; no wonder the protesters in Quimper in Brittany last Saturday created such mayhem in the best French tradition of rioting. They were protesting against the new eco taxes on heavy lorries, which of course has a particularly negative effect on Brittany, since it’s so far from its markets, and also at the high levels of unemployment in Brittany. Up to 30,000 people took part in the Quimper protests and they certainly made their point, but whether anyone in authority will take any notice is an even more pertinent question.
It’s the same here in Ireland. My ire was raised one day week when I was having lunch with a friend in a city centre restaurant in Dublin. Towards the end of the lunch, I looked out the window and there was the finance minister, Michael Noonan, strolling up the street, dressed up like a proper little country gentleman, carrying a little upmarket carrier bag of goodies. He’d just been doing a little shopping during his lunchbreak. He’s on a fine salary and benefits, yet he and the government of which he is part was responsible for the recent budget in Ireland that introduced all kinds of harsh measures for the poor, the sick, the unemployed and the pensioners while the wealthy, the friends
of Noonan’s party, Fine Gael, got off scot free.
No wonder that these days, in order to cut down on huge home heating bills, many old age pensioners are forming groups to spend their days travelling the country by train using their free travel passes. How pathetic that the country has come to this, yet Edna Kenny, before he became prime minister, said he wanted to make Ireland the best small country in the world in which to grow old. His words have come back to haunt him; they are typical political Orwell double speak: they mean nothing and they also mean, in practice, the very opposite of what was spoken.
It’s no wonder that in a big protest in Cork city yesterday by pensioners that one of the posters read: "Ireland. Probably the most corrupt small country in the world”, a take on the famous Carlsberg beer
ad. In another protest the other day, outside the Irish parliament, two groups of students gathered to protest against recent cuts hitting them. One group was dining off traditional student fare, baked beans, while the other group, wearing masks with photos of government ministers, was sipping
Champagne!
It was no wonder either that yesterday, in one of the Irish national newspapers, someone wrote a letter to the editor accusing Edna Kenny, the prime minister, and his cronies being a “bunch of fascists”. After all, as the letter writer pointed out, Fine Gael, which is the largest party in the present coalition, with the utterly useless and impotent Labour Party, has its roots in the only neo-Nazi movement Ireland has ever had, back in the 1930s.
These days, it seems that the government and the state can hose down the people with as much shit as they want and people will say “Oh, goodie”, more please. That everyone can be so acquiescent in the face of such incompetence and unfairness never ceases to amaze me. Much but not all of the media can shoulder some of the blame, too. Before the big economic crash in 2008, many sections of the media industry saw their role as acting as cheerleaders for the government of the time and the property developers. The then prime minister, Bertie Ahern, now well and truly in the doghouse, even said that anyone who criticised the then boom conditions should go and commit suicide. Fine words of encouragement from a prime minister!
The latest wheeze in Ireland is of course high tech, as if this is going to be the saviour for all our ills. Personally, I’ve a high degree of scepticism and reckon that we could well be facing into yet another bubble, similar to what happened with the so-called dot.com revolution 13 years ago, this time, led by the likes of Facebook and Twitter. There is just so much business incompetence around at the moment, but in this respect Ireland is no different to many other so-called developed countries.
Last week, we had a big web summit in Dublin proclaiming that Ireland was at the cutting edge in world terms of digital technology. We currently are going through yet another collapse in the water supply system in Dublin, while on Sunday afternoon, the power supply in our part of Dublin went
down due to a fire in the electricity distribution system. This is what being a world leader really means!
One topic that is never ever discussed by politicians and the media here in Ireland is how the euro has
contributed so much to the country’s woes and why the overvaluing of the euro poses such a threat to the country’s future as well as that of the EU itself. The other day, Francois Heisburg, the French head of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, called for the euro to be put to sleep to save the European project. He said that the EU is now being threatened by the euro and that if the current situation continues, it could spell a death sentence for the countries of southern Europe. Needless to remark, not a word of all this appeared in the Irish media!
Still, the Americans are just as bad. After all the recent allegations of US spying on its allies, one wonders: how much trust can you put in the American system? Is it all a case of fine words
and bad practices, as Barack Obama in his second term, turns out to be one of the worst US presidents in recent history.
It’s as well to record as well the starting point for the great economic crash of the past five years. After the 1929 Wall Street crash, the Americans put in place a conservative system of bank regulation that worked very well for decades and prevented the banks committing any kind of excess. Who swept away all this regulation and allowed the banks run riot? Why none other than that great hero, Bill Clinton. When the American banks lost the run of themselves after this deregulation, the first effect was the sub-prime mortgage crisis, when banks turned out to have been lending vast amounts of mortgage money to people who couldn’t afford the repayment terms. This act of folly was the root cause of the financial crash that started in 2007 and accelerated in 2008. And don’t believe everything you hear on the BBC about the US! The other day, on Radio 4, I heard a solemn pronouncement that
George W. Bush won his second term in the White House in 1994 - it was of course 2004!
At least in France this week, there’s been a bit of a laugh over the antics of three drunken teenagers in Bordeaux. They discovered a llama that had escaped from a circus and promptly led it onto a tram in the city, where it and its abductors were discovered. I’m sure the llama enjoyed the temporary free ride!
On a more serious note, the first case of rabies in France for over a decade was found the other day, when a kitten that had been discovered on a street in Argenteuil, just north-west of Paris, died from rabies. It was the first case of rabies in France since 2001, but there actually hasn’t been a case in France of a human contracting rabies since 1923.
With news like that, the most recent earthquake in the south of France, almost four on the Richter scale, which was felt between Menton and Nice, passed almost unnoticed last week. Quite strong earthquakes that don’t actually cause any damage are fairly common on the Cote d’Azur, but it’s been so long since the last big one -126 years - that no-one takes much notice of the odd shake, rattle and roll. Still, at least, there’s some good news from the South of France.
In Nice, the new public gardens, the Promenade du Paillon, have just opened in the city centre, named after the river that once divided the old and the new towns. Nice also has a brand new Hard Rock Café, which has just opened on the promenade des Anglais with the traditional guitar smash. It has objects that were once owned by the likes of Michael Jackson, James Brown and Rihanna.
A more long term project has been announced, the upgrade of the rail line between Marseilles and Nice, which will include putting the Cannes to Nice section underground. But it won’t be finished until 2030 and even though it won’t mean TGV speeds, it will cut the Marseilles to Nice journey time to under two hours.
Another little bit of bright news came from Monaco. Over the summer, the place du Casino there was transformed with the planting of hundreds of vines. These have now produced their first fruits, so there is now a Cuvée Monte Carlo!
Meanwhile in Paris, the Brigitte Bardot take-off artiste, Frigide Barjot, has lost the case over her apartment in the 15th., which I reported on a few weeks ago. The latest legal judgement in the case means that she and her husband now have four months to quit their apartment.
Segolene Royale, who once aimed to be French president, has also been back in the news recently. She’s been recreating the famous Delacroix painting of Liberté, the woman leading the French
revolution, complete with the national flag. However, Le Parisien has added a little spice to the debate by saying that if she wants to be real about her lookalike project, she should pose with bare breasts!
I see also that another French tradition is under fire - bread. Good quality French bread is superb - it’s impossible to stop eating it, but it seems lots of French people are doing just that. People are eating half as much bread as 50 years ago because the quality has dropped so much. These days, people want whiter, more lightly baked baguettes. Flour production is now concentrated in the hands of four
milling groups, who between them control half the total market. Now it seems, additives are being used to make a cheaper more processed type of flour that looks whiter and is easier to preserve. It would fair put you off your baguette or croissant!
But at least it turns out that October was one of the warmest since 1900. Météo France says that October 2013 was the sixth warmest October since 1900, even if more rain had been falling.
We also had some good news on the wine front. Back in 2008, Angelina Jolie and her husband Brad Pitt bought the Chateau Miraval and its estate in the Var - it’s about 80kms inland from St Tropez. They had 400 hectares planted with vines and earlier this year, the first 6,000 bottles of their rosé wine were released. It’s very good quality, selling for about €20 a bottle. Just recently, the couple put up a barrel of the stuff for auction and it realised €10,000, which went to help an agricultural project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In the meantime, another big controversy has erupted in France. The government proposes to make a criminal offence the purchase of sex. However, a group of intellectuals, including some high profile journalists, commentators and actors, started a petition in which they demanded the right to visit sex workers and pay accordingly. The petition really raised the ire of France’s feminists, who naturally, support the government’s plans.
They had an interesting programme on Radio 4 the other day about people who want to swim the English Channel. These swims have to start from the Dover area as the French authorities don’t allow them to start from the French side of the channel. One person they quoted liberally on the programme was Mike Oram, who lives in Dover, trains Channel swimmers then pilots one of the boats that goes alongside them. In typical Oram style, he was very down to earth and at one point, the presenter called him the “voice of doom”, pinching my own trademark description!
Finally, to end this week on a Polish note. A leading firm of coffin makers in Poland has just
released its 2014 calendar and it’s most extraordinary - the photos show a series of nude and semi-nude models posing on coffins! How it’s going to increase sales, I’m not at all sure.
And talking of Poland, a good friend of mine in the media business in Dublin has as her partner a well thought of person in the construction business. He’s the head of one of the largest construction
companies in Ireland, which has just sought court protection because it has debts of around €126 million. Most of these debts, it seemed, accrued due to contracts in Poland. Last year, the firm had to walk away from one big motorway
project in Poland because there was so much incompetence and corruption in the
country that progress was impossible.There may well be plenty of incompetence
in Poland-perhaps they have learned their lessons well from here in
Ireland!