Letter Ireland's pink salmon version of Labour Party

SIR – Having regard to the supposed ‘socialist’ Labour TD, present at the Vincent Browne ‘People’s Debate’ in Bantry on TV3, as reported in The Southern Star, it was no surprise to me to hear Michael McCarthy spout the same Tory guff we get from Fianna Fail and Fine Gael. Sinn Fein, equally ineffectual, was not represented at the top table and was not missed.

I was chuckling at how Michael would not have a snowball’s chance in Hades of being an MP in the long overdue new direction of the British Labour Party under the true man of the people, Jeremy Corbyn. There has never been an Irish Labour Party representative as brave and good as that great Englishman in one hundred years.

If his party never again gets into government (which it will), he has restored to the Labour Party the noble soul on which it was founded.

Here, all the red-rag Labourites go into the Dail like compliant cattle and come out after their term as sausages – and a good bit richer. This they will remain.

People like Mr McCarthy must be aghast at what Mr Corbyn represents and will get very red faces when their own membership of the Irish pink salmon version is truly

questioned in comparison with the people being put first under Labour in Britain. And this without the extreme personal gain which is the natural hallmark of the Irish ruling politicians in the form of this and that Mickey Mouse committee – so many we can’t keep up.

He crowed about the passage of ‘his’ Autism bill and he took smug credit in his submission at the meeting in this regard, but this was soon shown up by autism

Campaigner Fiona O’Leary, who asked: ‘When will we see fruition of this Bill, as it is disgraceful that there is no legal protection...?’ in certain areas of these children’s lives. 

Michael is talking this talk for a long while at this stage. In response to Vincent Browne’s query on whether they are ‘any plans to reopen currently closed

Garda stations,’ Mr McCarthy replied that he ‘didn’t believe that would happen.’

I drive through the adjoining large villages of Ballineen and Enniskeane in West Cork every week. In Ballineen, there is a fine Garda station with the grandest police sign outside on the wall – the like of which you would not find anywhere else in the land

of Ireland.

Long, long ago,with the policy of full-time rural-suburban cop shops getting the near chop, they were put of a part-time basis and the ‘green man’ box was put on the sturdy doors, where it was alleged that all you had to do was press the button on the box and someone from who-knows-where would answer and address your immediate problem –which in itself was a neat trick, if you had a lot of time to waste.

In time, the emergency boxes disappeared from the doors, leaving us wondering what was the procedure now if we need a guard in the same haste as when these stations were on full-time duties.

The point of my concern is that, as usual, and to my great surprise, when I passed the

lovely Garda sign in Ballineen last week, the door was wide open, as if it had

been flung there deliberately. There was no Garda car outside and my first thought was to ring 999 to report that it looked like the Garda barracks had been broken into and, if they’d hurry, they might catch the culprits inside.

But then I remembered that it’s against the law to use my mobile phone while driving, so I had no choice but to keep motoring on.

I might get a concerned TD to ask a question in the Dail about the possibility of abandoned Garda places getting vandalised and used as drinking dens by the wilder citizens. This appears to be the way things are going. Sure, what else can I do? 

But rest assured, if Mr McCarthy loses his Dail seat at the election, he will promptly be kicked upstairs to the Upper House. He is a regular face there and this is how the Irish political system works, even when it doesn’t.

Robert Sullivan,

Bantry.