Damien Mulley

Patricia McKenna wants to give a voice to the voiceless. These are her people now?

Photo owned by alex_ford (cc)

Photo owned by jan lewandowski (cc)

I know what you’re asking. Was he wearing sandals? No, no sandals but he still had his superpowers with him. A few bloggers and an unexpected 79 members of Boards.ie came along to the Dáil yesterday evening and got shown around the Houses of the Oireachtas by Ciarán Cuffe, after which we had a chinwag with John Gormley, Ciarán, Deidre De Burca (a very pretty lady I must say) and Damian from Green HQ. The conversation was mostly polite too but was far too short. Another time.

Photo owned by Pink Sherbet Photography (cc)

After that we headed to the public gallery to watch a vote or two. Jesus, but John O’Donoghue’s head could really explode soon. After that we headed off to the Dáil bar. Hilarious the way the bar is like some sectarian place where all the parties have their own sections. Is the Dáil always full of hacks and wannabe pols? I’m sure people will complain about the Greens trying to influence the bloggers or some bullshit like that. I can happily say I’m still not a fan of the Green Party, I respect a lot of what they do however and as someone who has already stated he was a fan of Ciarán, I’m a bigger fan now. So watch and learn Fianna Fáil, this is how you to “that thing with bloggers”.

Darragh has a far more detailed post here. Worth reading and looking at. Update: Post from Mark too.

Via Laura

John Handelaar finally released it after some of us were made aware and were sitting on the edges of our seats waiting for it. What is it? Every word, every phrase, every double-speaking utterance from the Oireachtas since 2004 (for now). All searchable, sortable and subscribable. You can even email subscribe for keywords or phrases and get alerted.

KildareStreet.com, they’re working for you afterall.

Photo owned by Fiona MacGinty (cc)

Labour front page:

Fine Gael is a bit eurovisionary or Zooropa-y

BTW, I liked Fine Gael’s budget thingymajig, Labour’s taxing of texts to pay for the cervical vaccine was beyond dumb. Kids will be paying more than adults if all texts are taxed the 1 cent that Labour suggested. Meteor texts for life would be killed off. So teenage girls would actually end up paying for the vaccine just like Mary Harney suggested. It also undermines the importance of the issue by saying it’s not central to the Department of Health, it’s on a par with the plastic bag tax. Why not tackle the wastage in the damned health system instead of raising more money to have it swallow up?

See what Twitter is saying about picturegate

Damnit, I thought a snarky comment and the YouTube video would be enough but it’s not. I guess I can’t sleep until I write this down somewhere. What happened last night with RTE apologising and giving in to the bullshit from the Government and the statements from those fucktards in Fianna Fáil show how bad things are.

Last night part of the freedom of the press was murdered in front of our eyes, in prime time hours. We should be crying at that apology. Hope is quickly diminishing in Ireland and more of it went tonight. The country is going to hell in a handcart and now they’re attacking satire in a most brutal way. RTE News has been shut down. RTE cannot report news anymore without having to secondguess themselves and the reaction from Government press officers.

This is not the time for just a Facebook Group. I think this is time to attend clinics and say what we can say to Fianna Fáil before they stop that too. Because they will. Nob Nation was killed and we pay for that, not Eamon Ryan, not Brian Cowen, now our news that we pay for is censored. Did we vote for this? Did those that voted for the Green Party vote for those and of those who said they should go into Government? Did members of Fianna Fáil vote for this?

There is a meme starting on the Internet where Irish people are posting naked pictures of Brian Cowen on their blogs and Facebook profiles. Not enough. Let’s gather together with A1, A2 posters of these and protest outside the offices of the Taoiseach. At every public event we need to track Brian Cowen and his staff and display these posters. Brian Cowen’s office needs to apologise over this. RTE need to apologise to us over this. There needs to be more done though. There should be transparency when it comes to contacts from the Goverment on the direction of a state broadcaster.

On one point I agree with Fianna Fáil. The RTE DG needs to go but not for Fianna Fáil to be happy but to get someone else in instead:

Fianna Fáil TD Michael Kennedy last night called on RTÉ director general Cathal Goan to consider his position. The report “represented a gross insult to the position of An Taoiseach, not to mention a personal affront to the dignity of the man himself”, Mr Kennedy said in a statement

Let’s set a date and start a protest, let’s bring all the world’s press together and have them record caricatures of a naked man from the sticks. Let’s keep the momentum going. Let’s send naked pics of Cowen via MMS to each other and wave our phones, let’s encourage the opposition parties to wave these phones in the Dáil. Have them wear t-shirts under their shirts/blouses. Let’s walk up and down outside RTE news broadcasts. Please please please don’t roll over on this because next time we won’t know what else the news is hiding from us.

Caricature by Alan Cavanagh

IE reports the clip below is gone from the website. Luckily it got recorded on the expensive thing under the telly:

Via Suzy: Ooops