It's kinda funny seeing the near defunct Anti Catholic Indpendent Newspapers (net debts $2 billion) and the nearer defunct Anti Catholic Irish Times (annual losses $100 million) writing about Ireland's corrupt collapsed banks as if Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times are not themselves a party to much of the financial wrong doing that went on in Ireland during the past ten years.
Party to our financial collapse?
These bastions of integrity?
Could it be true?
Nay, nay and thrice nay.
Not party to our economic collapse.
Responsible for it.
As responsible as any failed Fianna Fail property developer.
Let me be clear.
I mean they are responsible for it by virtue of the fact that for the past decade Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times were themselves borrowing billions of dollars which they could never hope to repay from idiot banks in order to declare purely fictional profits.
While doing so the same senior editors and Boards of Management at Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times were paying themselves astonomical salaries from the same bank borrowings for doing the same old jobs, now effectively sinecures that weren't creating revenue and which shouldn't have attracted a lifetime's wages for a year's work even if the crooks concerned had actually had a clue how to run an ephin newspapers.
Listen folks.
It's not just corrupt businessmen we're bailing out by taking on the debts of Ireland's collapsed banks.
It's also Ireland's readerless and heavily indebted newspapers.
They've done more than their share in creating this mess.
Sins of commission, and sins of omission, and in the case of Tony O'Reilly proprietor of Independent Newspapers, sins of emission. (He's an awful wanker.)
Perhaps the greatest crime of Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times was that they were paramount in popularising the use of Alice In Wonderland terminology to convince Irish people that our country was wealthy.
I say it again.
Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times did more than any other media entities to foster the delusion that limitless payrises to extortionate trade unions could ever be a feasible economic policy.
Most tellingly it was Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times who championed the use of the nonesense phrase The Celtic Tiger.
All our employment was in the non producing State Sector.
All our trade unions were running rampantly out of control obtaining pay rises of thirty and forty percent from a corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government.
All our large corporations were using accountancy tricks to declare profits that didn't exist.
It was all there before our eyes.
And Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times were telling people we were a Celtic Tiger.
Of course Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times were also themselves declaring massive non existent annual profits during those halcyon days.
Difficult to know where any of that magnificent phantom money has gone.
Declaring hundred million dollar profits for twenty years and suddenly they're all broke after one bad year?
How does that work?
Where is the imaginary money?
Tony O'Reilly and his board of management will have asset stripped any of the real stull in inflated wages, bonuses and golden parachutes at the Independent.
The rest of it really was imaginary.
Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy and Managing Director Medbh Something Or Other during their stewardship of the $100 million a year loss making Irish Times will have absorbed a goodly portion of any genuine readies floating around their abortionist rag, through their salaries which both come in around the half million dollar mark and through their bonuses that no one has a notion about.
Half a million dollars in return for losing a hundred million year.
You couldn't make it up.
And we wonder why the economy collapsed.
Here is the news.
The economy has collapsed because our idiot government has forced all of us to pay the gambling losses of idiot banks who were lending limitless sums of money to idiot newspapers with no readers who could never have been in a position to pay any of that idiot money back.
Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times existed for the past thirty years and continue to exist now without readers, only because our collapsed banks still extend them a credit line.
It's enough to make you weep.
And finally Esther...
Even now Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times are writing about the banking collapse in terms of pure fiction.
One protestor against banking bail outs has been dubbed The Toxic Avenger, as if he's some kind of hero.
But this particular protestor is no hero.
He is someone who can't pay the banks the millions he owes them and which they should never have lent him.
He's not like us.
He's protesting because he blames the banks for his inability to pay back the limitless wodge of cash they gave him.
Toxic Avenger indeed.
Memo to Independent Newspapers and the Irish Times: He's a bankrupt property developer who should never have been given those millions of pounds by those idiot banks and whose debts are now going to be paid by the nation.
What the hell has he got to protest about?
Bankrupt.
That's what he is and that's all he is.
Not by any stretch of the imagination an Avenger.
And he snow job continues.
Independent Newspapers published a picture last week of Gillian Bowler the Chairman of a financial insitution called Irish Life and Permanent.
Bowler was all smiles.
As well she might be.
The Independent Newspapers caption informed the unwary passer by (no readers, remember) that Gillian Bowler was head of a bank that didn't cost the Irish tax payer a single penny.
Interesting spin to put on things.
Because Gillian Bowler is head of a bank that engaged in an the most outrageous illegal scam to conceal the losses of Ireland's most outrageously corrupt collapsed bank, an entity known as Anglo Irish Bank.
Anglo Irish Bank, although a niche bank of little importance to Ireland, not even in the top three Irish banks, yeah that Anglo Irish Bank, that's the one, Anglo Irish Bank, I tells ee, still managed to be the largest banking failure in the world.
Do you get this?
Anglo lost more money than the largest American loss maker Citibank.
Anglo was an unimportant niche bank in Ireland not even in the top three.
And Fianna Fail signed us all up to pay Anglo's losses.
And Anglo's losses exceed the losses of every other bank on the planet.
And Gillian Bowler's bank deposited more than seven billion dollars in Anglo Irish Bank's accounts in order to help Anglo Irish Bank conceal its imminent collapse from the auditors, the regulators and the government.
And now Independent Newspapers is telling us that Gillian Bowler's bank is the only bank that hasn't cost the Irish tax payer a penny.
They've cost us alright.
Just how much will become clear after the currency collapse.
