Dublin Opinion

I’ve long thought that the Sunday Independent front loads its crap in its opening pages, then pretty much layers it on thickly in the rest using only Gene Kerrigan’s column at the end as a kind of plug of sanity to stop it all spilling out on top of the reader when they open it up.

Eoghan Harris, the sage of the Late Late Show, and god help us, the Seanad calls the paper a ‘broad church’ but the spectrum of views seems to go straight from insane (Brendan O’Carroll is bonkers, right?) mediocre and extremely reactionary to Gene Kerrigan. If a reasonably informed reader is to go through it all on any given Sunday, they really need the Kerrigan antidote to deal with the overdose of info-junk that hits their system.

As a result Kerrigan’s column needs to have a kick, and in our present economic stupor there is a lot of crap to kick through. Thankfully his most recent column, last Sunday is a tour de force, and in the middle of what is the most clear sighted analysis of the inherent corruption of our system of government he mentions us, Michael Taft’s Notes on the Front and Tasc’s Progressive Economy.

But he mentions us!! Did I say that already?

Here he is talking about Michael Taft’s analysis which showed that Colm McCarthy’s report simply didn’t do the numbers:

“The new media hero is Colm McCarthy, he of the allegedly “forensic” slash and burn report. We asked here last week why McCarthy didn’t do his sums — why didn’t he show the net gains of his cuts, rather than gross figures, which leave out the costs to which his cuts lead? Notes on the Front, a trade unionist website, dug out an Economic and Social Research Institute report that did the maths on cutting public service numbers by 17,000.

The consequences are not impressive.”

And then he says in the ‘debate’ there are alternative voices, but they’re sidelined:

“There is an alternative voice — trade unionists and academics who are nobody’s pet. But they’re on the sidelines, in places like Notes On The Front, Dublin Opinion and the Tasc webpage, Progressive Economy. The mouthpieces and cheerleaders of the elite continue to dominate the debate.”

It’s nice to know Gene is reading. Having looked through all those Gralton magazines for the Looking Left program I presented it was interesting to see that his point of view and his concerns haven’t changed. Probably because, as his column says with regard to who holds the real power in Ireland, not much has changed in Ireland.

Thanks to Simon of Irish Election for the heads up.