Joe Higgins column

Last week thousands of parents, teachers and pupils staged a passionate demonstration at the Department of Education in Dublin. They were from schools benefiting from the programme known as ‘Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools’ or DEIS which was designed to counter the many ill effects on children living in areas of high unemployment and poverty.

Roger Altman was the Deputy Finance Minister in the government of US President Bill Clinton in 1993/’94. He is now an investment banker and a member of the international big business think tank, The Bilderberg Group . Not a radical socialist then.

It’s said that when the Chairman of a major football club vows that an under-pressure manager has his full confidence and protection, the Manager should prepare for a hit. Sadly in the cynical world of the Irish political establishment we have an equivalent phenomenon.

Budget Day looms for the Fine Gael/Labour Government. On Tuesday, December 6, it will be clear for all to see how this government lives up to the claims of its leaders upon taking office in March, that it was the product of a ‘democratic revolution’ and represented a fundamental break with the cynical establishment politics of the past.

As recently as a year ago when I and others on the Left wrote and spoke about ‘the dictatorship of the financial markets’ many people thought we were exaggerating. However after the events of the past few weeks, can there be any doubt but that we are witnessing a full frontal assault on democratic rights by European bondholders, bankers and speculators facilitated by the leadership of the European Union?

Winning the Presidential and Dublin West By elections was hailed as a great day for the Labour Party. While these victories undoubtedly took some of the pressure off the party and its leader, Eamon Gilmore, a sober assessment will conclude that these amount to a small upward blip on a graph that will soon be seen to be on a consistent downward trajectory.

The dedicated staff at all levels in Connolly Hospital, Blanchardstown, should be forgiven if they are in a state of some confusion and great anger this morning. As a result of a huge effort by them involving innovation, imagination, dedication and cooperation, the hospital was recently rated by the Health Services Executive as having among the highest clinical standards in the country. Furthermore it is not only reaching its service targets for 2011, but is 4% over.

In June the Minister for Finance, Michael Noonan, was in Washington DC and held talks there with the International Monetary Fund and with the US Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, on Ireland’s financial crisis.

‘We are the hollow men/We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpieces filled with straw.’ So opens the famous poem by TS Eliot and closes with the lines, ‘This is the way the world ends/not with a bang but a whimper.’

Even before they start their Third Level or working lives, the 55,000 students who received their Leaving Cert results last Wednesday have done the people of the State a service. Acres of coverage of their achievements meant that, yesterday, most of the main national newspapers, including The Mail, were Presidential campaign free zones. What a relief.