Friday, November 5, 2010

The thin edge of the wedge…

Hey folks, no need to be depressed anymore about the cold dark days of winter, the country’s impending budget of doom or the fact that you might be struggling to pay your bills because our trusted leaders have a plan to make things great again.
Umm, sorry, I meant it’s more like they have a plan to make things ‘grate’ again.
Yep, as people up and down the country brace themselves for the worst budget ever, as hundreds of thousands are out of work and most people struggle to survive from week to week, the government’s great plan is to hand out cheese!
Yep, you’ve read that right folks – CHEESE.
Now forgive me for struggling with this concept, but isn’t this the same government who bailed out the banks to the tunes of billions of euro.
You know the banks, the ones who are in a large part responsible for putting the country in the mess we’re now in.
The boys who continued even after the bail-outs to give themselves big bonuses cos that’s what is expected in the banking industry.
Yep, those banks get billions of euros, and the people who lose their jobs in the fall-out as the economy crashed and are struggling now to pay any of their bills – will get cheese!
Now don’t get me wrong, I like cheese. In terms of the stuff you can make with milk it’s right up there among my favourite things with butter and chocolate, but seriously folks, is this the best the government can offer.
I can just imagine them all sitting around the tables last week planning their budget strategy when somebody suggests that they will need to offer ‘some crumbs of comfort.’
And of course, now that all the dough’s been used up, they have no bread crumbs to offer.
And so we get cheese.
The announcement was made by the Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith and he seemed to suggest that the cheese would be available for distribution within a fortnight to ‘people in need.’
This, of course could be a problem, unless the government has planned ahead and actually defined what a ‘person in need’ actually is.
Definitions though, have not been a strong point for this group of politicians.
Remember a few years ago when we were being warned of a possible economic meltdown and their response was a kinda – ‘define economic meltdown for us. No, you’re exaggerating, we’re grand here. Now don’t youse be scaremongering.”
And then of course they struggled with that whole ‘reasonable time’ thingy regarding the election in Donegal South West.
Still, if this cheese is coming off the EU’s cheese mountain (I think those food mountain places would be a great tourist attraction, we should ask the EU if we could have them here on a 6-month stint like the Presidency) then I expect that the EU might have all sorts of mumbo-jumbo red-tape and forms to fill out before the cheese is handed over.
They might even have particular specifications like their farming grants.
“Vat’s siz you say, you do not ave a thatched roof? Vell then, you do not qualify for ze cottage cheese hand-out.”
We will have to wait and see how the whole thing works out, but in the meantime I guess we’re all supposed to be happy.
Apparently after this, things might be on the up churn…

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