What the **** ???

Over the past week I’ve been wondering what the F*** parliamentary language is.

You see, thanks to that outburst in the Dail by Green Party TD Paul Gogarty, I think that I now have a pretty good idea of what unparliamentary language is. But what the F*** is parliamentary language?

For those of you who don’t know what I am talking about, basically what happened was that last week Ireland was handed its toughest ever budget by the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen.

And then the next day all of the country’s TDs (members of the Irish parliament or Dail as we call it) came in to debate the issues in full before the legislation was put through.

Well, ok, not all of the TDs, I think some of them were busy. In fact, from what I could see on the clip, five of them managed to make it in.

In fairness it’s not the only time the Dail chamber would be as empty as it was last week and that always gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about the kind of democracy we live in and about our wonderful politicians.

I mean it was obviously fiercely important to them all, just not important enough to come in to debate.

Well there is some consolation I suppose that from among the five, two of them managed to drum up perhaps the most exciting thing ever to have happened there in years when Green Party TD Paul Gogarty decided he would take issue with Labour Party TD Emmett Stagg using these words –

“With all due respect, in the most unparliamentary language, F*** you, Deputy Stagg, F*** you." 

But hey, before anybody might get offended by such an outburst, let’s just say here and now that he immediately apologised.

And apparently that makes it alright. Mere mortals – you know the people who got hammered in last week’s budget with tax cuts and social welfare cuts and proposed taxes on our houses and on the water – couldn’t get away with such an escape clause, but apparently its ok in the Dail.

I think it’s because they had a choice a few years ago between e-voting machines and one of those wee silver yokes that Men in Black used in their movies to make people forget what just happened.

And of course smart boys and all as they were, they went for the E-Voting machines straight from the back of Del Boy’s three-wheeler.

In the meantime they had to come up with a plan for situations like last week when one of their members threw a wobbly and lost the plot.

And they came up with – “I immediately withdraw that remark and I apologise.”

It seems it works to. It’s like their do-over or gimme or whatever you want to call it but seems like not everybody is happy and some are suggesting that Deputy Gogarty should have been expelled.

And what’s even better is that apparently there are now moves afoot to change the rules regarding parliamentary language because under the current rules, use of the f word is not banned.

What I’m wondering though is how many of them would even bother to turn up when they’d be debating the introduction of the new rules and would they mean that the Minister for the Gaeltacht would from then on not be allowed to use ‘No focail at all?”

Yep, these are the people who run our country.

It’s no wonder it’s F***ed!!! 

(Watch the clip - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CosVhlxpFao)