Winter Wonderland

Dan Boyle has admitted that he didn’t know that the biggest financial gamble in the States history wasn’t actually a ‘money bill’ and therefore not actually a Government-dissolving piece of legislation.

This occurred on his F’book page this weekend and comes a few days after he swore blind to the contrary, in front of 600 GP members in an extended ‘civics lecture’ of a speech, at the Special Convention.

He spent some time elaborating the technical grounds on which a Govt might collapse. One of these is the rejection of a ‘finance bill’. In fact, under the Constitution and the Dail’s standing orders, there is no such thing as a ‘finance bill’; these things are correctly called ‘money bill’s’. But our Dan is clearly not one letting the facts get in the way of a good ‘yarn’.

He explicitly said that NAMA fell into this category while telling those who had just voted on a ‘new’ Programme for Government’ that if they didn’t back NAMA that the Govt. would fall.

When told of his error, his rejoinder was that it doesn’t matter as a rejection would have the same ‘political’ impact. The political world I inhabit is one where ‘politics is the art of the possible’. And we have all seen some pretty strange possibilities come to pass in the last two years. Many more are likely in the near future.

So for Dan to be saying what is and is not ‘possible’ shows are remarkable lack of imagination for someone who lives in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ bubble where words mean what he wants them to mean and nothing more.

Is there anything more that DB thinks is ‘white’ that will turn out to be ‘black’.

It is also true that JG and ER said the same thing – that the Govt. would fall if NAMA was rejected. They are more adroit with their weasel words and so did not commit themselves so blindly to the technicalities.

Your correspondent also owes you an apology for not checking the facts on the matter in advance.

In future, I will not be so stupid as to think that when the Party leader and the Party finance spokesperson and when another Cabinet Minister all say something that they are to be trusted or that they correct or that they know what they are talking about.

1 Comment

Eamonn76November 5th, 2009 at 23:41

Mr Doohan,

I am not a Green supporter, or of any other party. My concern is with NAMA.
The behaviour of the leadership of the Green party in respect to NAMA is unprecedented.
They have misled the country on bogus 5% risk-sharing (it wasn’t even that large to begin with), the private ownership of a €54 Billion publicly funded NAMA, and the replacement of the bank levy with a surcharge only Buck Rogers will live to see affect our banks. They pledged 2 of them and were lying. The SPV was a massive lie of omission.
The chicanery, dishonesty and stroke pulling which they used on their members to get NAMA approved were truly disgusting and again unprecedented. At every stage there was deceitful manipulation.
I would urge any supporters outraged by the many betrayals on NAMA not to leave the party until after the loans are being transferred.
Threaten to leave by all means but do not do it until then please.
If you can stop NAMA that would be fantastic. Temporary state ownership is the correct solution.
But if you can’t please try to get risk-sharing restored and expanded. That would save the country badly needed billions.
Even better if you can make NAMA value the loans at a prudently low amount, as any commercial business would.

Thank you to you for your work on this and thanks to Greens Against NAMA too.
Independent property loan expert Peter Mathews is right when he says NAMA will lose €20 Billion. It is worthwhile trying to reduce this for as long as that is possible.

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