While you can’t argue with him winning – this is the choice of the Fine Gael Parliamentary party’s choice – there is the more than inconvenient issue that a lot of people who vote in elections do not apprecate the finer points of Enda Kenny, leader of Fine Gael. They do not believe he is competent to be Taoiseach. At all. And so, by and large, he gets low personal approval ratings, and in the 2007 which the media were practically handing to him on a plate, he lost out to Fianna Fail and whoever they could bribe into government with them.

There’s this huge desire for change in Ireland. Massive. We’ve had enough of Fianna Fail. We really think that they need a period in opposition. A lot of people even think they should all be thrown in jail which might even be a bit extreme. But when it comes down to it, people look at Fianna Fail, and then they look at Fine Gael under Enda Kenny, and they have Doubts with a capital D.

And Fine Gael are unwilling to recognise this. Enda Kenny, he may be nice, he may be a good organiser, but you know, so are the nuns individually but you wouldn’t necessarily vote too many of them in to run the country. They might, however, make a better fist of it than Enda Kenny does running Fine Gael.

The objective of a political leader should be to make his/her party as palatable to the greatest number of people as possible. Enda Kenny is failing to do this. When plaudits are being lined up for him, it’s mentioned he undid the damage of the previous leadership. Got back 20 of the 21 seats they had lost. That’s good, but it’s not good enough. Meanwhile, Fianna Fail are winning adequate numbers of seats to remain in some semblance of power. This despite Bertie Ahern. This despite what seems like daily scandals.

After 2007, there should have been one clear indication to the powers that be in Fine Gael. Enda Kenny is not enough of an electoral asset to win elections. And the party is not adequately bright enough to understand this.

You can see this in the response of some of their members on politics.ie. Enda Kenny winning this leadership battle will do his ratings good. People will see that he is tough. Can get the numbers when it counts.

They don’t appear to understand that what people see is not Enda Kenny being good. It is Fine Gael being collectively stupid.

If I were in Fine Gael – and I am not – I would take a few of the senior people aside and explain some quiet truths. Enda Kenny is an electoral liability as leader. He may well be a very good representative for the people of Mayo, but the point remains, it’s not enough. The party lacks vision. They are reactionary. Their young and upcoming stars are boring. Simon Coveney. They lack credibility and ideas. The people are not interested. Fine Gael, it appears, are not attached enough to the reality of people’s lives.

There has been an attempt to dress up the leadership issues in Fine Gael as a rural/urban divide. The problem is it is not. The point which Fine Gael will have to address is the wider electorate do not want Enda Kenny. Not because he is from the west, but because he just doesn’t inspire confidence. Being from Mayo is not a cause of that, no matter how much you’d like to dress it up.

Fine Gael are not selling a vision of Ireland that anyone wants to buy. They’re not even selling themselves as a party beyond “We’re not Fianna Fail”. What sort of an offering is that?

The tragedy for Fine Gael, however, is not so much that Richard Bruton will not be their next leader barring unusual events. It is that even if he was, it probably wouldn’t change too much.

If there are realists in Fine Gael – and there has to be – the painful truth is the party needs major re-invention and the current senior names in it are not capable of delivering.

In the meantime. Fianna Fail, despite spectacular problems, are stumbling along in far better health than they should be given that Brian Cowen is their leader and Taoiseach and presiding over political and budgetary poor management that is historic in its extent.

Anyway, for reasons which I won’t go into, a lot of interesting blog thingies are turning up in my life. Blogs about being a freelance webdesigner, freelance writer, freelance programmer. All those good things. The latest of them is this one. To be honest, I haven’t looked too much into the idea of freelance programming distributed although I know a few people who do it from Ireland for customers that are a a few thousand miles and timezones away. It’s a nice set up in some respects if you can get it; albeit not without its disadvantages. Most people I know want home to be separate from work.

One of the points made by a commenter to the piece above related to the fact that the original writer liked the global possibilities offered by distributed programming, but the project itself wanted to hire people who were located in New York. Only. Which, given that the piece is lauding distribution across five states is odd enough. Someone else was unhappy at the thought that programming work for US companies could be distributed outside the US via this sort of distribution.

On balance, while I can understand the frame of mind that creates that concern, the other way of looking at it is if you’re in the US, you can fight for the right to work from the US for customers elsewhere, like Europe, for example. As in, you can offer competition, not suffer it.

It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I consider things like 1) infrastructure in Dublin and 2) property prices in Dublin and 3) current job opportunities.

We have a government who apparently are interested in the whole knowledge economy thing. We have a way of doing things in Ireland that leans to the centralisation. We have a management mindset as well that doesn’t always recognise the benefits of distributed working areas.

If we are to get this right, we need to change the way we think about work and how we value it. We have all sorts of tools that could allow us to distribute work around the country, not just in incubator locations in Dublin and Dundalk for example. One of the key benefits of the construction boom was that it removed the necessity for internal migration for a while. It was not a sustainable way of doing it; but we could turn the entire country into a development island if we were forward thinking enough about it. And we could take some high quality development and design work into the country. According to Dublin City Council, the creative industry is worth a few billion to the city and to support it they have set up an organisation to foster it and new entrants. It’s called Creative D and it also provides links to the same industry elsewhere.

A key requirement for this is obviously comms infrastructure. UPC are getting there slowly. Eircom are 10,000 miles behind. I’m stating this on the grounds that I’ve just ordered 30Mb broadband from upc and will be cancelling 8Mb from eircom. But we need to reassess the education system also.

In a way, I think there’s a social tendency to fear change upfront. Our education system while it works, does not work well enough. And our way of approaching it is too regimented. It lacks imagination. We generalise education too far – up to about age 12. We are not effectively teaching numeracy or communications skills. And we don’t value work creatively. A lot of working in Ireland – not just in Ireland as it happens – is perception over reality. Working to the clock and less to the job. All this needs to be adjusted if we distribute a lot of work that could generate export credit and benefit the trade balance country wide.

The original Celtic Tiger – I hate that term – happened because we invested in a future that offered some potential. We killed it when we refused to face the economic reality of an economy that was growing on consumer spending and property driven credit. We are going to have to face some imagination again. Identify a different way of doing business and working it. And this time, instead of going for the quick buck, go for the long buck.

So the whole investigation was shelved pending further information on some fronts. I have some prior qualifications. I have a degree in languages -French and German, postgraduate diplomas in conference interpreting and information technology. I did look at doing a continuation masters for the IT stuff but I can’t see that it’s still available.

In part, I’m stuck between a couple of principles. Firstly, I think that you should – as far as practical – study stuff you’re interested in. But I’m in my mid thirties and even now still have an eye on career implications and so this doesn’t leave me much scope for taking 4 years off to go back and study mediaeval history, for example.

With that in mind, I have started looking at options in the local universities and will also examine some options in the distance sector. As far as Ireland is concerned, that is National Distance Learning at DCU which is clinically insane since I live down the road from DCU, or the Open University which is expensive.

My interests are a bit varied. I’ve been looking at options in mathematics, multimedia, graphics design and maybe more information technology since what I do is hyperspecialised and will definitely not be around for the rest of my life. Some adjustment is called for.

For practical reasons, I’m interested in part time options. Ireland isn’t good at this. Much of Ireland’s college scheduling has a single market in mind and that’s school leavers. But browsing part time courses is hit or miss.

DCU, for example, if you’re looking at their postgraduate qualification lists them all on a single page and shows whether they are full or part time or both. This is useful. DIT allows you to browse on either part time or full time. This is useful too although I prefer the DCU option of listening everything. So far, on UCD’s page and Trinity’s page, I have had some difficulty identifying what courses are full and what courses are part time. This is particularly difficult because having looked at the maths stuff, UCD appears to have the nicer courses but they are all full time.

In truth, I rather think we need to look at how we approach education in this country. In some respects, it is overly regimented, and it’s quite reactionary. I live near DCU and I work quite near there at the moment too. In an ideal world, their timetabling structure would enable me to pick up some of their daytime degree courses on a part time basis by agreement with my employer for example – certainly to complete them over a slightly longer time frame or shorter as required.

Most of the universities and colleges in Ireland now have a credits based system. While I recognise that it’s hardly economically beneficial to have school leavers (particularly if they are government grant aided in any shape or form) languishing around the system if they cannot acquire a sufficient number of credits in a given time space, it might be long term beneficial to make it possible to acquire the benefits on an ad hoc basis if you are otherwise working.

I have no doubt that the colleges – already facing cuts and reconsideration – would scream at the cost of implementing such a system. On the other hand, for a country that’s desperately looking at ways of spinning out of an economic crisis, some fresh thinking is going to be needed and some hard thinking.

Of course, if it happens, it won’t happen in time for me. But in the future, if we can do a better job of selling education and making it possible to buy education particularly for people in full time employment – not, for example, rely on the Open University to fill gaps – it might go a long way towards contributing to ongoing economic development.

• Quinn Insurance into administration
• 1200 bank loans transferred to NAMA on a haircut of 47% on average. Two building societies facing annihilation.
• 8 billion transferred to the systemically important Anglo Irish Bank. Because saving it is less expensive than closing it.
• AIB and Bank of Ireland to find some way of raising capital. If they can’t manage it, state ownership looms, or significant state participation
• Banks. Sum of our problems.

But

1. falling incomes
2. general CPI deflation
3. increased property supply
4. increasing tax burden
5. increasing interest rates
6. increasing unemployment
7. collapse in inward migration
8. increase in net emigration

This suggests downwards in the short term.

On the other hand

1. government action by way of moratoria on repossession proceedings
2. government action on properties securing loans to NAMA
3. ECB giving up on fighting inflation temporarily
4. another financial shock.
5. Demolition of  ghost estates
6. unexpected economic turn around in an as of yet unknown industry sector.

The problem for me is I can’t see what’s going to absorb our unemployment. The Green Party will tell you it’s renewable energy initiatives. So will Spirit of Ireland. Other members of the government ramble on about smart knowledge economy. But I can’t see that sector necessarily absorbing all the current unemployed.

If I had to put anything in writing – and this is a pure guess – I think that in the short term, property is going to head further down for the next 2-2.5 years. After that, I think it will bounce along the bottom for a couple of years.

Let me be clear. Water metering is a good idea in certain circumstances:

• areas of major drought
• areas where water provision services are extremely good

Right now, neither circumstance really applies to Ireland. Ireland’s key issue is monumental mismanagement of the water infrastructure over scores of years. We are taking mismanagement on a scale that makes the underinvestment in Irish Rail look like Toytown economics. Services are not extremely good and lately, they have not even been adequate.

John Gormley is not the person who is even remotely capable of understanding how best to rectify this situation. Unfortunately, John Gormley is what we have got.

According to the Irish Times:

Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, Minister Gormley described as “shocking” the percentage or water which is lost annually due to defective pipes, and said that situation must be rectified immediately

The situation has been shocking for years. I know that as recently as 2005 – wait, that’s five years ago – the estimated loss of water through inadequate infrastructure and leaking pipes was about 40%. I want you to consider that figure very carefully as you remember that for the past 2 weeks, many parts of Dublin have been without running water because the infrastructure is old, it leaks and in freezing weather, it breaks.

When John Gormley says it should be rectified immediately, he probably doesn’t have a clue how much work will be involved in doing this but it will involved digging up a huge number of pipes in the main urban areas and replacing them. We don’t have the money to do it now, and I doubt we have the stomach for the disruption it will cause. However, at some stage, it will have to be done.

Earlier today the minister announced that investment in replacing defective water mains will increase to €300million over the next three years.

Remember, when he tries to make you believe that this is a lot of money, that it is a small drop in the ocean compared to the amount of money that is being poured into the banking system at this time. Which you will also pay for but the fruits are unlikely to ever come back to you.

John Gormley has been in government for 3 years now I believe. I would be interested to know why this wasn’t done before major problems hit the biggest city in the country. It’s probably the same answer as is common for many things in this country. Do nothing until your back is against the wall.

From 2001 to about 2007, the country was raking in tax take. Why was it not done then? Well some of it was. Fingal County Council eventually had to fix a mains under Forrest Road in Swords because it was constantly bursting. It was constantly bursting because the traffic on the road above it had sky rocketed owing to a lot of development feeding onto that road.

“We’ve taken the decision now to introduce water metering in this country which will be done on the basis of an allocation of water to each household and you pay above that,” said Mr Gormley.”We are the only country in Europe where we don’t have water metering and where we don’t charge domestically. That needs to be reversed and reversed as soon as possible,” he added.

We have not taking any decision. It is being pushed on us by a revenue hungry government, desperate for any additional methods by which they can extract money out of a tax paying population who have already been seriously screwed over in the past 2 years. We are the only country in Europe with a lot of things and without a lot of things. But I don’t see the Green Party and their Fianna Fail overlords rushing to do anything much about 1) public transport in Dublin – that ambles along at a particularly pedestrian rate – or tenancy legislation, something which is crushingly necessary particularly in light of the screwed up property market. Also, if John Gormley wanted to introduce water metering, he really should be introducing more positive reasons to do so. Being the odd one out is not a good reason.

Irish people are used to being the odd ones out. We have perennially suffered from poorly planned infrastructure, we are the only country dumb enough to introduce management companies in apartment complexes and private estates without a valid legal structure in place beforehand, we are the only country with a capital city completely hamstrung by fecked up semi-privatised public transport which even now still doesn’t have integrated ticketing. We are the only country with a lot of things but the only things that the government appears to be interested in fixing right now are methods by which they can continue to fleece you.

Each household is to get an allocation he tells us above. Well, supposing the overwhelming majority of households live within that ration, where does the one billion come from? I’ll tell you. The allocation will be reduced. Nor is it clear on what basis the allocation should be calculated.

Mr Gormley said that it costs about €1billion per annum to treat water for public consumption and that the Government would seek to recoup the cost of this through metering. He also called the abolition of water charges by previous governments as “nonsensical and spineless.”

We’ll come to funding for the one billion in a moment. However, for what it’s worth, I would consider the introduction of water charges to be delusional and misplaced. I also consider the motivations to be somewhat misguided and I will come to that in a moment.

Unfortunately, members of the opposition are being equally delusional. From Fine Gael:

Fine Gael today welcomed the additional funds for replacing defective water mains but said the Government is not taking steps to fully address the underlying problems of Ireland’s water infrastructure.

The party’s environment spokesman Phil Hogan called on Minister Gormley to set up a new water utility company to take over responsibility for water investment and maintenance management from the local authorities.

There is a monumental risk here and it is this. If you set up a utility like this and metering is already in place, it becomes very easy for a cash desperate government, possibly under duress from, for example, an international monetary organisation, to privatise this.

Water privatisation has been a fiasco in a number of places. Problems in the UK are well documented. I don’t know if John Gormley or Phil Hogan read French but if they do, L’Empire de L’Eau by Yvan Stefanovitch – I have a copy – is a massively illuminating look at the problems related to privatised companies providing water supply services in France. Put simply, at the time of publication, many, many French municipal authorities were in the process of municipalising their water supply systems because they could do it more efficiently than the private companies and issues relating to corruption because less problematic. If you read French and can lay your hands on it, Stefanovitch’s book is well worth a read.

Ireland is not short of water, not in the way that parts of Spain and Portugal, and indeed, most of the south of France at certain times of the year, nor, for example, Cyprus. But we do not manage it effectively and this is what needs to change. The issues relate to pipe infrastructure. Charging you and me isn’t going to cause anyone to fix this problem and until it is done, you cannot argue the toss on water charges and metering on environmental grounds at all, the Green Party’s apparent raison d’etre.

Nor do we really want to go and make the mistakes other parts of Europe have made in terms of water privatisation and yet there is a huge risk that some idiot party might risk doing it at some stage in the future. It is not in your interest or mine that this happens. Remember Eircom. It won’t be hard.

One of the key problems, however, relates to how we fund local authorities and the knock on effects it has elsewhere. Put simply, the local authorities are constantly squeezed of two key assets:

• effective management
• adequate resources

I’m of the opinion that local government needs to be reformed and in a massive way. We need to look at reducing national/central tax and introducing a local income tax. France manages with this quite effectively. Many things could be regionalised and funding diverted away from central government provided sensible management goes hand in hand with it. The history of spending budget lest you lose it needs to be killed off. Prudent councils shouldn’t be punished for being prudent but every service in the country gets that one.

If John Gormley, instead of spouting the “we’re the only country in Europe that don’t have water metering card” to sort out this mess came up with a wide ranging and visionary plan to sort out local services and authorities, it is entirely possible that we’d get far better local services and better budgeting for local needs instead of centrally allocated funds and we might have a decent water infrastructure.

Unfortunately, he just proved again that the next time you have an opportunity, you should note vote for the Green Party.

I would like to highlight the fact that just because he’s high profile doesn’t mean I think he’s any good (I think he’s not) or that because the Sindo is the biggest selling Sunday newspaper that I think that’s any good either (I think it’s not).

According to various heartbroken and delusional vested  interests, property values in Ireland dropped something between 29 and 41% or so over the last year or two. This you’ll recall was not supposed to happen because the fundamentals were sound, there was a lack of property, we would have a soft landing. We now have 12% unemployment and there is more than a years’ supply of property in pretty much every property market in the country and properties are taking 7-9 months to sell, very few make it to sold status without dropping their asking price at some stage. In July 2007 in an effort to talk up the market, Brendan O’Connor stated that the smart ballsy guys were buying up property in the period when prices had dropped ever so slightly. They’ve dropped quite a lot since.

You’d like to think that Brendan has finally faced reality and I suppose, in a way, he’s facing some of it. But there are still gems of utter…wrongheadedness in there.

Indeed, the fact that so many of Ireland’s risk-takers and visionaries focused on property was probably to the detriment of the development of other areas of the economy.

My emphasis. In the run up to the property crash, 24% of the economic output of this country came from residential construction. 40% of new builds in 2006 were sold to investors. There is no probably about this. It destroyed huge parts of the economy by diverting people into construction as an industry and capital into property which is now proving difficult to extract an income. And the risk-takers and visionaries weren’t there because they were risk-takers and visionaries. Anyone who bought into property as an investment after about 2003 was only a visionary if they got out immediately. Anyone who bought into property as an investment after about 2004 was jumping on a bandwagon that was seen as risk-free. We are not talking about risk-takers and visionaries here. But the syphoning off of a lot of our productive population into a non-productive section of the economy – you can’t export houses and they don’t earn for the country and they are based largely on debt – was hugely detrimental to the economy – it has led directly to

• the increase in unemployment in all related sectors
• the behaviour of the banks has left Irish banks in a perilous state. They overlent because there was a huge appetite for property speculation and they all assumed someone else would carry the can.
• the Irish tax payer is carrying the can in the way of NAMA and a near unlimited banking guarantee, cuts in spending and other related hassle
• the cost of property drove the cost of living through the roof and destroyed our international competitiveness.

So, Brendan, there ain’t no probably about it. It is a certainty and sadly for you, it was all too foreseeable. If you didn’t, then strike yourself off the smart list. Most people knew it couldn’t go on; they counted on not being the ones left standing when the music stopped. You can’t actually predict that.

Maybe it’s time to start loving our houses as homes, to realise that, unfortunately for some, the home might be a lifetime commitment.

For the last 9 years as people told me to buy anything to get myself on the ladder I pointed out that a quarter of a million euro was a lot of money and I wasn’t going to ship up money I didn’t have on houses or apartments I didn’t like. People should attach more importance to the utility value of homes – and if they did, they wouldn’t need this advice – because if they hadn’t been so gung-ho on making a killing, they wouldn’t now be taking a killing. This is 20-20 vision hindsight and again, all too visible to smart people.

This is a difficult one for us to get our heads around. Irish people’s relationship with property, characterised by the property ladder philosophy, has tended to involve a form of social climbing.

The ladder mentality is a recent phenomena, Brendan, pretty much developed to get people to buy property they did not want under the illusion it would help them to buy property they did want 3 or 4 years later. Speak for yourself with this drivel. I never bought into this ladder nonsense and a lot of people I know only bought into it because people like you were writing drivel about property. The sort of drivel you’re now decrying. While giving you credit for recognising you “might” have been wrong, you were supposed to be intelligent enough to see this. A lot of people did. Why were they not being paid by the SIndo to explaint his? You could say sorry, dammit.

The new reality is that house prices are not going to “recover” to previous levels in the near future.

We know. And the economy needs to ensure that they do not.

The new reality is that house prices in Dublin have fallen nearly 50 per cent in real terms since 2006, according to Sherry Fitzgerald.

In fact, it’s hard to say because no one is really comparing volume trade either. It could be much worse in some areas.

This period has been characterised by two things — historically low interest rates and wild lending by the banks. The wild lending has come to an end and the low interest rates will before the end of the year.

We had the historically low interest rates most of the time from 2002. The rises from them were the start of prices coming down, something anyone with nothing to hide could have told you. The wild lending has come to an end because the banks have been caught swimming without their clothes on. And Alan Greenspan should not get any praise for his low interest rates post 2001. They never needed to go that low.

Add to this imminent property taxes an d the outlook does not look good for property prices. If property prices couldn’t thrive while the banks were throwing out money with minimal interest rates, they’re certainly not going to double in the absence of those two spurs.

Property prices did thrive and big time – that’s how we got up to the absolutely stupid, stupid property prices that we had in 2006. It wasn’t based on salary multiples of 3x and 7 % interest rates. Do you really not have a clue what you’re talking about here?

And that’s what they would need to do to get us back to to pre-crash prices. Even the 7-10 per cent growth in property prices for 2010 predicted by Bloxhams on Friday, if it were to happen, would claw back only a fraction of the value people have lost.

No, dude, sorry. Not only do we need to do that to get us back to pre-crash prices, we need double incomes paying them as well which with growing unemployment is not going to happen. Bloxhams price prediction should be seen in the context of the types of property that might sell.

House prices would need to double to “recover” back to what they were. And we all accept that the days of property prices doubling in a few years are gone. So basically, anyone who bought in the last few years is operating with what you might call a legacy cost base, a mortgage that does not reflect the current value of their property or maybe even what they currently earn.

Brendan, it didn’t ever represent the current value of what they earned. People got mortgages of 8 times their salary during the bubble. Do you really think that was sustainable?

The Government needs to get rid of stamp duty on residential property. They should do it for a year and then they should probably do it for another year.

Brendan, I have argued for many years that stamp duty should be flatrated and not value based. But be careful what you ask for because frankly the government are looking at an annual residential property task which you might not want – I know I don’t and I don’t even own property -  either.

The banks need to start lending in a reasonable fashion and they need to create mortgage products that reflect the new legacy-cost-base nature of home ownership.

The banks are still lending too much. Reasonable fashion means 25 year term, a salary multiple that is manageable to pay back in that time. They don’t need to mess around so much. You might also add that the Financial Regulator and the Central Bank could start doing their jobs a bit more effectively in terms of watching the banks. Because the Central Bank could have limited the impact on this by simply forcing the banks to increase the deposits they hold with the lender of last resort and the Financial Regulator could have blocked 100% mortgages and wildly increasing salary multiples and mortgage terms.

They need to create longer-term mortgages and perhaps even mortgages that would allow people in negative equity to move out of properties they currently own and into homes in which they will live long term.

There are still mortgage terms of 40 years available. How much longer do you want, Brendan? Fifty? Intergenerational?

Please. You may have recognised that the bubble is gone, but you don’t seem to have learned much about how we avoid it in the future.

On the plus side, i discovered I’ve got great, great neighbours. The copper pipe for the garden tap burst today courtesy of the continuing subzero temperatures. I use that tap to clean stuff like kite equipment during the summer; but it hadn’t been turned on for quite a while until it burst today.

Unlike gas fires and electronic equipment, plumbing is not something I even know where to start. My tool box consists of a Skipper Swiss army knife and that’s about it. Next door told me to try the guy next to them again; he might be able to help. He very kindly fixed it for me. I’m really grateful.

I’ve spent the evening doing crochet and watching Catalyst by Cabrinha Kites just to see what sunshine looks like. Currently it is snowing (again). The crochet is coming along. Technically I have just one pattern repeat to go for the main part of the cardigan I am making right now but as I tend to like these things a little longer, I will probably do two extra repeats. All going well then I will start at the sleeves tomorrow. I think I have an adequate supply of yarn for that as well, which is helpful.

I’ve lots of things I want to do and getting in the way is the weight of feeling that I don’t actually have time. I think part of this is cabin fever. Courtesy of the condition of the roads lately, I struggle home from work, once in the door I don’t have any desire to leave. This means I haven’t been climbing in about 3 weeks which is really starting to get on my nerves. As there’s about 4 inches of snow outside again, I can’t see this changing tomorrow.

Meanwhile I’m going to check out real estate ads in California.

I have no objection to a DNA database per se, however, that objection is dependent on it being of a non-Big Brother variety of database and there being some serious privacy rules applied. Default position should be for the average citizen not to be on it. I also want to be damn sure that no one is going to be stupid enough to go losing USB keys, laptops, CDs, passwords to said database.

The issue is that while there are lots of politicians I don’t trust simply because they are politicians, there is Dermot Ahern whom I don’t trust because of the blasphemy saga and some of the comments he made around it. In other words, I sort of wish someone else had Justice. I really do.