Pie in the Sky Doesn’t Come Cheap:
Sinn Fein has gradually gained electoral advantage from the fact that the soi-disant “Irish” “Republican” “Army”, – the vicious, Marxist terrorist faction of which it is the political wing, – is a defeated and dwindling shadow of its murderous former self. The party has done well in elections on both sides of the Border because, with the demise of the IRA, it now conveys what is intended to seem almost as though it were an outward appearance of respectability.
In reading Sinn Féin’s long, detailed, gimme-gimme Christmas wish list, which the party amusingly mischaracterizes as a “manifesto”, I recalled the wise words of a Southern Baptist preacher in deepest rural Texas. He used to say that the problem with totalitarian parties [such as Sinn Féin] is that “If they don’t git hah many beans make fahve they don’t git that pah in the skah don’t come cheap”.
In many respects, the Sinn Féin manifesto is remarkably similar to that of Britain’s Communist Party (which persists in calling itself “Labour” even though sensible working-class voters have more sense than to go anywhere near it).
As Margaret Thatcher used to say, “Socialism is all very well – until other people’s money runs out.” She was right. One of the many fundamental immoralities of totalitarian politics is its propensity to promise jam on tomorrow’s glorious horizon without having the faintest idea of who is going to pay for it.
The Sinn Fein Christmas List:
So let us count the beans in the Sinn Féin Christmas list. Here are the main items of additional annual current-account spending, over and above the already costly plans of the previous government: Farms, food and fish €90 million, business €85 million, brats €980 million, global warming €245 million, Gaeltacht €44 million; defence €15 million; welfare €3,332 million, schools €1,142 million, aid and trade €50 million; houses for immigrants €227 million; equality €272 million; “reform” €982 million; rural €4 million; transport €265 million; referendum on taking over Northern Ireland €10 million; more free handouts €2.4 billion; total €14.5 billion a year.
On top of that, there will be another €10 billion of “additional capital spending”.
Now for how to pay for it all. Sinn Féin proposes to increase taxes on banks, multinationals, wealth, higher incomes, property, high-end pensions, cigarettes, dividends, vacant sites, second homes and – I give you this last item word for word, as spelt – “Replace Help-to-Buy scheme with pubic and affordable homes”. The party imagines that this pubic expenditure will bring in €4 billion a year.
It won’t, of course: overtaxing the rich drives them overseas, where you can’t tax them at all, so taxes on the rich end up being taxes on the poor who can’t afford to flee. The fastest-ever growth in British prosperity came under Margaret Thatcher, who cut the top rate of tax for the rich from 98% of earnings to 40%. Inevitable result: the poor got richer too. And the totalitarians hate the poor getting rich, because the poor vote Communist and the rich don’t.
Moral Obligation of Politicians not to make Extravagant Promises:
Let us assist the sappy totalitarians with their mathematics. Additional spending of €14.5 billion a year less additional taxation of €4 billion a year entails a shortfall of €10.5 billion a year, before taking into account the additional current-account cost of servicing the extra capital expenditure – to say nothing of Ireland’s accumulated national debt, one of the highest in the world as a percentage of annual national output.
Ireland has been down this irresponsible road before, and not that long ago. Now, it seems, Sinn Féin has forgotten that acutely painful course in the University of Life and would yet again bring the nation not merely to the brink of bankruptcy but beyond bankruptcy to permanent third-world status.
It is the moral obligation of political parties not to make extravagant promises that will entail yet further increases in the indebtedness of once-prosperous Western nations. It is bad enough that Germany’s two leading commercial banks – Deutsche Bank and Kommerzbank – are between them holding more than €1000 trillion in worthless, euro-denominated debt, an elaborate, fraudulent fiction to prop up Europe’s pretend “currency”.
The euro, the toytown “currency” whose real purpose was to serve as an instrument of enforced political as well as economic integration, has failed, and failed abjectly. Yet Sinn Féin – in English, “Us Lot On Our Own, So There!” – proclaims that, contrary to its name, it is “not isolationist”. Yeah, right! [or, rather, far Left].
Presumably that is why the party is content not merely to bankrupt Ireland with its no doubt kindly-intentioned but lamentably-costed pie in the sky policy sweeties but also to leave the nation fatally exposed to the coming crash of the euro, which cannot be indefinitely deferred by the dodgy can-kicking at the spectacularly corrupt “European” “Central” “Bank”.
Sinn Fein and the Culture of Death:
Even if Sinn Fein were a party that showed some sympathy with the Faith of our fathers, this manifesto panders too much to the life-threatening proclivity of the loony Left to pander to the ever-multiplying variants of homosexuality. As readers of this column will recall, it is homosexuals themselves – particularly the male, promiscuous kind – who, wittingly or unwittingly, expose themselves to perpetual misery, disease and, typically, death 10 or 20 years before their time. The sad evidence from the medico-scientific journals is entirely clear.
Yet “Us Lot” have nothing to say about providing basic health education in the form of polite but plainly-worded warnings that homosexuality is at least as dangerous as smoking, which “Us Lot” propose to tax savagely. It is precisely because we love homosexuals dearly – for we love everyone dearly – that we do not want to see them putting themselves to death without having been given fair warning, just like smokers, of the consequences of what they are doing to themselves.
Paradoxically, the failure of “Us Lot”, in common with the other political parties, to ensure that proper health warnings are given to homosexuals is calculated to cause continuing and fatal harm to the very community that “Us Lot” pietistically insist they support.
And then there’s Buy Me and Stop One – universal access to child-killing medications. The manifesto says it will make what it euphemistically describes as “contraceptives” available to everyone for nothing. These “contraceptives”, of course, too often work by killing any baby that may be present.
Here, the Church finds herself in more than a little difficulty. The hierarchy is reluctant – and to some extent forbidden – to interfere in politics, and yet if they remain silent the death-dealing wickednesses of homosexuality, contraception and baby-butchering will continue.
Time for the Church Militant to be Militant again:
So it’s up to the laity, who are not forbidden to engage in politics, to take on the tired, tyrannical totalitarians of Sinn Féin and the rest. What is needed is an unashamedly Catholic political party, dedicated to upholding the teachings of the Church not only in opposition to the totalitarian death cult of which Sinn Féin is an unthinking satrapy but also in opposition to the flagrant fiscal irresponsibility of today’s politicians at local, State and superstate level.
The Catholic family is not only the bastion of civilisation against the moral turpitude and ruthless callousness of the death-dealers but also against the financial incontinence of very nearly all Western political parties. Just as a family exists to serve its members and, therefore, to preserve each of them from homosexuality and suchlike harms, so a prudent family budgets carefully and does not pay out more than it can reasonably expect to earn.
The totalitarian assault upon the Christian family that was and will once again be the foundation of Western civilisation began as early as 1921. It continues to this day, and the Church – particularly the laity – has not been vigorous enough in standing up against the Marxists and Fascists who would sweep the Church away as an irrelevance if they could.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s time for the Church militant to be militant once again. And that does not mean taking up arms, as Sinn Féin’s bedfellows the IRA once brutally did. It means getting into the political arena and taking on these apostles of hatred head to head. We should be spending less time in the shadows and more where the Lord of Life told us to spend it – shouting from the rooftops. Yellow and white rosettes, anyone?
