For me, the scariest thing about a Donald Trump rally isn’t so much the rhetoric he spouts, vile and hateful though it usually is. What is truly frightening is that so many people listening to him actually cheer.
Well, here in Ireland we can rest assured that we don’t have a businessman whom a lot of people think can run the country? Think again.
Now to be clear…this is NOT a post about the rights and wrongs of the strike currently threatened by workers at Dublin Bus…what we’re looking at here is how it is reported and how certain people react to them.
A trade dispute is between an employer and its workforce. Therefore, there are two sides. Yet whenever a strike is threatened in this country, particularly in the area of public services, the “watercooler” discussion invariably surrounds the inconvenience to said publin (which of course is understandable) though with the blame put squarely at the doorstep of the unions.
It is so bad that Michael O’Leary, boss of the 5th best low-cost airline in Europe, feels he can weigh in on the matter with a remarkably simple solution that clearly nobody else has thought of :
“We should be privatising all these useless public services that depend every year on big subsidies from the tax payer because frankly, the tax payer has better things to be spending the money on.”
Ah, the tax payer. Clearly the person for whom Mr O’Leary toils morning, noon and night. And look – he called them “useless”, that’s just something you or I would say! He talks just like us! Who cares if he never actually backs up his words?
Yet the response from his “man-crush brigade” is always the same. This is just from one thread on Facebook :
Yippiekia! Gotta love Michael O’Leary
He’d turn this country around that’s for sure
the tail is wagging the dog now…50k+ because its a “responsible” job..next thing we’ll be paying kids in McDonalds 50k not to put glass into the burgers…
It’s always the unions at fault. Now let’s be clear…I’m not saying they are perfect by any stretch. But the way things are supposed to work is that the government works for the general public to resolve a dispute between two sides.
Instead, between the government, corporate class and the media, these disputes generally disintergrate into a standoff between public and private sector workers in general discourse. A fire people like Mr O’Leary are more than happy to stoke.
One thing I will say for him…he is probably smart enough never to actually run for public office.
First Person Plural 