tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88827021200860062972024-03-14T18:09:21.974+01:00Gerry Feehily - EurophreniaAuthor, journalist, presseurop.eu and Courrier International.Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.comBlogger123125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-8633050651996577612011-03-18T18:43:00.000+01:002011-03-18T18:43:11.480+01:00Ireland for saleIt seems a rich, if not bitter, irony that on the feast of Saint Patrick, the day Ireland pats itself on the back, that its new government should announce a plan to sell off its state assets, the “crown jewels”, as the Irish Independent puts it. Although the Dublin daily doesn’t go into the specifics of what jewels will go under the hammer, a recent report by NCB, an Irish securities Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-54611959651438743592011-02-25T14:49:00.000+01:002011-02-25T14:49:50.963+01:00Democracy – but beautifulHere’s my editorial for Presseurop on the Irish elections, Arab revolutions, and more…
An angry Ireland votes today, and will doubtlessly elect as its next Taoiseach Enda Kenny of Fine Gael, a centre right party, to replace Fianna Fail, another centre right party, widely blamed for the country’s economic crash. Mr Kenny, like most of Ireland’s political leaders, intends to pursue Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-65241334340367499732011-02-16T18:34:00.000+01:002011-02-16T18:34:25.548+01:00EU couldn’t keep peace in a Buddhist monastery In the wake of the EU’s reaction to the events in Egypt, I can’t help thinking again of President Van Rompuy’s recent Warsaw speech. “Europe is the best guarantee for peace. It was and is a work of peace.” Then, “Europe has to be the fatherland of peace. We owe this to our history ... The bloody battlefields from our history have been replaced by Brussels Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-17516878096003551392011-02-09T18:33:00.000+01:002011-02-09T18:33:46.707+01:00As queer as a jobless recovery Ireland is in “recovery”. Such is the sage counsel of NCB, “one of Ireland's largest independent securities firms” and “a leading provider of institutional equities, wealth management and corporate finance services to our clients for over 25 years.” NCB has just produced a 104-page opus entitled “Ireland Moves Forward” (IMF for short, notes Jason Walsh @Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-11919908112491849052011-01-21T17:51:00.000+01:002011-01-21T17:51:17.739+01:00Laurent Wauquiez - dodgy oxygenHere’s Laurent Wauquiez, French Minister for European Affairs, in a speech in Helsinki on bringing Romania and Bulgaria into the Schengen area (HD to @beranger_v4 for info). “If the Schengen zone’s data-base falls into the hands of international organised criminals, then it’s European internal security in its entirety that is wiped out.” He then argues that it’s in Romania, Bulgaria andGerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-76843391612954484982010-11-26T19:30:00.000+01:002010-11-26T19:30:17.969+01:00The IMF has such good taste After a hard week chuckling over the future of Europe with my transcontinental colleagues at the Presseurop offices, there’s nothing I can resist quite as much as scooting off to poor banjaxed ould completely knackered Ireland in an Air France jet and just “letting go” at the Merrion Hotel, “one of the finest luxury hotels in Dublin Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-72150993239956412272010-11-21T15:35:00.000+01:002010-11-21T15:35:32.441+01:00It's TINA, stupidThis is the Presseurop editorial I wrote as the EU / IMF men in back landed in Dublin. It's available also in 9 other languages at our site.
In the coming weeks, if not months, the story you are likely to hear will be one of a plucky nation, emerging from a legacy of colonial oppression, poverty and mass emigration, whose rise to riches was as spectacular as its downfall. And there are noGerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-72738283718778618412010-11-18T17:16:00.000+01:002010-11-18T17:16:18.986+01:00Meet the new government of Ireland
The only thing sovereign in Ireland right now is the contempt which the government holds for its own people, denying point blank that an EU/IMF bailout for the national economic car crash is imminent. So first off I would like to offer profuse thanks and curtsies to Simeon Djankov, deputy Prime Minister of Bulgaria, for finally calling a spade a spud when he Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-90718094477330984732010-11-16T13:55:00.000+01:002010-11-16T13:55:01.681+01:00The new Irish famine
“The Irish famine killed more than a million people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country, it did not the slightest damage.” So wrote Karl Marx back in 1867. As 21st century Ireland peers out over the debt drop, beneath which lie the open jaws of an EU/IMF “bailout”, I’d like to make some outrageous parallels between then and now.
Back Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-26316144377122270912010-11-05T11:50:00.003+01:002010-11-05T11:51:09.130+01:00Attack of the fantasy bombers
“Booby-trap bomb sent to Nicolas Sarkozy”, “Greek parcel bomb plot targets Merkel”, “Italian police investigating parcel bomb sent to Berlusconi”. To go by yesterday’s headlines, you put a bomb in a box, do a gift wrap, post it “personally addressed” to Nicolas Sarkozy, Elysée Palace, Paris, and usually it should end up on his desk, or in Merkel’s case, in her “Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-27115981181731562212010-10-14T13:27:00.001+02:002010-10-14T13:27:56.636+02:00Meet France’s Number 1 scroungers
Pff… strikes, strikes and more strikes. There I was, only yesterday, railing on a metro platform with my two plastic bags at all these sluggy, pasty faced, socially-assisted scroungers running France into the ground, when my train turned up 30 seconds late and I got to work on time. To think that three million of these good for nothings, born with “a hair in the Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-58026059230592526022010-10-08T13:24:00.000+02:002010-10-08T13:24:33.585+02:00Frontex flies under the radar Frontex anyone? What sounds like a brand of prophylactic actually is one - an EU body charged, among other chores, with keeping illegals out of Europe. Of French inspiration, a crunch of Frontières Exterières (ie External Borders), Frontex, in its own words, provides “particular added value (my italics) to the national border management systems of the Member Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-83021378195365683282010-09-30T00:48:00.001+02:002010-09-30T00:50:24.160+02:00McCreevy and the Brussels afterlife
You really have to hand it to Charlie McCreevy, ex-European Commissioner. There he was, leaving his office at the Commish on a bitter cold February morn this year, no doubt with a couple of plastic bags full of personal effects, and gloomily contemplating what life might be from without the glass walls of Berlaymount. No doubt, as Europe sank into crisis, heGerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-74331933390781119252010-09-24T18:25:00.001+02:002010-09-25T02:50:36.683+02:00The truth? There is no crisis Very recently, I ran into a copy of London’s ultra-glam Plastique, a “Bi-Annual Luxury Fashion and Culture Magazine”. Plastique is so stratospherically glam that its website just leads you to three photos of a woman who looks like she’s been on the skag since her sex change but is too rich to care. You can click on absolutely nothing else. On the Info Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-32468375475129912010-09-16T19:59:00.003+02:002010-09-16T20:01:29.904+02:00Et pourquoi pas English?
On Tuesday, Libération’s Brussels correspondent, the indomitable Jean Quatremer, mounted his favorite hobby horse, the perils of the use of English at the Commission. This time it was Viviane Reding’s condemnation of France’s expulsion of the Roma that caused his cables to snap. It’s worth quoting in full the following passages which I fear fail to convey their vigour in original French, but Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-6080736361918788242010-09-15T17:36:00.001+02:002010-09-15T17:37:38.722+02:00Brian Cowen, no credit can he gain Last night consternation hung like a dreadful cloud over the capitals of Europe and the world… if you follow the Irish media, that is. From Brussels to Bratislava, and along the ancient Silk Road via Kazakhstan to China, the alleged drunkeness of Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen on national radio was evoked in hundreds of exotic tongues.
According to the Irish Examiner, the Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-4448266049828182142010-09-09T13:16:00.000+02:002010-09-09T13:16:03.019+02:00Thilo, the self-hating Sarrazin
Who can feel sorry for Thilo Sarrazin, who lost his cushy Bundesbank job after the publication of “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany is deleting itself), a diatribe against the lower orders, but probably would have held onto to it had he avoided talking about Jewish "genes". In nine chapters of pop science with graphs and pie charts, Thilo proves that the lower Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-63886214081522987152010-07-29T18:34:00.001+02:002010-07-29T18:35:07.175+02:00Dublin, toytown of literature
So Dublin has been named a UNESCO City of Literature. Greeting the news, the Irish Republic’s Minister of Tourism said, "Being one of only four cities in the world to achieve the status of UNESCO City of Literature, will enable Dublin to increase its market share of tourists and attract more people to both the city and the island of Ireland."
Indeed, Dublin is one of four cities, along Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-41506746572857053042010-07-22T16:07:00.002+02:002010-07-22T16:07:59.135+02:00European integration? Go to jail
Quite often Mr Wolfgang Schäuble and Madame Christine Lagarde make sense. But then again, it seems that just when the synapses get sparking all luminously, the connects short circuit. Take this initially promising declaration they have just posted to Herman Van Rompuy. “A single currency simply cannot work properly without enhanced economic policy coordination”. Correct. Indeed, it’s Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-44925254836277715792010-07-22T12:46:00.000+02:002010-07-22T12:46:05.029+02:00Green taxation, green sadism? Individual consumer, Joe Sausage, muddling through this vale of CO2, be warned. If your planet is warming, seas are rising, glaciers turn to soup, entrapping polar kittens etc etc, then it’s all your fault, or your dodgy heater’s, or draughty attic. Take this case spotted by The Times yesterday – with hat doff to @tiredhack. The new caring Tory / LibDem admin is so concerned about “energy Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-36867589101553641872010-07-19T19:19:00.000+02:002010-07-19T19:19:06.672+02:00Meet Europe’s highest paid politician
Politics.ie has just posted a list of the world’s highest paid politicans, four of whom are European. Confining ourselves to the Eurololly-list only, we get Angela Merkel in fourth place, David Cameron third, second spot for Nicolas Sarkozy and taking the gold medal is…is…is… Monsieur Brian Cowen of the Irish Republic...
Who with his cool €263,000 can have a right laugh and say a Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-76115272999786194132010-07-09T19:04:00.001+02:002010-07-09T19:04:29.558+02:00Bring Paul the Octopus to BrusselsNews has just come in at the Presseurop office’s that Paul the Psychic Octopus has officially retired, following his latest prophecy that Spain will beat the Dutch in this Sunday’s World Cup final. Octopus life expectancy being only two years, Paul, already an advanced two and a half, shall be no more by the European Championship 2012 and World Cup Brazil 2014. Spiegel reports that the director Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-1151556623280641252010-07-06T16:55:00.000+02:002010-07-06T16:55:16.945+02:00ECB, the bank that looks after its ownA lovely little bit of news comes from the Financial Times today. The European Central Bank, champions of fiscal austerity across a continent, has been giving Romania an earful for hitting employees of the country’s central bank with a 25% pay cut. “In a strongly-worded statement,” the FT writes, “the ECB on Monday warned that Romania’s actions violated European Union treaties allowing monetary Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-73584091461380021592010-07-02T12:59:00.000+02:002010-07-02T12:59:19.703+02:00Will the Tories do Sarkozy’s bidding?
European Voice reports that UK Foreign secretary William Hague, speaking at the Foreign Office in London, has said that the UK government is ‘determined’ to increase its influence in the European Union. “The idea that the last government was serious about advancing Britain’s influence in Europe turns out to be an unsustainable fiction,” he said. “They neglected to ensure that sufficient Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8882702120086006297.post-90142163849363061192010-07-01T13:38:00.003+02:002010-07-01T13:42:13.405+02:00Football cannot affect your retirement planHas France gone daft? 10 days after its shambles of a national football team shuffled out of the World Cup and we’ve got a public inquiry into the “fiasco”. Today, a parliamentary “Commission des affaires culturelles et de l'éducation” led by Sports Minister Roselyne Bachelot held an in-camera hearing with French coach Raymond Domenech to determine why Les Bleus are so, well, rubbish.
I would Gerry Feehilyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08396679904277936238noreply@blogger.com0