Ireland hasn't changed a bit

I haven't been in Ireland since Christmas 2008 and not a thing has changed. Literally. I drove to Dublin this morning and to Heuston Station and back I counted a total of 9 cars registered in '09 and '10 (2 were '09 and 7 were '10. Looks like it's picking up slowly). Really, no one has bought a new car. No new businesses. The old ones aren't even boarded up, just the shutters down like they didn't bother to open up on a Saturday morning.

But maybe some stuff has changed. The whole traffic problem in Dublin is gone. Phibsboro was like a ghost town at 10am on a Saturday. More like I remembered it being at 6am on a Sunday as I staggered home from a pub.

This could have something to do with the €50 billion in debt the government is taking off the banks. How on earth did they go €50 billion under? This is €23,000 per household and it's something to do with over valued property market. But if people are still living in their houses, what does it matter how much the value dropped? Is it not only the empty houses belonging to the banks? So if the bank own €50 billion in unsold houses, or where the mortgages where defaulted, what is this, 100,000 houses valued at a half million each? Or are there a million houses in Ireland that they can't sell for 50 grand? Or is it some smart fucker decided to sell 50 houses to the gobshite of a finance minister at a nice billion euro each.

Can we trust a Finna Fail finance minister when he says €50 billion is the bill? The same finance minister who said none of this is his fault because he didn't know what the banks were doing? Apparently the minister for finance doesn't need to actually know anything about the economy. The same party who had a finance minister (Gobshite / taoiseach / dickwad Bertie Ahern) who as Finance minster didn't know he had to pay tax on a 'dig out'. Ministers for finance don't need to know about taxes either.

The drunk, the ignorant and the gobshites running the country make me think if I ever bother to get the vote in Canada I can feel safe and sound voting for Stephen Harper (spent a billion on holding a meeting) or Russ Hiebert (blows money on flights) or Gordon Campbell (just google HST).