Have they looked out of the window

There never seems to be any end to the government’s wasting of money. There are
cutbacks a plenty in all areas of public spending, but still the public purse seems
to be freely open for the mad, bad and ridiculous.

Dublin city council have recently released records which admits that it spent
nearly €450k on foreign junkets for councillors, that would pay for a lot of
trolleys, sorry beds I should say, for the HSE. If they need to have a ‘knowledge
exchange’ with somebody in Beijing, surely they have heard of that new invention,
the telephone, or perhaps there has been a cap put on the phone bills.

We have paid in the region of €3 million to store voting machines that are
useless and will never be used, even the other €1.8 million that has been paid to
yet another commission, to produce two reports on e-voting, hasn’t made them
useable. That would amount to eight years of trips for Dublin City Council to Las
Vegas, and still leave enough for the cabinet to have a tea party.

The government is even paying private companies silly money to store paper
records for them, and pay each time they want to access them. Surely a few good
computers could do the job as easy. Aideen Ireland, of the National Archives
questioned the viability of digital storage with this statement, ‘Storing data on
electronic disk is truly one of the most impermanent modes of retention. The digital
world moves so quickly, and systems need to be constantly updated. We would need to
ensure the records would still be accessible in 50 years’ time. Good quality paper
lasts a lot longer in the right conditions.’ That is basically a long winded way of
saying we can’t trust the staff not to leave their laptops at bus stops.

The most ridiculous waste of public funds at present has to be the recent radio
advertisements for Dublin water. It does state that it is the most extravagant
advert ever made, and that it is. How stupid do we have to be, to think at this
point, that we would in any way need waste Dublin’s water by watering our lawns.

Look out of the window guys, at present I have a cow swimming past.