Thursday, April 26, 2007

Embarrassing the Government

Pity poor Bertie. Years of dedicated service to the people of Ireland and we still do things that embarrass him. How thoughtless of us. Yesterday during a debate in the Dáil he was asked about the fiasco of e-voting machines.

Mr Ahern countered: “If this House did not want to play politics with the issue, we would not be the laughing stock of Europe by carrying out a vote for two million people by using pencils. A ridiculous situation.”

Well, it was his government that ignored concerns about the security of e-voting machines and paid €52 million for them. They were then used in just two elections, and have been sitting in storage ever since. The public had been under the misguided notion that the then Environment Minister, Martin Cullen, was the one who was responsible for the failure of the project. Turns out we were all wrong. You see the failure had nothing to do with the people responsible for the project itself. It was all the fault of the opposition parties because they, shudder, "objected".

He told the Opposition: “It was your fault because you objected to it. If you had taken a mature attitude to the e-voting system that worked particularly well in the last two elections, but politically you didn’t agree with it and got a few people in to find flaws with it.

How evil of them! Finding flaws in e-voting machines. Sush don't tell anyone, maybe we can sell them to some other country where the opposition and public are less diligent. Perhaps after the next election we could have the opposition Deputies bound and gagged before they enter the Dáil Chamber? That should make things easier for Bertie. Though it would appear he is already thinking along those lines.

“It is an embarrassment. I do hope that in the next Dáil that we’re able to rid ourselves of the horrendous difficulties we have in trying to be a modern country.”

So, Bertie is embarrassed that we are voting with pencils. Well, we have used those pencils to vote him into power for the last 10 years so if he feels that embarrassed by the whole process he can simply remove his name from those old fashioned paper ballot sheets and perhaps move to a country where such tedious problems have been already been overcome. May I suggest North Korea?

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