Minister Announces Own Department Now Redundant

Background

Every other week it is clearly outlined in writing that the Minister of Communications has no role in communications policy, whatsoever,  so we as ever  wonder what is the point of a Minister being “in charge” of a department that has no evident function according to their own Minister.(1)

Minister for the Utterly Bizarre(2)

In a written answer straight from the “ Ministry of Truth” we see Minister Rabbitte openly admitting that his department is pointless and has no role in communications policy in Ireland.

The logical conclusion is that we abolish the Department of Communications as it  does nothing at all according to its own minister and the only realistic policy option available to us is to rid ourselves of the millstone of the Ministry of Kafkaesque nonsense that to date has been intent on destroying infrastructure across our nation.

Eamonn Wallace Chairman of IrelandOffline commented : The Minister says as standard response to every question : “Shure we’ll lave it all to the regulator, shure don’t they know all about dis and shure begorrah I know nothing atall atall so go ask somebody else about this “schtuff” I’m in charge of, you know dem wires and services and all that malarkey”.

In fact Pat Rabbitte has hidden behind his standard ‘Liberalised’ market excuse 228 times since becoming minister, 10 times more often than any of his FG colleagues have and over Twice as much as all the rest of the cabinet, including the Taoiseach, combined. (3) It is great to see such positivism…and such a burning desire to take charge of policy for the benefit of Ireland.

Never has any minister in the history of the state been as unquestioningly devoted to putting every single policy failure down to a “liberalised market” as has our Minister and his Department.(3)

Wallace continued: “Well we all know how fantastically well regulation has worked here in Ireland to date along with the mantra of “leave it to the market”…we have charities. financed by public monies, paying their executives three quarters of a million so they can go off to play golf in the Algarve and all at our expense, banking regulators who didn’t want to know any “bad stuff” about the entities they were supposed to be regulating and only wanted positive news…when we had banks that is. Clearly that kind of arms-length regulation has been a resounding success, have we not learnt anything since 2008?

The World Bank in undertaking a study of Privatisation of Telecommunications in Moldova recently used Eircom and the Irish lack of Regulation as an example of “How Not To Do Regulation and Privatisation”.

Need we remind the Minister it *is* his job to direct communications policy in this country and not to be continuously hiding behind flaccid excuses.

Way to go Minister, ALWAYS  leave it to somebody else, pass the buck and blame everybody else!!! We have to ask what have this Ministry actually achieved in the last 20 years and off-hand we can think of nothing constructive or of long term benefit…whatsoever? Nothing a big fat zero!

(1) http://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2014-01-15a.1286

(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

(3) http://www.kildarestreet.com/search/?s=liberalised+2011-03-01..2014-02-01&o=p