#VinB on hypocrisy of parliamentarians who seek (for once) to enforce the law…

Had to do a double take on this one this morning… Vincent Browne points to a number of cases that have passed unnoticed under the gaze of Dublin’s parliamentarians (not least Ireland’s wealthiest media tycoon, Denis O’Brien)..

While Vincent is not arguing that Mick the Builder (from Wexford) is not deserving of censure,

…in a normal, decent society, he would be deserving of censure and of the appropriate criminal sanctions.

…he does, however, muddy the waters somewhat by getting in a little whataboutery of his own…

But the society of our political establishment is different.

This is close to the territory that Fintan O’Toole was probing last week. But in his case, whilst the case of Lowry and the awarding of the last 3G licence in the state were to the fore in his analsys, O’Toole pinpoints the nub of the problem: impunity from corrective measures which would be normal elsewhere.

Today’s water weak response from the Irish coalition government to local planning notwithstanding, surely the way to solve the problem is to end the principle of immunity for those we like or with whom we have business or family connections rather than to give into the thoroughly subversive notion that we’re all damned anyway?

Mick Fealty

Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty