Tilting at Windmills

The Irish Ferries dispute ended today, in the manner of many of these things, with a compromise.

The Union and Company delegates emerged at six am this morning, after an intensive all night session, an agreement was reached at the eleventh hour. Minimum wage is saved, despite the attempts of the company to circumvent Irish law by waving (very thin) International waters law books frantically in the air and whittering about how twenty-six million in profit last year is not enough to save the company. The company, however, still gets to re-flag their ships which is appalling, but will take a change in Irish law to stop. It also still gets to hire foreign labour to replace the Irish, which in principle I have no objection to, as long as they are paid the same as Irish workers, which is now guaranteed by Irish law. The Irish workers get redundancy deals, and by the end of the day, the lock in on many of the Ferries will end.

This is of course all on the condition that Irish Ferries stick to the agreement, which if previous ones are taken into account, is about a fifty fifty chance.

This whole crisis has made me so Angry that, at the moment, along with a close friend I have had the feverish and badly thought out idea of running for the Irish Parliment at the next elections as an independent, under the single issue of compulsary union acceptance by companies setting up in this country, and the enforcement of any pay restructuring from the top down. The CEO's and their cohorts should get hit first, and hardest.

It's not that I have lost any faith in Anarchism (which I still hold by) but I am sick of ranting to no purpose, both on my blog and to my friends and family.

In the event I run with this insane idea, I think I'll be running down the path of the ex Dead Kennedys frontman Jello Biafra who in the Eighties ran for Mayor of SanFranciso and came fourth. Jello at no point was a candidate that could win, but during the race he managed to put many candidates in uncomfortable positions with regards to their stance on many issues.

The only reason I would run (though the idea came up today, and is still very much only in the "joking about it" stage) is to cause as much trouble as possible for the other candiates and get some issues that I believe in strongly discussed. Things like the fact that the top tax bracket of forty two percent applies to anyone who earns more than €32,000 euro which is most of the country, the destruction of our national heritage to make way for endless roads that do nothing to solve the traffic problem or end our dependency on imported oil.

Those points and about a thousand other things that daily make me want to snap, and stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 Carbine-gas semiautomatic, bitterly pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers alike, would be alleviated somewhat by a political soapbox and the adoption of a "holy-fool" like persona. These changes in strategy, taken together would prevent any, ehm, "sapping" of our fine nations economic growth.

Seriously though, the political run will, most likely, never happen, but in the weak light of today's winter sun, it all seems quite plausible.

Now I just have to find out how to do it, how much it costs, and get 100 individuals with a mental imbalance to sign me up for it.

Tilting at Windmills.

Peace and Hope.

FatherCrow.