State of the Nation Part Deux
Posted by Maman Poulet on 06 Feb 2009 at 10:06 am | Tagged as: Irish Politics, Recession
‘If we decide to wallow in sea of doubt don’t be suprised if we remain in the turbulent waters we are in today…’
Brian Cowen, Dublin February 5 2009
What you mean you missed it again? Don’t worry you are not a completely incompetent media consumer – An Taoiseach Brian Cowen spoke without a script for 16/17 minutes last night to an audience of business types at Dublin Chamber of Commerce and the only media person present was Harry McGee! Bet he blogs about it later! (And voila he did!)
So we’ve had our second speech off the cuff (that’d be picking his cuffs) this week. An Taoiseach is working up to the real one maybe? These are just rehearsals to the trailer in Clara or the studio in RTE! I can feel your excitement too!
And you can listen to last nights speech here thanks to Newstalk who’ve released the file as a podcast – Dublin Chamber of Commerce helpfully recorded the performance.
Obamalike (I kid you not!) has already been mentioned on the radio this morning – what do you think?
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If the emails to Pat Kenny are any guide, not everyone is impressed.
The emails he’s just read out range from suspicion that an impromptu speech “just happened” to be taped, to cynicism that a business party leader’s speech to a group of businessmen is warmly received, to asking what sacrifices he asked of the Chamber as he
spreadsshares the pain.People where I work are deeply angry about the income levy (why is it deducted from my pay when I’m not required to pay income tax?) and the attack on pensions is just crass (wasn’t there a contract there?) There’s no doubt on our part Mr Cowen, we’ll vote you out as soon as possible, and make necessary changes!
He’s no Obama for a couple of reasons, Mr Obama has a direct mandate from the people, and Mr Obama has made more executive decisions and demonstrated more leadership in 15-16 days than this fake coalition has made since it was cobbled together. So there’s gonna be bicycles for everyone, my vote for a bike for every FF’er and Green to get on, and go! Anywhere!
Gerard,
I recorded the speech. There was no sign prior to it that it would be as good a recording as it was.
Harry from the Irish Times and the Press Officer for the government also record it, but I did it through the sound board hence the fairly good quality. He was the only journalist to attend. Due to an average ‘door-stopping’ response by the Taoiseach prior to the speech many of the other journalist collected headed home. I’ve built up a collection of unpublished podcasts and I thought I’d be adding to it with this speech.
At the event last night our President presented to the Taoiseach a survey of Dublin Chamber members that we had done two weeks ago. Our findings were that times are tough and that Dublin businesses are focusing on survival during the downturn. About 9 in 10 companies are freezing or reducing their pay levels. Our members said that they were leading by example. Hardest hit has been senior executives, with 30% of the companies who responded saying they are cutting top level salaries by a tenth or more.
And we called on the Government to follow suit during the current partnership negotiations by addressing the pay differential between the public and private sector. That is what he was responding to.
I hope this gives a bit of context.
Patrick
FF must be delighted with the coverage this is getting. Newstalk is now playing Cowen to a rock anthem soundtrack.
FWIW Patrick, I’m self employed and my income fell by a lot more than 10% last year. But I’ll still have to pay extra taxes thanks to the income levy. Private sector workers are hurting, public sector workers just took a hell of a hit, but there’s not much evidence of IBEC taking any of the pain, and that’s part of the reason why people are angry. Every day, there’s another story of bankers and parachutes. Company profits are down, but so is everyone else’s income. Would it really be such a heresy to put a couple of percent on corporation tax?
Thanks Patrick for the background!
I’d say it’ll be the last time for a while that journalists go home early in case they miss the next state of the nation address.
Hats of to Patrick, good coup, good recording.
It wasn’t a response to the survey, if he was just presented with it, then he didn’t have time to read it. The man, Brian Cowen didn’t even read the Lisbon Treaty (which was 97% the text of the EU constitution).
the silly fools in old media land think this is fighting talk.
if the irish economy over heated and went of fire and burnt down to ashes, then Brian Cowen is the arsonist, he saw the fire, the ESRI told him about the flames. He stuck his fingers in his ears went LA LA LA 4 more years and refused to call the fire brigade, his builder friends slapped him on the back till it hurt.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone have a tape of the famous/infamous election 2007 press conference where Cowen ‘took the campaign by the scruff of the neck’ and changed direction. It could make interesting reading in light of subsequent events.
of course now it’s out there on podcast it can be played with…there’s a votetube challenge if ever there was one.
I’ll look for news reports on Cowen’s ‘moment’ in election Gerard.
Someone will probably overdub it to the Downfall video.
http://www.rte.ie/news/2007/0514/election.html
14th of May was the day of ‘fightback’ in the election campaign – Can’t get clips to play visually for me but that could just be me!
listening to it myself now-he uttered a sentence (more than one in succession) without descending into bureaucratic nonsense. It is hardly obama. It is one professional to another. Some spin by FF.
I found some those clips on the RTE News site too. They seem to be mostly journalists interviewing other journalists, but there are probably at least a few clips from the pc too.
Unfortunately linux doesn’t want to play nice with RTE’s RealAudio format, so I’ll have a look later when I have access to Win
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