Poblacht na h Éireann™
The Temporary Government
To the people of Anglo-Ireland™
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of Mammon and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of subservience, we declare the name of this country to be Anglo-Ireland™, and through us, Anglo-Ireland™ summons her children to aid her banks and abandon their old illusions about so-called freedom.
Having organised and trained her economists through her secret capitalist indoctrination system, and through her open propaganda organisations, the Irish Media and the subaltern intellectuals, having patiently turned citizens into punters and made of a society a mere economy, having resolutely waited until the people couldn’t tell the difference, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on the control of the press and the power of capital to manipulate public opinion, she abandons whatever pretence she had to being a republic and opts instead to become a local branch of the IMF.
We declare the nonsense about right of the people of Anglo-Ireland™ to the ownership of Anglo-Ireland™ to be so much hot air, ditto the unfettered control of Irish destinies insofar as it ever existed. The long usurpation of these rights by the governing elite has extinguished them completely, nor can these rights ever be reignited except by the destruction of that governing elite, which I wouldn’t hold my breath for. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their willingness to follow the gentry, even so far as to give over their independence from imperialism to their own gombeens and shoneens, proof positive that we are a nation of slaves or fools. Now, standing by that fundamental abrogation of the rights of the People and reasserting the rights of profit before the rights of the people, we hereby proclaim Anglo-Irish Republic Incorporated™ to be a banking, real estate and auctioneering business, and we pledge the lives of our one-time citizens (now punters or tax-payers™) as collateral for the debts of their masters. Anglo-Ireland™ calls on the poor, the old, the infirm, the young, the students, the workers, the unemployed, the public servants, the householders, the small businesses, the small farmers, the fishermen, the tradesmen and women, to pledge their lives and the lives of their children and their children’s children to saving the corporate elite and the Fianna Fáil party whose long sacrifice in the name of holding onto power has finally borne fruit in this declaration.
Anglo-Ireland Incorporated™ guarantees the freedom of capital, the right to make profit out of other people’s suffering, and declares its resolve to pursue the prosperity of the rich at the expense of the poor with special emphasis on the benefits of emigration, balancing the obvious benefits of keeping our children at home against the equally obvious savings to be made by exporting our demographic problems to other nations, and proud of the differences carefully fostered by Fianna Fáil and the Progressive Democrats, which have divided a minority from the majority and given us one of the biggest rich-poor gaps in the world.
Until we are forced by time into a general election, the Temporary Government™, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the corporations and IBEC, determined to put down by force of arms if necessary, as already demonstrated, any attempt by the people to reassert any of the rights they mistakenly thought they had.
We place the cause of the Anglo-Ireland Incorporated™ under the protection of the ECB, the EC and the IMF, whose blessing we invoke upon our banks and businesses, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will endanger it by doing anything precipitous such as resigning his Dáil seat. In this extreme hour the Irish Nation™ must, by its squalor and passivity and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the standard of living of the few, prove itself worthy of the august austerity to which it is called.
William Wall is an Irish poet, novelist, and short story writer. This article was first published in his blog The Ice Moon on 19 November 2010 under a Creative Commons license.
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