Alexia Golez

Qikking from the Rally: INO Rep

So I went along to the rally on Saturday, protesting Minister Harney’s proposed cutting of the provision of Cervical Cancer Vaccine for 12 year old girls. It was the first political protest I’ve been to. I was surrounded by women and but more importantly, lots of interest groups I never thought I’d be on the street with – feminists, socialists, members of the People Against Profit organisation. Female genital mutilation was folded into the issues of the rally. I wasn’t happy about this. Hands up who’s for it in the first place? But that’s an aside.

Moving to the meat, I didn’t go as a political animal ready to sup up the anger of other women. I went as a woman who doesn’t want to see the chance to virtually eliminate cervical cancer in women in a generation lost because of €10 million that the Government refuses to find.

Drippy Watering Can

A Government that spends:

• €210,000 via Enterprise Ireland for the administration of a mailing list and forum for three years
• €1,000 bicycle scheme meant to placate the Trikenator.
• Reportedly €1.7 million on private consultants a week. A WEEK! Christ.

And whose parties ruled while:

• €600,000 was spent by Fás in the outdoor advertising campaign in 2004. We’re talking loadsa posters.
• €340,000 on the launch of the National Development Plan of which €75,000 was spent on multimedia, a logo and catering on the night itself.

We’re supposed to tighten our belts and suck it up, but widespread mismanagement of the nation’s revenue pot is rife. Fair right? What the government should be doing is spending on the resources we have today and building the right recipe for success. Sheltering those at risk in our society runs to the core of that. Economic growth and the betterment of society rests at feet of our children and their role models. Kill their supports and cut down the future.

Eliminating cervical cancer would have been a step forward for a whole generation of Irish women. Not only that but the prevalence of genital warts would have been stamped upon. The vaccine would have had made a major impact on the preventing many tens of thousands of Euros of public money being spent on STD treatments.

Prudence is a Virtue, so where’s Insight, Knowledge and Wisdom?

In these days of sackcloth and ashes, the Government is sticking to its hymn sheet of financial prudence with bluefingered zealotry. Recession is opportunity and the Government is supposed to be focused on investing in our future. Borrowing is only economically sound if one is investing for the betterment of the long-term infrastructure of the country.

Under the auspices of Project Let’s Get The Fucking Economy On The Road, national pension reserves are being raided to prop up our biggest banks. It’s the one-time capital injection of a lifetime, necessary though it is. Financial institutions whose dealings should have been more closely regulated. So, we are paying for the ineptitude of the system of financial regulation where addictive and self-destructive profit-taking killed the spirit of self-fulfilling capitalist economics?

Capitalism is not to blame. Bad judgement and the promise of Grab-It-Now profits at the expense of the long-term viability of the economic machine is. That’s corrupt capitalism at work. Idiocy on a titanic scale. That’s the bailout our Government is paying for. That’s our pension cash in the machine now trying to oil it up. There’s the lives of our kids.

The Government is focusing on infrastructure. Spending on infrastructure like the Roads Scheme, rail links and broadband ought to be number one. People are our most precious resource. How can spending on a once-off treatment to members of the future workforce not be seen as an investment in infrastructure? Fuck the bicycles and energy efficient lightbulbs. I’d rather see a child grow up, live a ripe life and die of an illness other than cervical cancer. I’m thinking you do too.

The Magic Bullet is that there is no Magic Bullet, just Voices

As I stood beside these political parties at the rally, I was aware that none of them have that magic bullet to wipe away all our woes. There is no Great White Hope. What there is and what’s needed is sustained noise on issues that bite the very young and the very old of our society. I don’t want my grandmother or my daughter to die because the Government can’t keep it’s pocket book in check. Their lives ought not to be measured on a scale against the leaky ship of Government’s financial mismanagement. Where is departmental oversight? Has it scattered off with the balls of budgetary bravery?

Who’s to say that a FG/Labour administration could do any better? That’s an unknown. I’m a cynic. There’s no bag of tricks on show to demonstrate that the opposition would have taken any decisions differently. We have promises, assurences but that’s not enough to believe in.

I was heartened by the faces on show. Men and women that want to demonstrate their anger. People that didn’t want to stand silently by and watch certain cancer prevention be plamásed away under a rock. This Voice needs to sound out louder still and continue until change is realised.