The Long And the Short Of It
The Mayor of Limerick, Jim Long, has been embroiled in a number of controversies recently. So who is he? What does he represent? And is he really a racist, as his accusers claim?
Olaf Tyaransen, 18 Apr 2012
Well, the British Embassy in Dublin got burned down the same night...
It did, yeah. We marched on Limerick prison – don’t ask me why, it was just an iconic place.
Are those not more the actions of a Sinn Féin activist?
Well, maybe some people might be shocked by what I’m going to say, but aren’t all Irishmen Republicans? Didn’t we all come from oppression? Dictatorship? Didn’t our forefathers fight for our freedom? So is there not a Republican in most of us? I have no axe to grind with Sinn Féin. I wouldn’t agree with their policies, and I still have a public opinion, it’s not a political opinion, that we’re not ready for a Sinn Féin government here yet, because they haven’t been proved and tested. We know where they came from. We know how they got there. But we are a democracy. Some of them are still lagging very far behind in democracy, and we found that out this week in our own Chambers when there was a protest about the household charge. I chaired the meeting. They were entertained, they were given the house rules, and when they didn’t get the decision, they went ballistic. That to me is clear evidence that they’re not yet ready to accept a democratic decision.
Are you in favour of the household charge?
I’m not. But by the same token, and I try to explain this to people, the Irish government, namely the Irish people, signed up to the Troika agreement. The people didn’t have a say in it. In my opinion, it was rushed. I have looked at it and we couldn’t have survived without the bailout, and the bailout was part of the Troika agreement. I always try to put it in simple terms. If I go for a loan of €2,000, and I have €200 income and if the manager says to me, ‘I can’t give you €2,000 because you’re short-falling €50, but come back to me and show me where you’re going to get the extra €50, and I’ll give you the loan’. It’s no different to what the country signed up to. We had to show where we were going to get extra money, and we were only going to get it out of our own. I’m not in favour of the household charge, but I would be slightly comfortable that it was a once-off, a flat charge.
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