I never had any time for snitches.

South of the border, Social and Family Affairs minister Mary Hanafin has been showering them with praise. In the North, social development minister Margaret “The Snitch” Ritchie holds them up as model citizens.
I can remember the days when being talked of as a snitch could get you tossed into the river. But, sadly, standards have since declined.
Hanafin has been gloating about the number of stool-pigeons she has persuaded to back-stab their neighbours for blagging a bit extra from the social welfare. Apparently, more than 500 finks ratted out fellow citizens in the first two months of this year. 
Ritchie boasts of a record rate of convictions in 2008 as scoundrels squealed on neighbours trying to make ends meet by topping up their entitlements. “It’s heartening to see that professional thieves are being brought to account,” she snarled.
Professional thieves? Many of my best friends have diddled the dole in their time. Some still do. None became rich. It’s impossible to become rich doing the double. The best you can hope for is an easing of anxiety, a little bit of slack.
One reason for the rise in the incidence of treachery is that both ministers have installed telephone tout-lines which allow anonymous wretches riven by resentment to make malicious calls against citizens who have done them no harm.
There’s no hot-line for touting on the shysters, skunks and Seanies who have been robbing the plain people blind for decades.
I’d say that any family man or woman on basic benefits or minimum wage who doesn’t at least try to fiddle a bit extra is behaving in an irresponsible manner.
There should be a hotline set up for exposing the lowlifes recruited by Hanafin and Ritchie to do the dirt on decent people. Name them and shame them, say I, so society might shun them.
Make poverty history. Out a tout today.

The main threat to peace in the North isn’t dissidents but deprivation.
If the anger of those left behind by the peace process finds no other outlet, it will be siphoned into support for groups with a presence on the ground and which promise to hit hard against authority.
This is nothing new. Young people in Glasgow Celtic jerseys and runners with bricks in their hands were Gerry Adams’ most fervent followers down the days when his IRA was doing what the RIRA, the CIRA etc. are doing now. For the rioting and recruitable classes, life since the Agreement has not been getting better, but getting worse. And the recession has steepened the slide. You don’t need statistics: just a walk through Carnhill in Derry, Ballycolman, Strabane, or Kilwilkie in Lurgan.
This is far from a full explanation. But any explanation which leaves it out is inadequate to the point of uselessness.
In Northern Ireland, the main threat to political stability arises from the unequal impact of likely economic collapse.
Nationalist and Unionist parties are mad keen on equality between the communities. But when it comes to fairness on the economic front, they turn aside. In fulfilment of the Agreement, they needs must act together at Stormont and on local councils to impose job losses, wage cuts, the shredding of services, the harassment of the old and the young unemployed. None will tell the Treasury to sod off when it orders, for example, the reinstatement of water charges or pressure on lone parents to take any shit job they are offered. None says – Try it and we will rouse the masses against you. This would require them to exit the Executive and mobilise people in opposition to the political consensus and on a basis which has nothing to do with the community they come from – which would run directly counter to a system constructed around the idea of communal identity.
What’s needed to secure lasting peace is not defence of the Agreement but a clean break from the politics underlying the Agreement.

Muntazer al Zaidi should be made journalist of the year.
Muntazer is the man jailed for three years last month by an Iraqi “court” for having flung his shoes at the war criminal Bush while uttering the immortal words: “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog. This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.”
Unimpeachable sentiments mellifluously expressed, I am sure all will agree.
Muntazer wasn’t just an angry man who had lost his temper. He was a journalist who had had enough.
Sami Ramadan wrote in the Guardian: “He reported for al-Baghdadia TV on the poor and downtrodden victims of the US war. He was first on the scene in Sadr City and wherever people suffered violence or severe deprivation. He not only followed US Apache helicopters’ trails of death and destruction, but he was also among the first to report every sectarian atrocity and the bombing of popular market places. He let the victims talk first.”
Now the quisling Baghdad regime and its glove-puppet courts have silenced him.
The Istanbul makers of his distinctive shoes have sold an extra 500,000 pairs since Muntazer’s moral lob. I hope it’s true that royalties are being amassed for presentation when he emerges.
And he should surely be a shoe-in for world journalist of the year when next the media gong-shows get under way.