Just another thank you from Ireland for your great blog, you fill a very perilous info gap over here. Reading about all this makes me both really mad and also afraid but in a wierd way it keeps me sane – probably beacuse its such a relief to feel your having a reasonably in depth discussion of this stuff rather than the 'pat them on the head, tell some white lies' approach we seem to have over here. Vincent Browne has his heart in the right place but he does not have the detail necessary to back his views alot of the time, and so he is too easily dismissed as jus tthe token lefty opinion column.

Thanks again and if any other Irish readers are around you can count me in as someone who wouldn't mind chipping in to get David over here to talk.

Great vid – but the response of the Irish media to that would be that the bail out is for the schools and hospitals, that only a small portion of that is for the banks (25bn out of 85bn I think they said) and that the banking portion is just going to be kept as a reserve of some sort and will probably never be drawn down.
I myself am now so confused that I don't know if the public spending deficit is due to
a) original bail out,
b) loss of tax revenues due to the implosion of the construction industry,or
c) becuase Irish workers priced themselves out of jobs by stupidly thinking they deserved to eat in the cafes, drink in the pubs and rent the apartments, that were only put there for visiting bankers?
I don't know and the Irish press has moved on from asking the new line is were here – deal with it. The new focus is private vs public sector and Fianna Fial vs their slightly more responsible twin Fianna Gael. Anybody still talking about the banks is portrayed as just not getting the fact that we have to have a 'fiscal correction'.
Sadly we don't have anything like a fourth estate here – more like the Dail Mews. There is little to no investigative journalism apart from the odd, after the fact, doc. 90% of what's written in the Irish press could have come striaght from the FF/EU/FG joint press office with tthe kind of careful rewording that you might do in college when you're trying to make it look like you're not blatantly palgiatising on textbook.
The Irish press actually has the audacity to chastise the nation for living above their means when they have been constantly championing the idea of Ireland as some sort of Orange County, E.U. for the past ten years. In their lifestyle and property sections they tried their best to convince you that everybody who wasn't a loooserr had a house with four bathrooms, a rental semi-det and kid fitted out in Abercrombie & Fitch from the de rigeur December trip to New York.
The crap they peddled made the people who could hardly afford the scandalous rents and inflated prices of everyday items feel marginalised and left behind and those are the same people who are now being made to pay the most % wise in this EU/IMK dictated budget.

Sorry I am beginning to just rant about everything so I'll stop – just wanted to give you a feel for the response your vid would get here

http://www.neweconomics.org/press-releases/who-will-tame-the-giant-vampire-squid

if I managed to copy your link correctly

If you imagine the voices of Eric Idle and John Cleese you have a Monty Python sketch.

How can something so creepy also make me laugh out loud.

Just got home but had to watch. Like Jamie said, – It didn't disappoint.