Mind the austerity gap.
Darragh Quigley writes:
‘Why do you use a food bank?’ asked the nice, well meaning, well spoken senior policy adviser from the ‘left leaning’ think tank, over coffee, paid for by another senior policy adviser.
For once lost for words I mumbled something about not having any food left before my dole comes through and and that I didn’t have any food sometimes.
What I didn’t say was, what the fuck? Here we have a person who advises on public policy who through the way in which our society is structured has never had to sit down with some body surviving on the sharp edge of the public and political policy he advises on.
…This cultural divide along monetary and gulf in life experience is where the ‘Ah shure it’s just an extra few euro a week.’ Mentality comes from. People so deliberately and in an incredibly calculated way were shielded and still are protected from even having to glimpse the ‘vulnerable’ way of life.
Hands up how many middle class people knew the college Joan Burton visited on that faithful day in Jobstown is also a food bank? Hands up who’s seen someone cry after being handed a tin of beans, some yogurt and pasta at a food bank? Hands up who told them they have done nothing wrong and it is a spiteful, shameful society who fucked up there, not you.
…This is how austerity works, quietly, efficiently and hidden behind economic policy and political decisions: live are destroyed, but slowly and strategically while firstly stripping people of all pride and dignity. ‘They’re less likely to fight back that way.’
At the height of a suicide epidemic what does the government decide needs to go? The bereavement grant, young men don’t usually have life insurance. The most vulnerable, private, sensitive moments offer no escape from the constant suffocating pressure of austerity. The kind of pressure which goes unseen, when the stress and turmoil we all experience with a bereavement also involves anything from not being able to afford clothes to simply not having the money for a funeral.
…The officer class desperate to believe the recovery narrative, terrified to look the cold hard data and facts in the eye. Austerity has failed, for us, for the 80 people who own half the world’s wealth, media, and exert huge political and economic power, it has been a fantastic success. Its also ideology, austerity is a belief system there is no ‘science of economics’ behind it.
Even economists don’t believe the austerity model, as discussed with Bill Black at Kilkenomics only about 10% subscribe to that school of thought, i’ts a way of thinking which is rewarded by our society and those 80 or so people who own half the worlds wealth.
Economists, academics and journalists have been kept in tenuous positions and easy to control. The herd behaviour our great commentators fretted about ended up applying to them, too afraid to question the dominant ideology they went along with the gang. With The Irish Times reading like a string of middle class people afraid to lose their jobs, fall through the cracks and end up in the public system.
Austerity restructures society in such a way that policy makers can’t even conceive the effect of their policies…(more at link below)
Why do you use a food bank? (Dara Quigley, Degrees of Uncertainty)
(Rollingnews)
Dara is a beacon of light with her writing. Met her a couple of times and can say she is an honest person with a heart of gold
Well put
“At the height of a suicide epidemic what does the government decide needs to go? The bereavement grant, young men don’t usually have life insurance”
The bereavement grant was PRSI-related so people, mostly elderly got it irrespective of income but young men probably wouldn’t have the contributions to get the €850 payment so point doesn’t hold (other points do). However, under the exceptional needs payment scheme, assistance is provided for funeral expenses to those with low incomes. Over 3,000 in 2014.
And not having lived long enough to pay the needed amount of tax should disqualify someone from a dignified funeral?
This is our problem.
One always receives praise for condemnation of ‘society’ or ‘the system’ or the government.
Once the conversation moves towards what we can/should actually achieve, we all seem to lose interest. Or worse.
Austerity has effectively been imposed upon us because our creditors demanded it. The choice to leave ourselves so exposed to the market had implicitly been made years before.
If you follow the link there is a suggestion re promissary notes. Frustration with the lack of a cleay articulated alternative is on both sides of da divide.
And the whole post growth economic model thing, seeing as we are already a post growth economy.
That’s a lot of verbiage there, Dara. Perhaps if you turned your hands to writing freelance blog posts at $30 a go, instead of complaining, you’d be able to buy an oul slab of koka noodles to see you through grim week 4.
The hatred of the poor by the blushirts is soo strong.
You’re sooooooooooooo cool and edgy!
That’s what you took from that? Your support of the blushirts is fairly strong, methinks.
+1.
Sorry Dav, just finished a hard day’s (highly paid & taxed) work. Sorry could not respond earlier. You might remember that concept, work? That thing you did briefly before you became a full-time edgelord?
Yeah, deffo a sneering blueshirt. Tuppence ha’penny, probably has everything on credit but thinks he’s rich.
Hates the poor for being poor despite not connecting the dots and admitting that blueshirt policies like allowing NAMA to sell thousands off houses and apartments to US vulture funds instead of transferring to ownership of County Councils to rent to tenants is one major cause of homelessness in Ireland.
It’s a criminal scandal that should see people in jail.
I’d like to see Blueshirts locked up.
Supercrazyprices : 2edgy4me I’m afraid. All I own (mostly mortgage free, mostly positive equity), I earned myself. I have no political leanings. I’ve nothing on credit. Some people are successful, your and Dav’s “class” envy is showing. It’s a closed shop to you because you don’t work hard enough to afford anything in it. I hope you can understand, a little less begrudgery goes a long way.
Do you have two or three international caps too?
Sorry Freelance. Wrong there.
I am entirely mortgage free having bought my house many years ago and well paid from my own very successful company. And I went to one of the right schools as they say. I just don’t believe the system is in the slightest bit fair or democratic.
I am best placed to know exactly what I am talking about. And your use of that good old Irish word “begrudgers” is entirely misplaced. That off the shelf put down to all and sundry doesn’t excuse those who knowingly perpetuate the exclusion of capable people just because they’re not from the old set.
I was blessed with excellent parents who gave me a respect for the important things in life and that success does not equate to material possessions. I pity those who do think that because they eventually realize it’s wrong and usually too late.
Beautifully, emotive written piece. As someone who has worked all his life as a community /youth worker, people like Dara make such a wonderful difference. The decision makers don’t care, the majority of them anyway.
Vast majority even.
Unfortunately austerity works for the people who are lucky enough to keep their jobs. And it works by forcing people out of the country so lowering the unemployment rate. So while a country is run like a company(cut the bittom line) austerity will always be used.
I was lucky enough to keep my job, austerity still doesn’t work
You kept your job, you didn’t become homeless, I assume, or starve. So while like me your wages might have been cut, your obviously in a secure job in economy that is slowly improving. So yes it worked for you.
@Anomanomanom is that the merrion square diktat that i read??
It’s fact.
Yes for all the people who kept their jobs and/or their homes, austerity worked a charm. Everyone else didn’t just let themselves down, they let austerity down.
You SO didn’t get my point
Now, now don’t be making a liar out of Inda or you be accused of “taking down the economy” or he’ll be wishing aloud that people like you kill themselves, just ;like his hero bertie did.
THat’s the problem with this country, we keep on electing the same self serving scum into office & they keep on making the same mistakes…
“& they keep on making the same mistakes”
Ah but they are not mistakes. They are deliberate self serving acts. They just don’t serve the state or society.
Rate of suicide hit a peak in 2004, well before celtic tiger collapse and austerity came in.
http://www.rte.ie/news/investigations-unit/2015/0309/685748-suicide-the-figures/
But lets not get facts in the way….
I’m not a doctor but 2004 was also the year of Keane’s debut album.
:)
Ha!
Maybe the rate of honesty about suicide reached a peak. Irish suicide figures have also been massaged; it’s considered kind to the family to conceal the fact that someone chuir a lámh ina bháis fhéin.
We all know that recorded figures and stats are absolutely correct and can in no way be corrupted by prejudice or bias, and can therefore be considered ‘facts’ and are incontrovertible. People and organisations would never take such liberties with information like that.
Confirmation bias – if the facts don’t fit your argument, then the facts must be wrong.
Granted, there was a historical reluctance to class a death as suicide for cultural, religious reasons, but that was a while back.
The data is compiled by the CSO who are just number crunchers.
http://www.rte.ie/iu/suicide/
There is obviously a huge amount of hurt and pain in the country, I’m not downgrading that. The issue of suicide is complex, not one that can always be thrown in the face of a government. Sometimes people make decisions that only they know the reason why.
Rates of suicides related to austerity particularly in working class areas. Like the mystical recovery austerity was not evenly shared. Some people lost their car, others a string of mates as they do tend to start a domino effect. Just another cultural difference.
Gullah – source?
Just Google, Austerity and suicide, far more capable than me have done the studies..or wait until this nags at me and I go dig up the links. Meanwhile, reality awaits.
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2015/dec/14/shrimp-sold-by-global-supermarkets-is-peeled-by-slave-labourers-in-thailand
i was extremely troubled by this when i read it this morning. the production of food, essential to life itself is a disgusting industry in many parts of the world. for food to plentiful and cheap here it costs lives somewhere else. and this is the issue with austerity, it erodes the ability to sustain life to maintain a profit for someone else. it has to stop, simple as.
Economists, academics and journalists have been kept in tenuous positions and easy to control. The herd behaviour our great commentators fretted about ended up applying to them, too afraid to question the dominant ideology they went along with the gang. With The Irish Times reading like a string of middle class people afraid to lose their jobs, fall through the cracks and end up in the public system.
Great paragraph. The tone that emotes from the Irish Times these days is one of writers hiding their fear behind much talk of food and lifestyle – the typical middle-class palliatives against self-doubt at the ultimate futility of one’s life choice.
hiding their fear behind much talk of food and lifestyle
Sorry, also forgot to refer to the mutual backslapping following print’s belated discovery of twitter. More experienced twitter users look on with mild pity as Times, Sun Times and Indo writers tweet to their twitter followers about how good their colleagues’ articles are, making obvious the self-referentialism at the heart of all of these publications. What’s to buy a paper for when all it consists of is a .1% of not very attractive, interesting or clever people essentially writing by and for one another?
What Sib said
+ Darragh
“hiding their fear behind much talk of food and lifestyle”
Just an idea but maybe stop reading the food and lifestyle section then if you don’t like it? Jesus christ, some people just wouldn’t be pleased unless all the papers were wall to wall misery.
The sneering of the middle class on here is exceptionally dull. Its as if certain posters, who are probably middle class themselves but prefer not too see themselves as such, think that the MC like nothing but frivolous consumer banality.
Vote Rep
Food and lifestyle is just a manifestation of the malaise that runs throughout the whole Irish Times these days. Put another way, it’s not last Saturday’s magazine, which is basically on how cook a turkey (who knew?), it’s what led the Times to go turkey to begin with. There’s a desperate clinging to smugness, a need to justify a world that they find essentially unsatisfying, that permeates every piece on that paper. It’s not necessarily any more unpleasant than the whiffs that come off the Sindo and the Indo, but unpleasant nonetheless. Why read? Well, at the moment I find it interesting to watch the essential vacuity of self-appointed irish decision makers becoming more and more apparent, it is a newspaper that shows where we have gone wrong. Once it has done it’s task in that regard though, I think it will have very limited relevance.
@Vote Rep
On the middle-class thing, I think what is becoming increasingly apparent in a society which has spent the last twenty years desperately aspiring to perceived ‘middle-class’ status (private schools, cars, BT2, handbags etc.) , is that the price to pay for that status isn’t worth the cost; however the Irish Times isn’t reflecting this and is sticking to the party line that everyone’s desired goal must be this status. I use ‘middle-class’ to refer to this aspirational status (kind of an Irish version of Ralph Lauren, with variations for country and city alike), I’m sure it’s possible to come up with a better word!
The economy of this country, and many more, has a vested interest in promoting consumerism. As we are structured today, we need consumer spending. Dismantling that is not as simple as removing vacuous commentary from the media, it requires serious introspection on who we are as people, and what we want to achieve, not to mention a huge shake-up in how we employ people and remain a productive society that can look after itself.
Also, why are the middle class consumerists purely responsible for poverty and deprivation? Why is their no criticism of the working class for buying new cars, or going on foreign holidays, or for reading the sports pages while their neighbours starve?
It’s all part of this idea that there’s some magical closed shop of people looking out for one another, a private members club that can be accessed by going to the right school and knowing the right people. And this isn’t true. The comfortable class in Ireland maintains itself through a parental attitude to education, passed on to children, and hard work at their careers.
It’s not a closed shop, unless you close yourself to it in your mind. It’s a decision to tell your child to remain in school. To expect them to expect more for themselves. To say “I will support you, by hook or by crook, in getting your life started” instead of “You’re 18 now, you need to be handing money up”.
Yes, it’s more difficult to do this from a position of lower wealth, but the state can only intervene so far, and does so through grants (and with it, no registration fees for college), supplements etc. We could certainly add more, but those that need it have to want it too.
As for why the ‘middle class’ closes their eyes and ears to poverty? It’s because they fear it, or they don’t want to know, or they have their own problems. That is a human response, not driven by their bank accounts or incomes.
It’s a closed shop Ronan.
I had to go to the food bank when I was a teen after my parent’s divorce. it’s an experience you don’t forget. Everyone’s middle class in their heads until they’re standing in line for government-issue cans of beans. It’d do these policy advisor/consultant/food critic nobs well to experience it sometime.
Why the attack on the middle classes?
Its generally an attack on the middle class by the middle class who think themselves above it. Its as if the fact that the majority of the middle class are just trying to get by means that they just don’t feel enough and so be sneered at and looked down upon.
It’s really the professional class to be more precise. Lots of people are ‘middle class’ but have no influence in policy and decision making. Professionals perpetuate institutional attitudes to social division and education apartheid. They hire people from the same schools and Universities they went to because they share the same ideologies and background. The same divisions continue generation to generation. The same clique hold on to their wealth and influence and as they say in Blackrock college ‘keep it close’.
Division and social apartheid is deeply embedded in Irish society and it’s roots are in private schools, The Catholic Church who run them and the main professions they feed into.
Jaysus. Worse chip on your shoulder than Mr. T.
Fastest way to get one Irishman to hate another is to tell him the other fella earns a fiver more than him.
here ya go https://degreeofuncertainty.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/they-tried-to-bury-us/
Its not an attack on the middle class but rather an understanding of the sheer effort, time and money which has gone into dividing the two classes is something we should acknowledge.
It is getting to a dangerous level of frustration from people who are not seeing their day to day reality depicted realistically in the media. When a massive section of society doesn’t have a voice and is constantly ignored, things like 100,000 workin’ class people shutting down the city with democracy happen.
Here I wrote about that too, it’s no attack, people from different backgrounds with a different set of formative and social lens shaping experiences. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that is the case, with <6% of Coolock progressing to 3rd level and even a difference in life expectancy. It comes with a different culture, dialect an set of cultural responses. So what?
The problem is that section of society has been the one to historically take all the hits, we can't take anymore. The great watchdogs of morality have been pretty quiet or only allowed exist because they are so utterly useless. So as citizens, we have rights but we also have responsibilities and one of those is not implicitly accepting the status quo of over 30% of kids in food poverty and food banks in our communities.
This economic model is called the road to Bangladesh, takes about 15 years so unless we're all happy following this model which by design takes a first world country to a depopulated 3rd word state. We better get working together on a credible alternative.
We're already a post growth economy if you take away the delusion of the shadow economy, just without the egalitarian, cool bits.
Lets try that instead of the ritual suicide thing.
Great piece, I helped set up a Foodbank in London a few years ago and Dara has hit the nail on the head, especially around the complete lack of comprehension by bureaucrats of the real hardship and misery their policies inflict on people.
“the complete lack of comprehension by bureaucrats of the real hardship and misery their policies inflict on people.”
There was a story only last month where David Cameron chastised Oxford County Council for considering cuts to elderly day centres and libraries without considering the fact that Conservative cuts to county councils are what caused it.
” People so deliberately and in an incredibly calculated way were shielded and still are protected from even having to glimpse the ‘vulnerable’ way of life.”
Yep.
Here’s a perfect example of that –
KFC from New York the other night.
https://www.broadsheet.ie/2015/12/12/de-sunday-papers-138/#comment-1497338
He’s nauseated by something… something to do with homeless people blaming the government it seems.
KFC –
“Nauseating. I don’t understand people who think every single problem in the country is down to the government wanting to kick homeless people while giggling.
If my shelf falls down I don’t blame the US government. I’d never want to think of the government as a second set of parents.”
I don’t mean to be picking on him, but I really can’t understand that type of thinking.. you can only help yourself so much when you can’t afford the rent and the landlord wants you out.
To be fair, my impression from reading KNYC’s comment is that he is attacking an attitude whereby a well-off, well-educated, well-connected member of society moans in a lazy, ill-thought out way about the problems of society.
Few people have more of a bully pulpit than Brendan O’Connor – depressing as that may be. IMO he generally abuses that position (with the odd article which bucks the trend) to write irresponsible nonsense.
Heya Anne
My point (probably badly made) in general is that it’s too easy and lazy to just point at the government as the ‘bad guys’ for all of society’s woes when it’s been proven that the most they can ever really do is keep the train (mostly) on the track, provide a clumsy social net and deal with maybe one crisis and a half at any one time. Anytime a bad news story happens, we point fingers and expect that the government could have predicted it and that Mammy and Daddy Joan and Enda need to protect us from nasty life 100% of the time.
Oh, and we refuse to help them do their job better, always moan, don’t ever want to pay any more taxes and treat them like subhuman scum for not being miracle workers. It’s childish, simplistic and lets everyone else in the country off the hook. As if voting for someone at an election absolves us of all responsibility for the world around us.
There should ABSOLUTELY be a strong safety-net for the disadvantaged, screwed-over and downright unlucky. But the majority of the screwed were probably screwed over by the fellow Irish citizen who then tut-tuts in agreement with the ‘sure isn’t it terrible’-type drivel written in the Sindo.
Well said, Kieran.
“People so deliberately and in an incredibly calculated way were shielded and still are protected from even having to glimpse the ‘vulnerable’ way of life”
How, exactly, are people being shielded in a calculated way? There has been multiple stories of hardship, of homelessness, of not having enough to eat in the mainstream media for the past 7 years. There has been prime time debates with stories from the audience?
The author of this piece is understandably irate. No-one should be without food or shelter in this day and age, and yes society has failed. But that’s not a now failure, that’s a failure in how we structured things, how we allowed a boom. It’s a failure of 30 years of policy, not 6 years of auserity.
As for austerity failing, and being an ideology, that’s hogwash. The goal of austerity has been to balance the books, get back on a self-funded footing, while avoiding running out of cash as a nation. There has been no ATM restrictions, no public servants waiting months for pay. The show has been kept on the road. Austerity, while having many victims, has been a success, and restraint will bring further success into future years.
What’s deplorable is that policy makers have decided to give tax breaks 1:1 with increased spending, when they spent years applying 2:1 spending cuts over tax take. Any budget wriggle room should have been applied completely on services.
Now that we’re getting into the black, as a nation, we need to start sensitively looking at our problems, starting with the increased rate of poverty and deprivation.
+1
Excellent.
We’re not in ‘the black’ have ya glanced at the deficit lately? We were actually having coffee and that same advisor had great advice for the dept of jobs. Who had found recent employment data ‘too complex’. Weekly sampling of orsi data should show the majority of jobs created are low pay, no rights zero hour contract types.
I agree with you on the 60 years but even the fact that ya reckon the media has successfully reflect the reality of child and food poverty is testament to the fact that yup yes were protected. A lot of people weren’t and were sacrifice. As you say addressing inequality and poverty needs to happen and soon. Before its not people like me but ones who will cynically play on fear and anger. As for austerity being ideology, take a quick glance at thwcresults of QE. Even Bill Black.dat world famous economist, the piece ‘Gullers travels go to kilkenomica’ goes thru it. We already a post growth economy. Just Google finfacts Irish government understates recession job losses.
Budget deficit will be eliminated more or less in the next two years.
Government debt levels is close to hitting 100% of GDP, down from 120-something%
Have ya seen the debt to GDP ratio? Or any measure of debt? Well suppose nationalising our debt technically, in an off books’ kinda way…nah sorry buddy dats delusion even the IMF an FT will back me up there.
https://twitter.com/daquigles/status/563733356656222208
https://twitter.com/daquigles/status/563648037495771136
Yeah Ronan, the proletariat think that sounds really smart and informed because it’s well structured and argued.
But the reality is this: Austerity is a transfer or wealth from state institutions and the population at large to private enterprise and the banking sector. It was done by economic blackmail via the Troika who offered high interest loans with strict conditions which were designed to break state control of markets and services. It forced higher taxes on the person to pay the loans which were used to bailout the banks.
It was also designed to break the labour market and subvert the power of unions. The press played a major part in that by dividing public opinion and putting sectors against each other, like employer V employee and public V private sectors, working V middle classes. The Indo was at the forefront of that and still is. Jobbridge was a key tool in pushing down salary expectations and the devaluing of work and even professions.
The privatization of public services is driven by the likes of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan who ‘advised’ the Irish government on how to manage the crisis which they were part of creating (subprime, derivatives). Their goal is to establish international utility and services companies around the globe by stealth, bit by bit. Health service is their big target here as well as water infrastructure. The PR battle is being fought for them by again, the Indo and other media such as RTE and internationally by pro-banking media groups.
This in an international ideology of financial control of governments and people and it’s undermining society. The wealthiest who benefit don’t care because they can relocate, travel at short notice and protect themselves wherever they live form the consequences of their actions. The vast majority will find their struggle to provide getting worse as the years go by. The middle class as we know it is ceasing to exist.
The next big struggle or revolution if you want to call it that will be global and between the ordinary people (which includes you Ronan) and the very very few who control the legal and financial frameworks on which everything will exist.
The biggest obstacle to success for the majority is those among them who think they’re part of the upper echelons because they think owning a BMW makes them special.
Joan’s fav photo op is at a food bank.
Good article Darragh. You should see if you can get it published on journal.ie and compare and contrast the comments.
If Fine Gael spent as much on reducing poverty as they do on salaries to the goons who comment here on their behalf……… if only!
I think the article is a bit unfair on the policy adviser. This is someone who, like the author said, makes decisions on public policy. It would be a bit ridiculous if said person just based policies and their opinions on their own thoughts on the topic – they have not had to use food banks, so they ask what kind of situation you need to be in to use them. Good researchers question – why do you use a food bank, how often, what would the alternative be for you if the food bank wasn’t there. These questions and the answers are used to inform policy (e.g. surveys, gathering of qualitative data).
That was myself, notice how I didn’t name the guy as like poor Cormac Staunton in “The minotaur and the house boy: Noonan Bae of PIIGS. The guy was not conducting research he genuinely couldn’t understand why I’d go to a food bank rather than borrow money. This then involved explaining that all those loans of a score dried up about 4 years ago. That is the cultural divide I was trying to highlight. Its not his fault its a natural human response his set of life experiences and social group have never put him in touch with somebody in that situation. This gap however is dangerous and its time it being the centenary an all to get going on dat egalitarian society.
I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect rationality in foodbanks, where people exchange their dignity for food.
Dignity is not exchanged for food. Nobody who understand dignity would say that.
Oh am I supposed to lose the head? Sorry for ya. A food bank is where people exchange the result of economic and political policy in exchange for food.
Nice1 for highlighting the whole ‘shame and fear of poverty’ thing bud.
Some of the cuts made during austerity horrific and damaging as they were happened due to a complete lack of alternatives.
Other cuts were made by comfortable unionized public sector workers protecting other comfortable unionized public sector workers, convincing themselves that it work ok the go after the soft, voiceless, vulnerable targets as opposed to having any kind of honest scrutiny on the completely distorted relationship between the value they bring to society compared to their grossly overinflated salaries and pensions. The political party in power was to some extent irrelevant. Public sector will always minimize cuts to their own first and foremost.
So no-one in public sector had a pay cut? Really?
The cuts taken by public service workers were in the ha’penny place when compared to the swingeing, unjustifiable cuts made to the supports and services provided to the vulnerable and voiceless in our society. They felt able to do this exactly because the people whose lives were devastated by these cuts were poor and had little in the way of organized representatives or access to media outlets and politicians ears when compared to the massive, well funded machines of the public sector unions with their communication consultants and professional lobbyists.
For a significant majority of the Public Sector the cuts taken were little more then a figleaf to hide behind while those in genuinely difficult circumstances in our society had the very little they were so dependent on taken away from them.
Policy maker asks a service user for their opinion and you think they are terrible for not understanding your situation. Joan Burton visits a deprived area and she gets attacked by those who give out that their areas are ignored. God help then next person who tries interact with the less well off.
+1
It was a social interactions between equals discussing a talk we had just been at and how the dept of jobs would find the data a lot less ‘complex’ if they sampled weekly with prsi data.
The question and subsequent expainations served to highlight the gulf in formative and life experience between the experience of the problem and the people who attempt to solve these problems. An ya know da whole absurdity of dat situation.
Although the fact that you differentiate between ‘person’ and ‘less well off’ does say an awful lot.
How come Darragh Quigley can use the F word spelled eff you see kay and we get edit-fupped in the replies?
Do you really need that explained?