Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Verona Murphy at the opening of Ms Murphy’s by-election campaign offices in Wexford town last July

This morning.

Via Irish Independent:

Fine Gael’s leadership didn’t know its besieged candidate Verona Murphy was also at the centre of bullying allegations made by a female worker.

The party is embroiled in controversy over its by-election candidate linking migrants with terror group Isil.

Despite concerns within the party about Ms Murphy’s views, Tánaiste Simon Coveney gave a significant show of support yesterday by campaigning with her in Wexford.

Ms Murphy is the president of the Irish Road Haulage Association (IRHA). Last year, the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) found an office manager at the IRHA was penalised for raising concerns of alleged bullying by Ms Murphy and others.

The female worker, who is in her 60s, raised a bullying and harassment complaint against the president and claimed Ms Murphy “took umbrage against her for raising such concerns”. Ms Murphy denied the allegations.

Fine Gael sources said the party knew nothing about the matter until now….

Meanwhile…

Fine Gael ‘in dark’ on bullying case against besieged candidate Verona Murphy (irish Independent)

Earlier: Dan Boyle: An Epitaph To Epithets

Top Pic: Wexford Today

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41 thoughts on “Due Diligence

  1. class wario

    Much like the Tories in the UK, it’s fascinating to watch a party suffer endless, terrible, incompetent PR and still end up with a sizeable chunk of votes at the end of it. Recent posturing by Leo about Noel Grealish made to look totally toothless, the Verona Murphy hole being dug deeper and deeper, FG happy to stand by this dope as long as she’s a likely vote winner. She’ll still end up romping home.

    1. V

      No she won’t

      the favourite to win the seat from even before the writs was FFs Malcom Byrne anyway
      Who can now expect a decent boost thanks to Verona’s big trap and the party of Government’s attitude to voters by tossing any oul’ candidate in front of them

      1. Otis Blue

        FG seem lamentably bad at strategy and the ‘business’ of politics. Yet they retain a vast army of strategists and advisors. Any idea what any of these clowns actually do?

        1. V

          This is a By-election
          And traditionally it’s the non- Government candidate (s) that prosper

          Fine Gael are playing a long game having already announced a General before they moved the writs for the four By-elections
          They weren’t going to risk any bright young thing they have hopes for in a November By-election

          Besides Malcolm Byrne had a great run out in the Munster EU Constituency so he was always be the front runner in his own back yard no matter who they put up against him

          Like why would they spend money or carry risk in a race they were never going to win

        2. Gabby

          @Otis Blue: I think the paid strategists and advisors do what it says on the label: they strategically advise and advise strategically. Unstrategic and ill-advised voters get what they deserve. Opinion polling company shareholders smile all the way to the bank.

      2. GiggidyGoo

        Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if George Lawlor hit the jackpot here. He’s one of the few running that is involved in worthwhile community organizations and one of the founders of Marine Watch. As well, Labour tend to top the polls regularly in Wexford. In a normal election Labour wouldn’t get 2 in, but in a by election he has an excellent chance.

        1. V

          I’d love to see George Lawlor take it
          And seriously expected Labour to do better in the locals but they ended up going head to head with the wave riders in the Green Party
          However they did make the few gains that the SocbDems should have

          But since then they’ve lined out their GE candidates
          FFS all the ould wans again
          Average age 65 I’d say

          So they’ve sumped themselves serving themselves
          Again
          The Irish Labour Party
          Same as they ever were

          But George Lawlor is a decent candidate
          But then
          So too is Malcolm Byrne
          Who I expect to take it without any sweaty counts

          1. GiggidyGoo

            The green wave was a media-created fad. Not a chance of anything green getting a sniff in Wexford.
            George Lawlor has high visibility, and in community groups. I doubt Malcolm Byrne applies himself with the vigour that Lawlor does. On top of that, had Mick Wallace not gone to Europe, and there was no by election, Lawlor may have had to wait another few years for Howlin to relinquish his seat. This opportunity to elect Lawlor does form the basis for Howlin to ride off into the sunset and hand over the Labour reins in Wexford. An opportune time.

          2. V

            Hardly a media created fad
            When they topped the poll in the Dublin Euros and took a second seat in South out from an incumbent
            Or the locals where they went from 12 Councillors to 49

            In any case, the voters are in charge now
            So let them tell us who’s right or wrong

            Malcolm collected a respectable circa 8.5% share of 1st Prefs in 2016 there
            And 9ish in May
            I fancy his chances next week

      1. Janet, I ate my avatar

        do you think he has a problem with migrants per se ?
        I don’t from his comments,
        I think he has a problem with mismanagement of integration

          1. Janet, I ate my avatar

            I genuinely would never have come to that conclusion from some of your comments,
            but we have already had that conversation ;)

          2. GiggidyGoo

            I think it’s fair to say that you are quite prepared to break the rules and law, as you admitted not too long ago – so don’t come a-preachin’ brother.

          3. GiggidyGoo

            We sure have had a few conversations Janet. I do wonder what benchmark you and others set to determine what’s racism and what’s not though.

        1. some old queen

          Of course I don’t have a problem with immigration as long as it is properly managed and people are given a chance to become part of their new home- single figure ratios per community- but it is a bit more than that.

          I have a huge problem with the Left playing the race card at every opportunity and attempting to silence debate with derogatory slurs. 90 odd % of applicants are not from war zones, they are mainly young male economic migrants and similar figures have their applications rejected- and yet, the number deported is marginal- this is fact. That is not fair on those who are genuine cases and it is not fair on the local communities.

          I see where this is going is all- when you get to a situation, real or perceived, where immigrants are being treated better than indigenous, things can only go one way. It is only a matter of time before something or somebody like the NP get voted in- and then, the Left will have nobody to blame but themselves.

  2. :-Joe

    Get real folks, F-f/g know full well about her past…

    The only reason there is such a huge swell of support is because she has her greasy fingers all over the haulage system and guarantees support to the establishment. Unfortunately for the haulage workers it looks like they badly need a proper strong union system to deal with this facist, authoritarian, ignorant, racist, bullying-buffoon and the establishment behind her.

    If she wins, great for F-f/g. If she loses, who cares it’s still great because they have her and her ilk on their side anyway because they satisfied her ambitions and supported her to the end.

    Welcome to your new and improved blatent out in the open for the public’s full viewing please… Oirish dystopia.

    A 21st century psychadelic facist binary choice polemical illusion of democracy manged by an undemocratically elected puppet for the gender-fluid, ultra-woke, techno-slave generation.

    – I’m convinced F-f/g pushed him to the top to use his race and sexuality as a curtain to distract the masses into thinking they were the modern progressive future of Ireland. Pull back the curtain and look what you find… Just like the illusion of race relations with Obama’s “change” on the outside it’s all status quo on the inside. Oh, dear it was just a rebranding excercise. At least Obama was somewhat, democratically elected and every big evil corporation from coca-cola to cambridge analytica must be taking notes from this pr-spun Oirish political marketing success.

    Anyway, before I digress any further.. Your dystopia is created by all of you who tolerate the 60%-ish eejits who keep voting for the F-f/g establishment for privatised profiteering from public funds while abusing and neglecting everyone else below their bubbble in the top 20% in Oirish society. The burden lies at your feet to transform these eejits into ordinary sane functioning useful members of the human race.

    Austerity, sufferning and pain for the public and unbridaled greed and averice for the establishment political class layer up through the banking layers and beyond to the corporations and billionaires who may as well be extra terrestrial aliens for the distant association they have from any real human being of the 99.99% majority of the planet.

    On the subject of racism, migrants and migration in general.. Arm your mind and your pens(pc’s smartphones etc.) and have your argument well thought out and ready to state the facts and crush the spread of ignorance, fear and hatred before it can grow into anything else.

    Here’s my basic weapon against the stupidity of the always punching down, mostly fear but often racist hatred, immigration rhetoric…

    IMMIGRATION IS NOT A REAL PROBLEM. You have been fooled all along but now you know.
    So there, that’s one less thing you didn’t really understand but can now forget about anyway.

    -No need to thank me. You’re welcome all the same. Glad to be of some help. You’re free to focus your attention on something else.. anything else you wish.. no, stop, I said anything else… STOP!…

    Ok good.. It’s sorted.. Now you can have a treat because you are super smart and you learned to change. The whole world and the human race is proud of you..Well done you.
    – Most of it all goes back to child psychology.

    Or If that’s not for you, maybe this kind of thing is more useful…

    Esther Duflo – Nobel Prize Winning Economist –
    “You have no reason to fear low-skilled migration”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1pZfFY132Q

    Jeez..that was a long one.. time for a cuppa..

    :-J

    1. some old queen

      If I say that I would prefer Hindu Indians to Muslim Pakistanis- am i racist or just some old queen who has been around a few blocks?

      1. some old queen

        Sense of belonging ≠ racism or homophobia or whatever extreme left and right claim- it is an identity- a culture- outsiders welcome- but in moderation- and with respect.

        1. :-Joe

          To reply to your second post…

          You just need to erase this notion of “swarms” and “floods” of migrants “coming to take your jobs” or “rape your daughters” etc etc out of your mind…

          One incident in Germany or another one somewhere else and a tiny fraction of less than 1% of migrants are illegal and so, it should not even register in your brain as a real problem at all.

          It’s all bullshit propaganda used as a tool to manipulate your emotions for nefarious ends and it’s bad for ye.. as George Carlin used to say..

          BTW.. If you use gurgle YT or facederp then you need to delete your accounts and switch to DuckDuckGo.com and Firefox or Brave(If you prever Chromium) for browsing.

          Any new online account should be created for each seperate service with fake details to obfuscate your personal identity and data away from those who are manipulating you through granular targeted digital advertising and psychological profiling.

          It’s not as difficult or as tedious as you might think, after a few weeks you get used to it and you feel better knowing you are being a lot less violated by corporate power’s evil filthy tentacles..

          :-J

          1. some old queen

            I have no notion of swarms but I am well aware of the impact a couple of hundred immigrant young men can have on a small town because I see it locally on a regular basis- where women and girls are afraid to walk the streets of their own town at night- this is not propaganda- this is real.

            And, like most others I am perplexed as what the hell is going on in Sweden where bombs are now a near daily occurrence. You cannot transplant large numbers of people from a very different culture without fiction and without the creation of ghettos- just look at some of the suburbs of Paris.

            I use Brave and Duck Duck go btw- I am well are of the privacy issues.

            Something you might ask your tech guy to have a look at Bodger- there is no edit function on this site when using Brave?

      2. :-Joe

        I don’t see a problem saying that e.g. you like Jamaicans more than Swedish people, surely that would just be a personol opinion or preference? I can’t see how that would be racist. No?

        Same with Hindu vs Muslim.. maybe you just prefer one superstitious belief in a supernatural celestial male dictator god moreso over another.

        It’s a bit like a controversial joke, context adds a lot more to the meaning otherwise the words can be misinterpreted or misunderstood quite easily.

        Most of this is down to experience and a lack of it in the case of fear, hatred and racism.
        I’ve met and got to know loads of Muslim Pakistanis and Hindu Indians and they’re all sound and/or just as daft as the rest of us.

        I can barely remember religion being mentioned at all but to be fair apart from some really interesting conversations sometimes about cultural differences and experiences living in Ireland etc. half of the time it was at 4am in a local late night Curry restaurant after a skinfull…

        :-J

        1. some old queen

          Religion is directly relevant- the difference between Hinduism and Islam is that one is a religion while the other is an extreme right wing ideology- the difference is so stark that it spit a country into the two of now India and Pakistan.

          It is patronising to tell people they are been taking in with right wing propaganda when it is full on from both sides- one of which- DOJ- is just not doing their job. Explain to me why we have such a high number of asylum seekers from Pakistan this year but not India?

          1. :-Joe

            At a guess, more Pakistanis because of more poverty and social turmoil maybe and/or possibly randomness or coincedence in a specific timeframe of the last year etc.

            Many people are taken in with intentionally incendary comments that would be classed as morally right-wing political propaganda for the purpose of stirring anger up and fomenting hatred with people who are even worse off than themselves. Keeps them busy from finally losing the plot with the politicians and the bankers etc. Simple tactics that have been going on like this for hundreds of years. No?

            I’ve seen you comment on Islam before but I don’t agree with you. It’s a monotheistic religion of about 25% of the planet’s population spread out over multiple countries and different cultures and societys.

            Extreme right wing fundamentalist Islam would be something like Wahabism which is the ideology resposible for 911 etc. and a lot of the other insane goings on exported from the hard line archaic primitive-minded and fundamentalist culture of bedouin desert people of Saudi Arabia.

            It’s a very broad, loose and offensive statement to just label all muslims under islam as idealogues believing in right wing extremism. It’s a bit like saying all catholic christians tolerate child abuse by the rc churh.

            Take these public intellectual and pseudo-intellectual speakers for example like Sam Harris and that f-ing eejit jordan peterson who talk a lot about this and while Harris investigates the logic and thinking behind Islam( from science as a Neurosurgeon and Religion as an atheist ) from how these ideas develop at it’s root and raises many interesting points or ideas but both of them are essentially slapping each other on the back in their bias against islam being somehow more extremist or worse than any other religion.

            Harris is more intelligent than Peterson on all this. Peterson is an absolute fraud and obviously a morally conservative(I would say with mildly far-right extremist tendancies himself but it’s not that obvious).. catholic with skin in the game and a lot of psycho-babble and bizarre ideas and colourful fantasies to hide behind too.
            Both of them are right about some things and wrong about others imo. Stopped clock etc. more in the case of peterson.

            Religion is daft but if it didn’t exist we would have had to have invented it in some form, we were just not evolved enough to cope without it whatever evolutionary biological reason it comes from? In a way atheism is kind of pointless because you can’t just ignore religion entirely and be anti-religion because it’s too deeply intertwined with cultural history and literature for example. Maybe in a couple of hundred years it will fade out.. but what could or will replace it if anything at all?

            Islam aint going anywhere soon… but more and more people are declaring themselves as atheist thanks to efforts by the Dawkins project on spreading atheist ideas for free online which is a good thing to help to dilute the consciousness and for other ideas to spread inside more closed-minded religious cultures.

            TBH I really don’t like talking about religion.. cause I have no real difinitive clue what to make of it all but I can say nobody can prove it either way and a belief without proof is a superstition. I’m not supertitious because I don’t feel a need to be afraid of ideas, stories and things I don’t fully understand.

            Speaking only as a quasi satanist pagan who only would worship or believe in the earth, sun and stars etc. maybe Mars too when they open up a few good dive bars…

            :-J

          2. some old queen

            @ Rob_G- there is those labels again- is it so wrong for a gay man to object to importing an Ideology which is extremely homophobic? And don’t take my word for it- go read about the problems young gay Muslims in England have when they come out- in the main they are ostracised. Over 50% of Muslims in Britain think that homosexuality should be made a criminal offence again- where is the progressive thinking behind that?

            @:-Joe- there is very little difference between the economies of the two countries- both have extreme poverty although granted that the likes of Hyderabad is doing very well in the tech sector. I am just asking why so many from one country and not the other is all.

            Of course not every Muslim is an extreme right winger but when the likes of Qatar and Dubai is funding mosque building in Ireland, one had to wonder where it is all going.

            Islam ideology it is inherently right wing and far more in common with the old school RC or the Christian fundamentalists up north than the Left who are championing it here.

  3. Steph Pinker

    I heard the tail-end of an interview with Denis Naughton on Drivetime earlier and he’s proposing cutting off social welfare payments to parents whose children miss 20+ days of school p/a without attestable reasons such as medical issues etc… He never mentioned a word about penalising parents whose children aren’t on social welfare – seemingly, working/ middle/ upper class children don’t have the same issues as those reliant on social welfare, consequently, they [must] rarely miss classes due to illness, bullying, hunger, homelessness, poverty, substance abuse, absentee parents etc…

    I was in a school where every month, some of the nuns’ favourite pupils were allowed spend 3-4 days in bed because they were menstruating and in pain, whereas the rest of us had to take some Disprin and get on with it – those more favoured pupils were truants but because they had wealthy influential parents their behaviour wasn’t classed as such. I’m not surprised at all to hear a former FG TD spew what he did, I’m just surprised he’s not still with the FG party (it is a party after all and they’re all on the gravy train!) because the disdain and contempt shown towards the less fortunate in society is beyond my comprehension; they really do represent the wealthy and elite within our society. I wouldn’t be surprised if he ran as a FG candidate again, the election campaign and associated propaganda doesn’t pay for itself after all.

    I am not advocating any child missing class unless absolutely necessary, but to impose financial penalties on those who need assistance and support the most is sociopathic and counter-productive. There are many reasons why children can’t/ won’t go to school – let’s focus on that and investigate why.

    1. Cian

      Do you mean social welfare payments that parents get like Child Benefit?? Which, for the avoidance of doubt, is available to all parents (well mothers).

      1. Steph Pinker

        You know exactly as to what I’m referring, especially considering you’re working at taxpayers expense from a FG troll farm 24/7.

        Why don’t you get out in the real world and do some volunteer work in a soup-kitchen, or offer to help with the homeless/ sick/ elderly/ needy members of society, instead of spending your middle age on BS defending the indefensible imposed by your FG masters?

        You can start tonight – unless you suffer from a sticky mattress, that is.

        1. Rob_G

          He was referring to child benefit – here he is in quote referring specifically to this payment.

          Not at all sure what your unpleasant experiences with the nuns decades’ ago has to do with children attending school today

    2. :-Joe

      Yep, more casual classism to add to the daily casual racism that has become the norm for the establishment..

      The F-f/g establishment for averice and greed are the equivalent ot the tory clowns in britain.

      Unfortunately we don’t have a strong enough opposition to this but it’s on it’s way. My guesstimate is that It’ll probably take about another five to ten years or at least two to three election cycles for it to appear as we used to be about twenty years behind any political change in britain but I think that timeframe has halved and when Corbyn get’s elected and starts to end austerity, people in Ireland will hopefully demand the same.

      We’ll probably have to go through some brexit style calamity in the process to shock the average voter out of their sleepwalking pattern of mental paralysis though..

      :-J

    3. GiggidyGoo

      Naughton also came up with a phrase saying that overall ‘we’ had a duty to the state finances. Mr. Courting McCourt has me in stitches when I heard him coming out with that one.

  4. GiggidyGoo

    Today’s lesson for Verona.
    Never have your photograph taken beside a photoshopped election poster.

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