oh no the meedja are out to get bertie

the times today has a selection of letters from people who seem somewhat irked that journalists and papers might dare to question the taoiseachs receipt of £30,000 from his landlord (???).

standard pooh-poohing that you tend to get from party hacks or from true believers, with plenty of illogical rubbish masquerading as some kind of opinion.

letter writers 1 and 2 try to imply that it's unimportant and implore the times to get back to real issues like health, crime, education, blah, blah, blah....

letter writer 1 tries the sob story approach, bertie's being ''hounded'' by vincent brown, the break up of his marriage and so on. (is that a violin i can hear playing mournfully in the back round?)

letter writer 2 says (this is the best)....

i am sick and tired of reading about bertie's £30,000 sterling (equal to weekly wage of a premiership football player) during this election.

equal to weekly wage of a premiership football player? is that all? trivial, laughable really, ha ha ha. not really worth worrying about then is it? but then i remember that 30,000 sterling is around 40,000 euro give or take a few thousand, and that's not adjusted for 13 years of inflation. that works out as one and a half times my yearly salary (at least) so no i don't think it's unimportant or trivial.

letter writer 3 thinks the coverage is unfair and unbalanced, bertie shouldn't be questioned on it 'cause kenny didn't get 30,000 from his landlord, so kenny can't be questioned about money he didn't get so it's unfair.... or something. anyway it's unfair.

i used to think that these kinds of letters could only be written by party members as damage control, until i got in a conversation in a pub (i know) with a guy who thought that this story was all down to the fact that the irish media wanted to like the british media, media peer pressure if you will. and nothing else. needless to say i wasn't convinced by that hypothesis.