HOPE VLAD MAY BE ON WAY OUT

Posted on 1st April 2023

So daffodils abound and my large rhododendron has erupted in a blaze of colour. I’m home after a week in hospital and went to give a hug to my favourite copper beech. I see the race to fill the slot to host the Late Late Show has been widened to include Jennifer Zamparelli.  She was terrific on “Dancing with the Stars”.  How she would fare grilling the Taoiseach I don’t know, but her emergence as a candidate brought a smile to my face. The Late Late still holds an important position in Irish broadcasting. I hope they make the right choice.

The view of Slane Castle from the hill

So daffodils abound and my large rhododendron has erupted in a blaze of colour. I’m home after a week in hospital and went to give a hug to my favourite copper beech. I see the race to fill the slot to host the Late Late Show has been widened to include Jennifer Zamparelli.  She was terrific on “Dancing with the Stars”.  How she would fare grilling the Taoiseach I don’t know, but her emergence as a candidate brought a smile to my face. The Late Late still holds an important position in Irish broadcasting. I hope they make the right choice.

However, in the grim world we live in, Spring may see the start of the long-awaited Ukrainian offensive against Vlad the Bad. This week the Ukrainians hit a key logistics hub in Melitopol. The city is 55 miles behind the Russian front line. They used the Himars rocket system supplied by the Americans. This could signal the Ukrainian’s aim to cut the Russian’s land border to Crimea. It may be difficult but it would be wonderful to see the Ukrainians retake Crimea. Such a victory, should it happen, could well spell the end of Vlad the Bad.  The Russian leader may not have been amused by a leaked telephone conversation between Iosif Prigozhin a music producer and Farkhad Akhmedov an Azerbaijani-born energy billionaire. In the call Akhmedov calls Putin “Satan,” “a wimp” and “a dwarf”.  He says he, “doesn’t give a damn about anything” and “doesn’t give a f *** about the people”.  Prigozhin says: “They’re criminals to be honest, criminals of the worst kind.”  He says Vlad the Bad, “squandered the country away” and: “There won’t be any future for us.”  If these remarks are illustrative of sentiments circulating amongst the Russian elite, Vlad the Bad may be in serious trouble. Combine this with the loss of morale which clearly exists amongst the Russian troops and you could find his regime starts to collapse a lot quicker than NATO has anticipated.

From war in Ukraine to bickering in the Dail.  There was never going to be an election, nobody wants to go to the country, not even Sinn Fein.  However, there is no question that the government needed to be called to account.  Like many, I fail to understand why, if they were going to lift the Eviction Ban, did they not have mitigation measures in place.  Nobody wants to see families made homeless.  When the scale of this emerges, I predict people will be shocked.  Fine Gael in particular will suffer.  They have been in power for too long and this results in complacency even arrogance.  This government displays a fundamental weakness and that is a lack of a sense of urgency, most particularly with regard to the housing crisis.  The flaky Greens and assorted Independents have held for the moment but the clock is ticking.



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