HOME Tuesday, 21 January 2003

On TV3 news last night, I saw a recording of the last section being placed on top of Dublin's Millennium Spike. "Plain as a pikestaff" never better described an object. At first sight, it looks like nothing more than a vertical pipeline, and any casual visitor from another country must have wondered if they were hallucinating, or had somehow wandered into a Bosch painting. Two million Euros spent on something that doesn't even have the distinction of being ugly, a tasteless monument to tastelessness.   Most people being interviewed, however, seemed to be pleased with the monstrosity, only one man voicing the opinion that it was a waste of public funding which could have been better spent on something more useful. But, like everything else in this dammed country, the voice of sanity was drowned out by the prattling of the brain-washed.   The thing was not paid for by city council funds, the money having come out of a Millennium fund handed out by our idiotic government, for millennium projects all over the country, still it is unacceptable that €2,000,000 should have been spent on a pile of junk while people sleep homeless in the streets. Why couldn't it have been used to shelter and feed them? The answer, of course, is that no one would have noticed such an action and it would not have stayed in people's minds long enough to sway their votes. Public representatation, it appears, has become an end in itself.   Any public representatives, worth their name, should make sure that all citizens are comfortable and secure before erecting such a monument to their bloated egos.