Conspiracy theories in abundance from here to America

Date Published: {J}

It is an absurd conspiracy theory. I do not believe that any deal was made on a golf course between the Taoiseach and Sean Fitzpatrick of Anglo-Irish. It's ridiculous to hold up this chance encounter as the smoking gun that proves they were in cahoots.

You don't need meetings to work out which side bread is buttered on. Cogs in a machine don't have to talk to each other. Government had been working in the interests of Anglo-Irish in particular and reckless property speculation in general for years before that. That was where all the money was coming from. The money that was keeping them in power. Not to mention the percentage that was finding its way into their own personal lives, apparently by sheer osmosis. The reason we need to get Fianna Fáil out of government forever is not that Brian Cowen was a naughty boy. It's because the whole FF political machine has become rotten to the core.

There's not much to add to that, so let us turn to the strange things going down in America. When someone attempts to kill a Democrat State Governor, especially in this brittle political climate, the natural assumption is that they're a gun-hugging Tea Party extremist.

Confusingly however, Loughner appears to be just a plain nut. One must be careful not to blacken the name of the insane – he has not, it seems, ever been diagnosed with a mental illness – but his personal ravings have that familiar paranoid sound.

Which is sort of a disappointment really. When someone goes on a killing spree it would be nice to have an explanation. We want something bigger and more important than one young man's distorted fantasies to share the blame – the weird upshot being that Loughner's insanity actually seems to make him more personally responsible.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.