Michael Burke formerly of Templemore Co. Tipperary Ireland, I served 42 years in Defence Forces. All opinions by me are personal to me. RT not an endorsement.
SIR ALAN BATES - THANKS GOD FOR THIS MAN. EH.
In 1998 Alan Bates and his partner Suzanne packed up their lives in West Yorkshire and moved to a small town in North Wales.
They put everything they had into a post office. Every penny. Every hope. A future they had planned together.
Two years later the software started lying. Money appeared to be missing. He called the helpline 507 times. He kept going. He kept records. He kept asking.
The Post Office's response was simple. It wasn't the software. It was him.
In 2003 they sent him a letter terminating his contract. No reason given. He lost £65,000. Everything he and Suzanne had invested, gone. Their private notes about him, revealed at the public inquiry decades later, described the situation with devastating corporate elegance. He had become unmanageable.
That is what they called a man asking why the numbers were wrong.
So he did what any reasonable person would do after losing everything to an institution that called them a liar.
He spent the next 25 years fighting back with nothing. No legal fund. No media empire. No government support. Just a burning refusal to let them win.
He wrote letters promising his continued and increased resolve to bring this to people who would have no choice but to act, regardless of how many years it took.
It took 25.
While he was fighting, at least 13 people who had been through the same thing took their own lives. People who couldn't hold on long enough. People who needed someone to believe them and found nobody there.
While he was fighting, the Post Office and its lawyers billed £265 million in legal fees between 2014 and 2024. Making sure the truth stayed buried. Making sure men like Alan Bates ran out of road before they ran out of fight.
He didn't run out of fight.
He rejected three compensation offers he considered insults. He watched an @ITV drama turn his life into a television event. He watched politicians suddenly discover outrage they had been too busy to feel for two decades. He watched the country cry at a story it had been ignoring since 1999.
In June 2024 they gave him a knighthood. Twenty-five years after calling him unmanageable.
In November 2025 he settled his compensation claim. He received 49.2% of what he was owed.
No executive has been charged. Fujitsu (@Fujitsu_Global) still holds government contracts. The Post Office (@PostOffice) is still standing.
This country failed Alan Bates for 25 years. It failed every person who could not hold on long enough to see what he saw. It handed him a title instead of justice and called itself generous.
He deserved better. They all did.
Teach this man in every school in Britain. Not as a feel-good story. As a warning about what happens when ordinary people trust institutions that were never built to protect them.
And as proof that one person, with nothing but the truth and the stubbornness to keep saying it, can make an entire country look at itself in the mirror.
Even if it takes 25 years to get them to look.
Sources: @ComputerWeekly | @BBCNews AND many others
“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…”
Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share.
This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating:
“Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight.
A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money.
A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive.
A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy.
A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages.
You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth.
More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea.
In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything.
They’re simply too poor to afford bail.
Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening.
Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s.
Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends.
Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years.
Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you.
And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster.
And you call Greenland badly governed?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world.
Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment.
‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’
When exactly was that, champ?
September 11?
Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU.
Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU.
Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years.
And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess.
You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy.
So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan.
The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth.
And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”
@JamesHeartfield There is one thing for sure if the police in Spain tell you to move out of the way and you think you know better then your asking for trouble.
جنود إسرائيليون يلتقطون صورة تذكارية مع طفلة فلسطينية مختطفة !
الصورة المنتشرة كانت وجوه الجنود مغطاة، لكن أحد الأشخاص استطاع الوصول إلى الصورة الأصلية .
أفضحوهم !
An Israeli female soldier COCKS her rifle at Palestinians, YELLS, THREATENS and FORCES THEM OFF their land in the northern Jordan Valley while preventing them from filming.
She feels “empowered” because she has a gun pointed at UNARMED CIVILIANS.
This is what TERROR looks like.
@buff_egan Even as a Tipp man 11 steps is not on... referee gave a poor display across the game .... tried to even things up during the game by giving soft frees on both sides. After last weeks display I had fancied this Clare team to win.
Just to reiterate, they won a tracked armour competition coming from a country that didn't procure any tracked armour for itself.
Something to think about.
The problem with Irish Defence isn't the people in uniform.
Imagine how successful they would be if properly equipped.