Mops sweated brow...

Phew! That was a close thing. Well no, not really a close thing – a win by nearly  20%  isn’t close. At the same time, I thought for a while there that that damned Adams and his crowd, not to mention that stuck-up amadan Shane Ross, between the pair of them and the Cusack love-child with a face on him like a cherub with crow’s-feet  – between them I thought for a while we were for the big drop. I did, as sure as I’m standing here I did. The heart was cross-ways on me – it’s bacon-slicer time, says I to myself.  If we hadn’t produced the goods, Angela would have had my arse for breakfast. But thanks be to the dear divine God and his blessed mother we’re home and hosed, that’s the important thing. I know we could have done a Lisbon and run the whole thing again if nip had come to tuck, but that’s a last resort. Wedon’t want to keep using it too often or people might notice.

Hogan, the big baldy culchie,  was all for a public victory bash, give the troops an arm round the shoulders and a pat on the rear for all their efforts, but I told him straight I was having none of it. Hogan reads too many bloody papers telling him he’s the real head honcho and is the man that pulls my strings. Well let me tell ye, it is I,  An Taoiseach, that’ll be doing any pulling’s  in need of doing around here. I move on a different plane and the sooner that big latchico gets that straight, the better. And I know lepping about shouting yee-ho only gets up the noses of the ones you’ve beat, and by God they don’t forget. “Get you in the long grass” is what that brings on you. So far better, says I to myself, far better do  the dignified restraint thing. In public, that is. In private is another matter. Once we got the door locked and the curtains pulled on Friday, Fionnuala and myself were doing somersaults and high fives and a number of other things I’m not going to discuss.  Just let me tell you, it was only mighty. Pure mighty.

I’d half-intended to invite Gilmore over, have a kind of discreet  hooley, make as if I actually like the little gobshite.  Only after watching the way he conducted himself during the campaign, I made damned sure I didn’t stand within so much as a hundred yards of him.  Didn’t he spend most of the campaign leaking support, losing practically every voter he ever had to those bloody Shinners? You’d think by now he’d have worked out how to get the upper hand on his erstwhile comrades but no, he let Mary Lou and that schoolboy one with the glasses, Peadar Toibin, run rings round him,   rings I’m telling yeh.   And  him turning purple  on the television when he couldn’t think what to say next.

Anyway, thanks be to the dear sweet Jesus and his divine Mother, the whole thing is out of the way at last. From here on we can cut  cut cut, and none of them can blame us for we’ll just point at the Treaty, it’s the Fiscal Treaty, lads, ye voted for it and ye got it. It’s the ones in Europe are playing the financial tune entirely now, it’s the Germans are doing the sums, so don’t bother blaming me any more.

God, I think I’ll sit down for a bit,  the oul’ heart is hammering. Post-traumatic stress,  it must be. Here, would one of ye get me a double whiskey.  And isn't it the mercy of God we'll have no more voting for a couple of years itself.

Getting mad about the jubilee badge

I’m back. And I was barely awake this morning when I found myself on the  Nolan Show, Radio Ulster/Raidio Uladh discussing the latest piece of local absurdity. It seems Tesco issued some Royal Diamond Jubilee badge to its staff in Britain but didn’t do likewise here. OMG – the INSULT of it. The CONTEMPT of it. There were callers saying they’d never shop in Tesco again (it’s called cutting off your nose to spite your face). Gregory Campbell – a man I like – was on saying it was absurd to have no Tesco/Jubilee badges here, because “everybody” here was agreed about celebrating the jubilee. Crikey, Gregory. Gisssabreak.

Tesco’s make decisions on purely commercial grounds. What will sell more stuff, what will keep the customers happy? In Britain, for reasons best known to themselves, most people seem to think that giving the job of head of state via genetic roulette is a good idea. Here, however, QE2 is, waking and sleeping, a constant source of joy to some half of the population, while the other half get a pain their tender parts just thinking about her. So Tesco  don’t want to go doing something that might at best irritate and at worst outrage half the population. Not good business, that. So they decided to just skip the badges-for-staff thing.  Eminently sensible, I’d have thought.

But no. There were chaps ringing in saying any staff that wanted to wear the jubilee badge should wear it, others who didn’t shouldn’t bother. Mmmm. Sound like a great recipe for division among staff and for identification of the unionists from the nationalists/republicans at the check-out.  Hardly the stuff of harmony. Another guy wanted to know what was my problem with Protestants and why couldn’t I “let Protestants live”. I hadn’t said a word about Protestants and wham bam, here’s this guy David telling me I’ve got a shocking down on the prods. Pu-lease, David. Some Protestants I like, some I can’t stand. As is the case with Catholics. But this is politics, remember. And all I’m saying is, Tesco made a good decision by keeping their stores here jubilee-badge free.  If David or anyone else wants to dance in their street because QE2 has been on a throne for 60 years, fine. Although do keep in mind,  she never would have been where she is only her uncle cleared off with that weird-looking American woman.  But  that’s how monarchy works – they allow women (or have allowed: I gather it’s going to change)  to pull on the crown when they’ve run out of men. And of course I’m hugely cheered by the  possibility that if I can get a sufficiently high-up royal to marry me,  the fact that I'm a taig will be no bar on my royal wife getting her rear-end lodged in that throne. As it would have been in the past. A major worry removed, I promise you.

Like I say: it’s a weird system, royalty.  Tesco’s, on the other hand, have one sole aim: to separate you from your money. So don't take the non- badge thing  personally,  guys ; it’s only business.  

Walking and repenting

Apologies, blog-readers - I'm off walking the Compostela de Santiago in a futile attempt to purge my many sins - will be back and annoying by the start of June at latest.

Keep the faith

Jude

Donegal and Angela

I was in Donegal at the weekend and I asked a man how he planned to vote in the south’s up-coming referendum. “Well,” he told me, “ if  Sinn Féin say no about something, I  say yes”. This man grew up in Donegal, lives in Donegal, works in Donegal.  That’s Donegal, the county that’s been neglected perhaps more than any of the twenty-six counties by succeeding governments. Even during the boom years, I remember another Donegal man’s lip curling when I mentioned the Celtic Tiger. “Well if there’ s a Celtic Tiger about, he hasn’t come up this way”. Except that he added at least four expletives as emphasis. Now that boom has been replaced by bust,  Donegal is experiencing what it’s always experienced, only to the power of ten. 

What to do? Well, you’d think that Donegal people, of all people, would declare themselves mad as hell and not prepared to take any more.  Uh-uh.  As the man made clear at the weekend, sometimes people cast votes on the basis of blind loyalty or antipathy. He detested Sinn Féin, so no matter what argument they advanced, he was agin it. 

Maybe it’s understandable.  Economic matters – and the Fiscal Treaty is definitely about economic matters – are sometimes hard to understand. Junior bond holders, senior bond holders, the IMF, the EFS, the markets – it makes my head hurt. So it’s easier to fall back on personality and prejudice for or against when you’re asked to make a decision. 

They were trying to get beyond all that on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics on Sunday night. Eamon Gilmore was explaining that the Fiscal Treaty was all about stability and growth, Gerry Adams was saying that the treaty would sustain not growth but  austerity for the next twenty years. “It’s like saying ‘We’ll end this famine by starving the people’ “ the Sinn Féin president said. 

The central plank in the Eamon Gilmore argument for saying Yes was that it would mean the south would have the option of going back for a second bail-out if needed. Gerry Adams claimed that the south would still have access to bail-out funds  even if it voted No, because the south of Ireland would still be in the eurozone, still be in the EU, and Europe wouldn’t be prepared to risk the contagion that an Ireland starved of funding would present. 

Who’s right? I don’t know. But I do know that Fine Gael and the Labour party ran their election on the charge that Fianna Fail had sold out on Irish sovereignty, by doing the deal they did with Europe. Now that they’re in power, Fine Gael and Labour appear intent on passing total control of fiscal policy to Europe. In other words, Europe in the shape of the German government will tell Ireland what its budget should look like, what sort of gap there should be between spending and borrowing. What’s more, the south’s government, supported by Fianna Fail, will surrender to outside powers what’s left of Irish fiscal sovereignty, and they’ll make sure it stays that way by cementing it into the constitution. 

Maybe they’ve got it right. Maybe we are headed for a United State of Europe, and part of that would have to be uniformity of spending and borrowing across the EU. Maybe John Hume’s post-nationalist era is about to dawn.  But shouldn’t the people of the south be told that? Don’t they deserve to know that Pearse’s dream of an Ireland of equals, freed from outside interference, is over?  That 2016 commemorations will be about looking at how totally out-of-date Padraig Pearse’s thinking has become in the course of recent years? And how the coming referendum, if voted through,  will be the visible sign of that out-of-dateness?

Here,Frau Merkel,  lock us up and swallow the key, would you?  We know it’s for our own good because our government has told us it is. And one thing we’ve learnt since the general election is, our government never tells lies.  

On being hurtful

Two interesting soccer-related pieces in today’s Irish Times.  Davy Adams  (a good man, in my experience,  and a good writer) has a go at James McClean, not, mark you, because McClean has chosen to play for the Republic of Ireland, but because of his reasons  for so doing. Davy goes into some detail about McClean saying  that Derry is “a nationalist city, where everybody supports the Republic of Ireland. You’re brought up that way”.  Davy says that’s a wrong thing to say – a “hurtful barb” according to the piece’s headline – when around 18% of the city probably wouldn’t support the Republic. And as for McClean saying “as a Catholic, you don’t really feel at home in the Northern Ireland squad” – well, Davy figures that the IFA “bends over backwards to ensure that Catholic players in particular are made feel welcome”.

Come on, Davy. Give us a break. You know exactly what McClean meant – he meant “All my mates and neighbours and all the people I hung around with and played with – we all supported the Republic”. And you know the IFA is bending over backwards to welcome Catholic players because so many of them, for a range of reasons, are heading south.  If McClean didn’t feel at home in the NI squad – and he did play for them at youth level – there must have been some justification for it.  Maybe check with Neil Lennon?

The second soccer story is about the fact that the Republic of Ireland  team, when they play Italy in the Euros next month, will wear black armbands to commemorate those who died in the Loughinisland massacre. Remember that?  Several UVF gunmen entered the Loughinisland bar, where patrons were watching the Ireland vs Italy game  eighteen years ago to the day,  locked the doors and then went round the bar killing Catholics – six of them, the oldest being 87-year-old Barney Green. The gang knew they'd be Catholics, because they were watching a game involving the Republic.  Nobody was ever charged with the crime, and many of the families of the victims are convinced the RUC investigation destroyed evidence and that there was a strong smell of collusion.

As I say,  Davy is a good man and I like him; but when it comes to soccer and hurtful, he just doesn’t get it. 

Body parts: talk about a cover-up.

Eh? Surely I misheard: the PSNI have been storing ‘body parts’ since 1960? When questioned they  refer to these bits as ‘human tissue’ but the fact remains that they’ve been storing parts of people – arms, legs, even skulls. Of course there was no PSNI in 1960, so it was the RUC that did most of the storing.

Now we’re told that these bits were to help with investigations and that the PSNI are really sorry and are busy informing the relatives of those whose parts they hold. I’m baffled. Why do you need to hold onto an arm or a skull to help you with an investigation? And an investigation of what sort of crime? And how come none of this was mentioned before now?

Let’s be honest: the police put the fear of God into most of us. If you see one of them  when you’re driving along, your heart does a skip and you stab at the brake pedal. If one calls to the door, you answer with a sense of foreboding: what have I done, what’s gone wrong, omgwtf?  What we need to do is remind ourselves – and maybe more importantly, remind the PSNI – that they are our servants. We pay them. So if you’ve got a servant who, for whatever reason, has been storing body parts, shouldn’t you have been told? Even if the part doesn’t belong to a relative of yours?

I keep checking the date but no. It’s not April 1. 

Joey Barton - he's for real

I've been trying to decide why I like Joey Barton. I know I shouldn't. He's a generally vicious man, if the accounts of him off-field and on are accurate; and his performance in that final game against Man City didn't cover him in glory. First an elbow in Carlos Tevez's face, then a kick at the back of Aguero's leg, then efforts to head-butt  Kompany, and finally an effort to get at Mario Balotelli.  Mr Mayhem, you might well say. And yet and yet.

I think it's the fact that he's real that makes me like him. On TV,  it's all handshakes and playing hard and be a good loser at the end. None of that crap for Joey. Every so often he makes it clear just how he feels. You may be sure Tevez exaggerated that elbow in the face AND he delivered one to Joey first;  that kick didn't exactly cripple Aguero, as his stunning last-minute goal showed; Joey never did get to  head-butt Kompany and he was never nearer Balotelli than twenty feet. He says he was trying to get one of the Man City team sent off with him when they retaliated (which they didn't), to even things up, which makes sense if not good sportstmanship. And as for his comments on Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker - wooo-hooo! At last someone has come out and said what the Match of the Day pundits are really like  - boring and sanctimonious and matey to the point where you want to heave into the toilet bowl.  Old Joey just put into words what lots of people were probably thinking, except it would have been a hanging-offence to bad-mouth two such idols of the great British public. And that bit about having better hair AND better shirts on TV than Shearer - looooved it.

Good old Joey - the football world would be a drabber place without him. He's the real deal.