Seven Sins of England? Is that All?

Way back when I was a pretentious teen in the late eighties there was a show on bbc2 called “three minute culture”.

It’s thesis was that our attention spans had shrunk to 3 minutes as that was how often we changed the channel on the TV. And that was back when the majority of people only had 4 channels, imagine how short they are now?

‘Scuse me, I’ve got to go play second life for a while.

Sorry, where was I?

Oh yeah, I was saying that I never really took the thesis of that programme all that seriously. Everyone watches TV, but if medical students only had a 3 minute attention span it’s hard to see how they could remember those 15 million words of text they’re supposed to learn (according to a movie I once saw).

The makers of this programme including the smug Canadian presenter Michael Ignatieff might have looked at the research more positively and seen channel-hopping as a sign of intellectual curiousity rather than laziness. It could be argued that globalisation has made our lives into one big channel-surf where we don’t know where we’ll end up next. Who’d have thought Gay Byrne would end up as road safety commissioner? There’s a Black Swan for you.

Hang on, I’ve got to check my hotornot score.

7.9. Not Bad.

Anyway, as I was saying, channel hopping may not be a bad thing. I was doing it last night, and came across some fascinating juxtapositions. I started watching a show called The 7 sins of England which posited a theory that the drunkenness and rascism that blights England right now is nothing new. This wasn’t any news to an Irishman like myself, we were being bludgeoned to death by English thugs centuries before they went on cheap flights to Bratislava. Even though the show which juxtaposed (I like that word) quotes from the past about working-class English loutishness with erm, scenes of contemporary English loutishness was well done enough, it seemed to miss a fundamental point, which is that the violence of the English working-class was utilised for hundreds of years to build a massive empire, only to be turned in upon the country itself over the last 60 years.

It might come as news to those colonel blimp types who’ve been complaining that those hostages in Iran were soft that the English working classes are still ‘ard. They’re well fuckin’ ‘ard. And some of them aren’t shy about showing it. One yob said the difference between English people and the rest of humanity is that they speak their minds more freely. Qué?

While the ads were on (one of those 7 sins is consumerism, ironically enough) I turned over, first to RTE1 where Paul Durkan was talking about his own drink problem, which oddly enough led to him writing poetry rather than smashin’ peoples fuckin’ ‘eads in. Then I surfed over to BBC2 where another legacy of Britain’s imperial past was being discussed.

It’s always amazed me that the Brits seem to think the problems in Northern Ireland are the fault of “The Irish” as if they had nothing to do with it. One home secretary described the principality as a bloody awful country, and he was right, but it was a bloody awful country they created by forcing so many Scottish mountain thugs to live there. They served their British masters well by building the ships they needed to conquer the world, but as soon as the empire was under threat they were ready to give the 6 counties back in return for an abandonment of our neutrality. We’ve since sold that to George Bush, but that’s by the by.

It didn’t stop the unionists from tattooing union jacks to their heads or shouting abuse at the pope (Nice man? Are u serious, TB?) for most of the time since, even after a Guardian poll showed most people in Britain didn’t want the north in their country any more.

Right now, though, it seems the unionists have finally realised which way the wind is blowing and that the anachronism known as the UK is finally going the way of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. It’s really unrealistic to imagine a rump state of northern Ireland clinging on to the UK with a tiny loyalist minority while Scotalnd tries to break it’s umbilicus with England.

Nevertheless, it’s going to be causing England a few problems for a while, looking for half a billion quid to get it back on it’s feet, much to the consternation of Paxman.

Me, I just shrug my shoulders and wonder why they got involved in Ulster in the first place, as with Iraq today.

Tennyson once said that he wished Ireland could move into the Atlantic. Well, Al, much as I like the Lotus Eaters I think we’re a bit unfortunate to live next to the most rapacious thugs on Earth as well. That their anger is now turned in upon themselves is a matter of huge relief to me.

Mr. Hobson goes to the Polls

In my last post I criticised the Irish media for being too supine in it’s response to the very plausible accusation that our benevolent leader may be the son of a cop-killer.

It would have made interesting reading for the Taoiseach if he was on to pay attention to anything my family had to say.

Apparently Red Ahern was at a function to honour the composer of the Fields of Athenry a few years ago, ironically as it’s sung by supporters of his least favourite soccer team, the one appearing in the Champions League Final for the 7^th time, though that’s by the by. Anyway, my great-uncle, who taught the composer at school, was also there, and it turns out he comes from the same area of the country as Dirty Bertie.

My Uncle did some extensive genealogical research into the then finance ministers ancestry yet found himself cruelly snubbed by Ahern, who decided the person on the other side of him would be more help on his way up the greasy pole.

Unlike many of the things Bertie has done this was neither illegal nor greatly damaging in the greater scheme of things. My uncle is hardly the only older person to be shafted by this administration. Yet the incident does demonstrate in microcosm the colossal arrogance of Bertie and his coterie. He may like to present himself in heavily photo-shopped posters as someone in touch with ordinary people and in soft-focus interviews as someone who likes nothing more than to go out with his mates from Drumcondra.

But politicians have a different concept of friendship to the rest of us. All of us are really there for our friends when we need them, but very few of us would choose our friends as coldly and as ruthlessly on the basis of what they can do for us as the likes of Bertie. Call me a cynic if you like, but it seems like a bit too much of a coincidence that all of Berties friends from a rough area of Dublin all seem to be able to lay their hands on a big wad of cash whenever he needs it, which seems to be alarmingly often.

It’s true that the figures involved are fairly small compared to what Haughey received though that hardly makes it okay, I never heard Idi Amin defend himself by saying that he only killed a twentieth as many people as Hitler. It’s also true that someone with Ahern’s street smarts could have made a lot more money drug-dealing (for example). But then power has an attraction all of it’s own, Ken Livingstone said that he was only paid £6,000 a year for running the GLC but he didn’t care as he was the most powerful man in London.

But Livingstone was certainly someone who believed in something at some stage, whereas it’s hard to make that statement with any certainty about Ahern. It’s true that in many democracies the dominant party attracts the most ambitious people regardless of ideology, but here the two main parties have traditionally been so non-ideological that the only reason for joining either of them could be personal ambition. The lack of any major ideological difference between the blueshirts and the soldiers of destiny has suited Ahern down to the ground until now, in a vapid beauty contest against the likes of John Bruton or Baldy Noonan there was only going to be one winner. But it seems people have finally woken up to what a phoney he is and how our money has been wasted, how many promises have been broken. To take one example, we were told that by this election we’d be spending .7% of our GDP on foreign aid, though it still languishes at .42%. This may seem minor, in fact it almost certainly does seem minor to Bertie, as Fianna Fail aren’t putting up any candidates in Tanzania, but it’s a big issue for people who depend on us to provide them with food and medicine.

In a recent interview with Hot Press, Enda Kenny recycled this promise. I think we should take him at his word… What other choice do we have? Much of the rest of the interview was disappointing. He’s against liberalising drug laws as it could lead to drug tourism. Would that be such a disaster? It might give someone in the tourist offices in places like Portlaoise something to do. But seriously, it’s a misjudgement on his part as many younger voters know how out of synch we are with the rest of Europe and his traditional supporters aren’t going to defect to the crowd who killed their parents during the civil war.

And what of Micheal McDowell, the man who promised us he’d keep a leash on Bertie but has been like a little lamb (except fatter and balder) on the issue of Bertie’s corruption (I don’t see any point in using the word “alleged” anymore) while he’s been tearing into Trevor Sergeant for having the temerity to disagree with McDowell on some of the major issues. Then the PDs issued a statement saying that a vote for them is a vote on Fatty Harney’s record as minister for obesity. Do they actually want to lose?

The answer, surprisingly, could be yes, as the PDs and the ideological soul mates in FF might want the Rainbow to get in narrowly, have to deal with the coming house price crash and be condemned to opposition for another generation.

So will I be voting for Fianna Fail to make their plan backfire?

Um….NO.

Gettin' jiggy with Dirty Bertie

Haven’t posted anything on this blog for a while, I’m thinking that if my blog was as popular as as bloggorah or slugger o toole then rumours would be abounding around the internet that I was dead.

Well, I’m not, and like Lisa Simpson, neither is my sense of moral indignation.

In case you are wondering where I was, I was in Africa. People were telling me that I should set up a travel blog, but I did like our ancestors used to do before the new-fangled days of web 2.0 and sent emails.

In one of them I was telling people that when I crossed the border from Kenya to Uganda I was asked for $30 but was given it back when I found out that I was Irish.

That was because Uganda is one of our biggest recipients of foreign aid. Bertie Ahern has visited the country, and afterwards had the brass balls to accuse the Fine Gael/Labour coalition of the eighties as leading a third world country, to which we would return in “jig time” if the opposition were re-elected. It’s a disgusting thing for someone who’s been to the real third world to have said, though no doubt he’s said the opposite on record since.

Since I came back, I found out that Ireland had suspended direct aid to Uganda as their president, Yoweri Museveni , wasn’t quite the “responsible” leader that Bill Clinton and others had made him out to be.

The sad thing from Africa’s point of view is that even after turning a blind eye to Tutsi attacks on Rwanda from Uganda, then getting together with the new Tutsi leadership in Rwanda to invade Congo-Kinshasa, steal their gold and diamonds and then use it to buy stuff to sell back to the Congolese at a profit, changing the constitution so that he can run again and cutting down much of the country’s natural rainforest to grow palm oil plantations, he remains one of the better leaders on the continent.

But then, who are we to judge?

In the past our great leader has been called the Teflon taioseach as dirt never stuck to him. I’m beginning to think that this reflects better on the dirt than it does on Bert.

It’s surprised me how little attention the revelations Sunday’s Turbine about Bertie’s father being a suspected cop-killer have received. There are those who argue that what happened in the past doesn’t have any bearing on current events, which is why the 90^th anniversary of 1916 passed without a murmur last year. It’s not as leaders are elected on the basis of who their fathers are, just ask Liam Cosgrave or George W Bush.

But there’s something deeply sinister about the fact the Bertie used his exclusive privilege to prevent the report on the death of Garda Fallon from being published. If he was too old to have anything to do with it, as Bertie insists, then what has he to hide?

In any case, isn’t it a tiny bit scary that his father was one of the Usual Suspects any time a cop was killed in this country? And it’s not like this is the only stain on his record. The rumours that Bertie’s first wife/partner left him haven’t gone away, they just aren’t being published because the media in this country is still so fucking supine.

In the eighties an extramarital affair by a TD was so widely reported in the UK that it gave a new term “horizontal jogging” to the English language, but it wasn’t even reported here.

It seems that while we may not be as deferent to the Church or the Gardai as we used to be, we’re still so insecure about our new-found wealth that we’re afraid to topple the person who takes all the credit for bringing it to us.

This doesn’t reflect well on us. After what happened in Virginia last week, our papers were full of stories about America’s gun culture and moral malaise. Yet there’s every possibility that our own leader is a corrupt, wife-beating cop-killers son.

Another irony is that in Uganda there’s a free press… the book where I read of Museveni’s invasion of the Congo was actually published in Kampala, and that was only after about 20 years of democracy. At the same stage in Irish democracy we were still banning books like Ulysess and even in the sixties someone’s shop was burned down for selling the thoughts of Chairman Mao.

So maybe it’s the people of Uganda who should really decide if they want to keep making this Faustian bargain with us. Do they really want to keep accepting dirty money from a country led by such a reprobate? Or should they withhold tea and palm oil exports to us until we show that we can govern ourselves responsibly?

Purgatory on the N8

Haven’t been able to contribute so much to my blog lately as like the pods in Invasion of the body snatchers, the Harneyites have got me working for them now, working being the operative word as work is what they want everyone to be either doing, on their way to, or spending the proceeds from.

It does mean that I’ve got even more money to spend than when I was on the dole, though I was hardly starving to death back then. I even had enough money to go to electric picnic, although, come to think of it, I was there last year as well.

I once read somewhere about Ko Pha Ngan that people want to stay there forever but end up going back to there boring jobs and I feel the same way about the picnic, and the job, which, involving as it does putting computers in boxes, is about as boring as it gets.

There are those who would argue that life can’t be like electric picnic all the time as the artists don’t come out of the kindness of their hearts and you don’t get food for free either (far from it!)

On the other hand, a lot of the stuff I saw going on there is stuff that in a more open society people could do for free any time they wanted, like sitting on the grass doing weed or mushies, playing Frisbee or listening to live, acoustic music. Or just fucking, like neither the birds nor the bees have to pay to do.

Such has been the commodification of pleasure that’s happened in the last 25 years that we now have to pay just to do stuff like this, or at least we are made to feel we do. At the same time it was nice to see how life could be all the time if there wasn’t such pressure to make money and spend it all the time.

Coming back from this to the real world was always going to be a bit of a shock, particularly when you have to pass through parts of the real world like Portlaoise.

I got stuck in this miserable, stygian, god-forsaken hell-hole for almost 4 hours. It might not have seemed quite so awful if it wasn’t raining all the time, though it’s hard to see why the sun would want to shine on somewhere so dismal, with it’s Austwich-watchtower of a church steeple and it’s brutally utilitarian shopping centre.

I went into the tourist office to find out how I could get out of this armpit of the universe, only to find that everyone else was doing the same, and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would go there for any other reason.

As my bus wasn’t going to come for another 2 hours, I decided to try to hitch, though needless to mention, nobody gave me a spin as heartlessness seems to be a sine qua non for people living in the Celtic Tiger era.

As I was forlornly making my way back to the “town”, I noticed something that brought home to me some of the realities of living in Celtic Tiger Ireland. Between the GAA pitch and the N8 from Dublin to Cork is a new housing “development”, the first phase of which was sold out within an hour.

I’ve seen some strange shit in my life, cows with extra legs growing out of their necks, napalm victims with a big scar where their noses ought to be, and the Liverpool team under Graham Souness, but I’m still shocked that people would be that eager to live in a hole cut out of the side of the side of the Laois GAA pitch.

There’s hardly a day goes by without someone on the radio telling us how insane the housing market is, but it all seems a bit abstract until you see something like this. There’s an old and not very funny joke that you shouldn’t tell politicians to go to hell as they’re building it for us. Well, this is the hell that Red Ahern and Fatty Harney are building for their subjects, a hell where they have to drive an hour and half to get home from work and then listen to everyone who’s working nightshift drive to work, while Bertie’s property speculator friends buy up the whole Bulgarian coast with all the money they’re making.

Shamefully, our tiny island has become one of the most car-dependent countries in the world, and it’s all because the government are doing so little to dampen the housing market. Tragically, most people who are forced to live in hell-holes like Portlaoise aren’t going to realize what a dreadful mistake they’ve made until house prices crash and they’re trapped in a spiral of negative equity and fuel prices go through the roof.

People look at Easter Island ask what people were thinking when they were cutting down the last tree, and people will ask the same when they’re looking at the aftermath of the property boom. We’ll be asking what sort of psychosis possessed us to super-size places like Portlaoise and god-knows how many other towns in the Dublin area. We’ll ask ourselves how we were naïve enough to listen to idiots like Bertie, Harney and David McWilliams who told us that the good times would go on as long as we kept voting for them.

I’ll be devastated if Fianna Fail get back into government after encouraging such a profligate, unsustainable way of life for the last 10 years. Yet I fear that the nation is still in the grip of the psychosis they’ve generated.

Trouble at the Raunch?

There’s a theory that’s still prevalent in some of the higher echelons of academia about the “death of the author”
As I understand it, mainly from reading an essay by David Foster Wallace on the subject, the theory posits the notion that authors are basically a conduit for the broader social and political concerns of their time.
But after going through the all the theories on the subject in some detail he ends the essay with the Occamian, no-bullshit line, “the damn books don’t write themselves.”
I thought about this a little when I finally got round to reading Fat Land last week and realised that I’d read almost all the arguments before, as I felt I had when I read the highly-regarded Silent Takeover by Noreena Heertz a few years back.
Likewise I felt able to comment on the god-awful book by David McWilliams which I never bothered reading beyond the first line as was obviously bereft of any new ideas and written in prose that would have made me throw up and have to pay the library to get a new one.

I feel much the same way about Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by the wonderfully named Ariel Levy, who’s obviously pointed the right way to pick up current trends. Maybe if you got up on the roof and turned her around she’d write a book about global warming or obesity, but faced the way she is she’s managed to write a book about something everything columnist has already spent their 2 cents on, and that adds up to quite a few euros in this age of information overload.
Her startlingly unoriginal thesis is that women are co-operating in their own oppression by confusing “raunchiness” with liberation, wearing playboy T-shirts in much the same way the global corporations market the image of Che Guevara.

I’m really grateful that we have observant authors who’re able to read the signatures of all things in ways that mere bloggers like myself aren’t able to. Me, I’d never have noticed that young girls walk around in t-shirts with pornstar written on them or wear tight tanktops and skirts that barely cover their asses because I’m not really attuned to that sort of thing but even if I was I wouldn’t be able to interpret the broader trends behind all of this because I’m just a blogger.
It seems that she thinks that women have been fooled into thinking that they’ve achieved equality and that’s why they can parade their sexuality with aplomb. But she warns, as many feminazis do, that the sex war isn’t over yet as women in the most highly paid jobs can get paid as much as 15% less than their male counterparts. To me, the issue is not that female executives don’t get paid enough, but get paid too much, while their male counterparts get paid way too much.

Chuck Palinhuk wrote that we can’t start talking about equality until men can have kids and he has a point: What man on the top end of the pay scale wouldn’t take a 15% pay cut in return for being able to retire and have kids any time he wants?
Even though the doubtless lovely-but-not-in-slutty-way Ms. Levy may think she has her finger on the pulse, she may be missing out on a more profound reason for the rise of “raunch” in the last few years.
When the cold war was going on, people in the west developed a consumer lifestyle in opposition to the dreary conformity of the Warsaw Pact countries. Our new enemy, or at least so we’re told, is the fundamentalist Muslim World, where women are are forced to cover up every part of their bodies.
Just as during the cold war their was a large movement to convert the west to a nicer version of socialism, now there’s a new Puritanism in our society which the likes of Levy seem to represent.

I was reading one of her fellow-travellers in our own Sunday Tribune yesterday who claimed that she saw young girls who were “…dressed, and there’s no other way to say this, like whores.”
Oh, No? What about B-girl, bag, bawd, bimbo, blower, broad, call girl, camp follower, cat, chicken, chippie, concubine, courtesan, fallen woman, floozy, harlot, hooker, hostess, hustler, loose woman, midnight cowboy, model, moll, nymphomaniac, painted woman, party girl, pickup, pink pants, pro, scarlet woman, slut, streetwalker, strumpet, tart, tomato, tramp, trollop, or working girl?
The fact that she didn’t know any of these terms, or have the presence of mind to look them up on www.thesaurus.com as I just did doesn’t say a whole lot for her journalistic abilities.
What’s more shocking is that the author of this lexically-challenged piece tells anyone who didn’t fall asleep before getting that far that she finished her own primary education all of half a decade ago, which would make her 23.
I could have a cheap shot at her and say she’s probably a lesbian but the truth is probably more complex than that.

I read that one of the Queen Bees of Feminazism, either Andrea Dworkin or Catherine McKinnon claimed that women who suppose erroneously that they enjoy sex are “collaborators” in a “Sex War” to which I can only reply, speak for yourself, you fat dyke!
People who’ve done research into the area rather than assume that their own prejudices reflect universal truths have found that at least 30% of women enjoy having sex just as much as men. For the vast majority of civilisation women’s sexuality has been denied as much as their intelligence or their ability to do most jobs as well as men, or even their humanity in the case of loony-tunes philosophers like Descartes.

We’re probably living in a brief Chrysalis moment where women are both able to enjoy the benefits of civilisation and live a sexually liberated life, yet an unholy alliance of radical feminists and the religious right wants to deny them this.
In John Updike’s latest book, Villages, set in the 60’s a woman utters the immortal line “the only thing we have to trade on in fucking, and since the pill the price has gone way down.”
The fact that sex isn’t something women have to withhold from men in order to gain financial security is something that ought to be celebrated.
Which is why I got such a kick from reading this review from the Guardain:

There, there, dear," I kept wanting to say to Ariel Levy, as I read her rightful, righteous wrath about women's collusion in their own objectification, their willing embracement of - hell, no, grotesque submission to - the current dominant value of "hotness". (Which she well defines as the constant demonstration not of actual desire but of simulated desirability conjoined with availability.) Don't take on so. What else would you expect in a world that has commodified desire along with dissent? Just laugh at the lapdancers, pet, and giggle at the college girls going wild: you'll only wear yourself out fulminating against fashion, and fashion is what it is. It will pass. Corsets and chemises did. Besides, you've a gift for reporting - your description of an uncool woman challenging a female media boss at a press conference has clarity with depth - and you wouldn't want to spend the next 20 years tossing off copy on tits and totty any time an editor wants to run explicit pictures, would you? Now go and research women's economics, which I bet you could make interesting.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

This Party ain't big enough for Both of Us

When I was up in Rossport last week I heard a joke that went somewhere along the lines of the following:
What do you get if you put 2 anarchists into a room?
A: 3 Splinter groups.

It’s unfortunately close to the truth that people who are on the left tend to be somewhat confrontational by nature whereas people on the right have such a need for order that they always toe the party line no matter it might go against the better part of their natures.

So I have to admit a certain degree of schadenfreude at the schism in the soi-disant progressive democrat party at the moment.

It seems that our good friend Micheal McDowell isn’t happy being a millionaire lawyer who’s running the justice system even though he’s in a party that received 3% of the vote at the last election. It looks like he’s just as fed up as the rest of us at seeing Mary Harney take up so much space in the media and he wants the top job for himself.

This is a bit like 2 bald men fighting over a comb except that only one of them is a bald man and instead of a comb it’s the leadership of a party that’s doomed to go the way of Clann na Poblacta within the next few elections.

Baldy McD is telling us that Harney promised him that she’d step down and let him fill the considerable space that she’d vacated. Yeah, well, politicians say stuff that they don’t really mean sometimes. Year before last Bertie claimed he was a socialist, but this week he dismissed socialism as a “failed ideology” and the leader of the socialist party as a nitwit who presumably couldn’t hold an intellectual candle to the man who said he wanted to bring posterity to Ireland when he took the leadership of Fianna Fail in the ‘90s.

We’re obviously going to hear 2 completely different accounts of the so-called leadership pact between the PD heavyweights. Famously, Tony Blair took Gordon Brown to a posh restaurant in London to carve up the labour leadership between them and some hacks over there have been writing about nothing else ever since, though in the bigger scheme of things it hardly matters as they’re both going to do whatever George Bush tells them to.

It’s quite possible that Harney did the same with McD but that he had to wait so long for her to finish eating that he was so groggy that he didn’t really know what she was saying.

Yesterday they went to lunch again together and insisted this wasn’t to clear the air, which isn’t surprising as I’ve never known a big lunch to have that effect, especially if you order the three-bean salad.

But if McD really wants to lead the most unpopular party in the country, he’s going to have to make a heave for the leadership pretty soon. Well, good luck to him, I say, as it’s not going to be easy pushing Mary Harney out of her place and he may need Tom Parlon to bring a few of his strongest oxen up from Offaly to help displace her.

Of course, once she’s gone I’m going to have to write about something else, as I can hardly go a posting without pointing out how overweight, surly, arrogant and extreme she is.

The good news is that her removal could help avert an economic downturn as Harney will no longer need to try to look good for her job, which will provide an enormous boost for the chocolate cake industry, while the governments savings on restaurant-based expenses will allow them to bring in more tax cuts.

Mmmm….Tax Cuts.

Go to hell, Shell

While I was backpacking around Spain a few years ago reading Hugh Thomas’ excellent history of that country’s civil war, I was shocked to find out that the Observer, a paper I’ve read religiously every Sunday since I was about 15 supported the fascists.

I didn’t know at the time that it used to be a right-wing paper for about 200 years until it was taken over by a wealthy, noblesse oblige type who turned it into a liberal paper that became required reading for vegan types like myself.

But, like Bono, who once sang “When I was three I thought the world revolved around me, I was wrong”, the paper seems to be reverting back to it’s former position.

It’s partly that genuine left-wingers like Nick Cohn have gradually moved to the right on issues like Iraq where he’s in step with the ludicrous Euston group. It’s partly that they keep supporting Labour at every election. But it’s mostly the supplements they keep publishing in association with big business interests.

Recently there was a Pravda-like supplement on animal testing which may have contributed to a hardening of attitudes against opponents of vivisection. This week, they published a supplement about energy efficiency in association with Shell.

I’m sure some jokes about this have already been made, that it’s like having a supplement on human rights in association with the Taliban or a healthy eating supplement edited by Mary Harney.

Oddly enough, I actually agree with most of the stuff that’s actually contained in the supplement. There’s a piece by James Lovelock who argues that the Earth, which he regards as a living, breathing organism is on it’s last legs though as he’s 79 himself one wonders if the great anthropomorphiser is merely having intimations of his own mortality.

Things get a bit more suspect with wildly over-optimistic pieces about bio-fuels and solar. It’s not pointed out that ethanol, the bio-fuel of choice for companies like Monsanto isn’t really all that energy-efficient at all compared to the more environmentally friendly but less profitable woodchip.

Then there’s a piece called Here come the caring, sharing millionaires. And there was me thinking that Shell were doing this out of the kindness of their hearts.

It seems that it’s hip to be green again, just like it was in the late 60’s and late 80’s. In the last few months we’ve seen the ludicrous spectacle of David Cameron flying in a private jet to witness the effects of global warming at first hand. We’ve seen B.P. change it’s name to beyond petroleum. And even George w Bush has told America to use less fossil fuels.

I’m not old enough to remember the 60’s but I remember how dissiliusioned I was in the early 90’s when the economic recession wiped the environment from people’s minds as if we were all stepford wives, and I can’t help feeling that when the current economic bubble bursts we’ll all be more worried about our mortgages than about Gaia.

Except maybe that people will make the link between the cost of oil and the environmental effect this time.

Those of you who’ve seen that excellent documentary The Corporation will know that Shell are no strangers to this sort of corporate eye-washing. In it their CEO has a cup of tea with some prostestors and tells them he shares their concerns, but that he works for a corporation where money is always the bottom line.

Last weekend I went up to Rossport in mayo to find out just how cynically Shell pursue this bottom line.

For an extra €200 million Shell could put the proposed new gas pipeline offshore and leave the people of Rossport free from fear of an explosion potentially a third the size of Hiroshima. That’s a lot of money to you or me, to Shell it’s peanuts.What’s worse is what Shell regard as “acceptable risk”

To them, if 1 in a million people in the affected area die, that’s acceptable. But the affected area is considered to be the whole country which will benefit (though not a great deal, thanks to Ray Burke) and the project will be there for 30 years, so it’s OK for 120 people to die, just so Shell can save €200 million.

So that’s what our lives are worth to shell. €1.66 million. I almost wish we worth as much as the victims of 9/11 ($200million), or the people of the Falklands (£10million).

Of course I’m sure we’re worth a lot more than, for instance, the people of Nigeria which is really reassuring. After all, we are letting them have all that gas almost for free even though we’re a rich western country and not a banana republic, though we will be if Enda Kenny gets elected, according to Bertie.

Unlike many of the people who mooned at the bemused security guard up in Rossport, (that’s me, second from the left) I’m confident that if the greens have a government ministry after the election, (environment, ideally) that the shell pipeline will be forced to go offshore. I recognise that we need the gas as we’re the 7^th most fossil-fuel dependent nation, although we seem to be ignoring the a huge resource of bio-fuel in Mary Harney’s stomach which could be tapped in a single liposuction operation.

Yet if we stopped listening to people like Shell and started driving smaller cars and living in smaller cars, we could probably leave both the Corrib Gas Field and the Tanaiste’s gut alone.