Harney the Honkin' hep cat

There's been a lot of talk recently about what sort of music politicians like to listen too, as there often is when there's elections coming up and stuff and they want to try to convince the voters that they're real people.

This recent bout was set off, however; by George Bush revealing what was on his iPod. Nice of him to share this information with us, now that he's being open and democratic amybe he'd like to tell us what his evidence is for his claim that Sadamm Hussein had links with Al_Queada.

Of Course, that's not going to happen, so we have to be thankful for slim pickings like the list we got last week.
I'm happy to relate that for the most part it confirms my prejudices that he's a man of little culture who's most happy listening to jingoistic country and western music written by people, who, like himself have never been outside America, and there doesn't appear to be a single Black or Female artist, which suggests that he's not really enjoying himslef all that much when he's listening to Condoleeza Rice play the piano.

It would have come as a shock if Dubya was into Free Jazz or early classical music or global groove or yo la tengo, I wouldnt have known what to think, except that Karl Rove was trying to make him look like an intellectual. According to Kitty Kelly, Bush's parents once lambasted someone for making them listen to a classical recital, which they descbribed as "awful music".

But there is one shock, and that's that he likes a couple of Irish artists, Van Morrison and The Thrills. Having seen the Thrills live last year and sung along to most of their songs, I have to say I feel a little violated and wish George would have kept this piece of information to himself. Still, it's out there and I can only console myself that his other choices show him to be a man that's totally out of touch with the music that people from the non-Texan part of the US, though it does beg the question of what he was doing when he wasnt studying in college as the answer to this question generally involves quality time with the stereo. It's kind of odd that Rove didn't suggest he put on some Jazz, Classical, folk or MOBO particularly when he appears to be only using 1GB from 20.

Anyway, not to be undone, the Guardian asked some British pols what tunes they were into. Apparently, it's been an open secret that Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary was one of the Children of the Revolution whose behavior shocked Cardinal Ratzinger so much, and he's got a collection of old Beatles and Stones records to prove it. Then Oliver Letwin said in a terribly English way that he wasn't sure which music common people listened to. Needless to mention, the person with the most well-rounded music collection was Charles Kennedy, not that that'll mean he'll get any votes.

Then on Sunday, our own Turbine got in on the act and asked some of our leaders which musicians they liked. Amazingly, they got a straight answer out of Bertie, who said it was the Bee Gees, which led the Turbine's psychologist to suggest that this was because of nostalgia for when he was young and hairy, which he certainly was. Enda Kenny told them he was a Springsteen fan, in keeping with his macho, Kilimanjaro-climbing, life-saving image.

Then they asked Mary Harney. I would have thought that her favourite band would have been Boston (Not Berlin, that's for sure) but apparently she likes Andrei Bocceli, which is just the sort of innofensive, middle-of-the-road stuff you'd expect her to like, although a part of me hoped she'd say that she never listened to music because work was more important.

Then she said she also liked Jazz, which I can't quite accept, as Jazz is a form of music associated with slacking, drug-taking and all the other things Mary Harney dissaproves of. But then it also originates in America, which for Harney is the root of all good things.

I don't know why she'd feel it necessacry to lie like this, as Will Hutton wrote a book saying how much better Europe was than America and said in the prefac that he was a big fan of Sheryl Crow (No Shit!) and apparently that Gaulist par excellence Jaques Delors is a jazz fan too. On the other hand, Condoleeza Rice is a trained classical pianist.

But then I could never imagine Harney smoking a reefer in a basement jazz club wearing a beret or searching for early Charlie Parker 45's.

But then no-one seemed brave enough to ask Micahel McDowell. But we all know that he listens to Wagner overtures and skinhead punk that he downloads from hate websites. Except he doesn't, because listening to music would make him a human being.

The Benny "No Pill" Show

When I heard that Cardinal Rat-Zinger had been elected Pope yesterday, I suddenly realised how all those people out there who don't like soccer feel at the end of the World Cup or European Championships feel as they realise that all the palaver is over with.

Then you've got to feel sorry for all those people who were rooting for the plucky underdogs from Honduras or the Phillipines but knew in their hearts that the Germans were going to win in the end. At least journalists aren't going to have to learn how to pronounce the name of the Capital of Honduras, Tecucigalpa (I think)

Sky News informed us that Rat-Boy was the first German Pope in a Millenium, though they're not yet quite so interactive that you can press your red button and ask why, perchance, this might be the case, but you know that they'd just mumble back that historical context wasn't really their thing, it's not the sort of information which graphics flashing along the bottom of the screen is conducive to conveying.

But here's the reason (briefly). In the eleventh century Henry IV, emperor of the "Holy" "Roman" "Empire" decided that it was within his power to appoint archbishops, and the then pope, Gregory VII insisted it was his exclusive prerogative. Neither side willing to back down, Gregory declared war on Henry, and was supported by the German "Nobles" who saw this as a chance to ameliorate their own power within the so-called empire. After losing a battle, Henry was forced to back down and wear a sackcloth while kneeling in the snow. It led in the long term to the Holy Roman empire, or "Germany" as we would now call it, becoming a loose confedation while England, France and Spain became United Nations that would conquer most of the World, and that it wasn't until Fredericak the Great and Bismarck overpowered the rest of the nation in the 18th and 19th centuries with their brutal Prussian militarism that Germany became united. So, according to some Historians, this tiff about who got to nominate bishops led eventually to the death camps at Austwich.

Thankfully, the church isn't that powerful anymore, but there were a few other things that happened in the intervening milenium. Some would argue that the Reformation was inevitable, that people in Northern Europe weren't going to let a bunch of priests in Rome rule them forever, but others would say that the Investiture Controversy led to alienation between the church and Germany which culminated in Luther's Wittenberg Theses and the Sack of Rome in 1527, when marauding troops of "Emporer" Charles V destroyed the city, killed around 80% of it's population and made off with most of it's priceless treasures.

That was almost 5 centuries ago, but then that's only a quarter of the existence of the Papacy ago. Can you imagine people in America today, 60 years after the end of World War II electing an Austrian with a creepy body-image fixation to be one of their leaders? Oh, Right.

Since then Italians have always been a bit snooty towards Germans, who they regard as vulgar and classless, even when they were copying their styles of Music and Architecture. Mussolini said that Italians were builing an empire when the Germans were living in the forests, though he later said that Italians were Nordic Aryans.

Now, it seems, they've made up. Maybe if some people from Honduras or the Phillipines ransack Rome today they might get the papacy in another 500 years.

Lenny from the Simpsons insists that Germans arent so bad - hey, they may have done some bad things in the past, but that's why pencils have erasers - but unfotunately this particular German wants to do some bad things in the present as well, like continuing JPs legacy of opposing contraception in the face of uncontrollable population growth and the spread of AIDS in Africa. Of Course, some are insisting that Rat-Boy is his own man and avoided being called John Paul III to avoid being in the Poles Shadow. Of course, he does put himself in the Shadow of Popes Benedict I-XV, but then nobody knows who they are, so what the Hey?

Others are suggesting that not-very-gentle Ben is a transitional figure who's going to pave the way for a relative liberal possibly (but possibly not) from Africa or Latin America. As John O Farrell suggests, it might be time to democratise the process a bit more.

Meanwhile, we're treated to the sight of Africans coming all the way to Rome to celebrate the appointment of a German who's going to insist that they don't use the pill no matter what the circumstances are. Then we were treated to the sublime Freudian Slip of Kristen Guru-Murty describing the new Pope as the son of a Barbarian. Of course, Freud said that there are no accidents, which is a typical deterministic, Germanic way of looking at things. And that's not good news for the people of Africa.

Mary & Me: This town's not big enough for both of us

Cork has a long and noble history of fighting against tyranny and oppression, particularly when it’s imposed upon the denizens of the city by outsiders, but this weekend a bunch of aliens from another planet arrived and discussed ways to take away many of our liberties and we let them do so without even registering a protest.
This isn’t a happy time in the city’s history. We’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of hosting the European city of Culture so far, with events of genuine cultural importance priced beyond the reach of the majority of the town’s population, who have to make do with a few fireworks. Even the business community could only find €8 million to spend on culture, they still managed to spend €100 million on a hideous new development across from the bus station. Then the city overcharges for bin taxes, with the result that many people are leaving litter thrown all over the city.

Then the fucking PDs host their conference here! What have we ever done to hurt anyone to deserve this? It’s not that we’ve voted in any PD candidates in the last two elections, that’s for sure.

Last PD TD we had was Maureen Quill, who used to remind me of a rubber mask I had when I was a child. I had a friend who used to work as a waiter in Iasacs and when the unlovely Ms. Quill visited, instead of giving him a tip she kissed him on the cheek, the sort of thing that leaves you scarred for life.

To be fair to the people of Cork, it would have been really hard to protest against the presence of the PDs in our fair city, as they weren’t really in the city, but way out in Tivoli, which is a fair old trek out, even on a mild spring afternoon like Saturday last. As well as this, it’s getting harder and harder to organise any sort of demo here as the cops can arrest you for putting up signs advertising one, mainly thanks to the efforts of the PDs themselves.

I decided therefore that the town wasn’t big enough for both of us and went down to Crosshaven for the weekend. I could be unkind and say that it isn’t big enough for Mary Harney alone, but I’m not going to. After all, if Fatty Harney was advocating universal vegetarianism and Free Love, I wouldn’t be pointing out how grotesquely overweight she was, would I?

You could argue, of course, that with the nation facing a growing obesity problem having a Health Minister that looks like Jabba the Hutt sends out all the wrong signals, or that by spending so much on so-called “health care” which is really disease care and doing so little to promote overall good health is no way to care for people’s health.

You could also argue that Harney’s policy of bringing in the private sector to run hospitals won’t do anyone any good except the greedy capitalists that run them, and you’d have a lot of support. If you take a look at George Monbiot’s writings on the experiences of the Private Finance Initiative in the UK, you’d wonder how Fatty Harney could even consider such a thing. In one privately built hospital sewage was running from the taps, and it didn’t even save the taxpayer in the long run.

So why would she consider it? You have to ask why she’s so enamoured of Thatcherite ideology when Thatcher was a woman who hated our country and our people with such venom. Perhaps it’s that Harney hates herself because of her hideous body shape but that this hatred is repressed and comes out in as contempt for the traditional sense of community values that we’ve always had in this country and love for the dog-eat-dog ways of our neighbour.

When I was reading an obituary for Saul Bellow written by that other former left-winger Christopher Hitchens, I got the sense that conservatism is something that happens people when they get older, like prostate problems and a growing interest in Snooker. With the PDs, though, you get the impression that Mickey McD was trying to convert his playpen into a detention centre and Fatty Harney’s first words were “Low Taxes”

It’s good to see that we still have some checks and balances against the power of PDism in the country, as it looked like Mary Harney was backing down on the issue of who would build the second terminal at Dublin airport.

This doesn’t stop them from taking the credit for all the country’s accomplishments, though. At the start of the conference, Liz O Donnell held up copies of the Economist from 1988 and 1997, one describing Ireland as the poorest of the rich and another as Europe’s shining light.

Contemporary history 101: Between 1992 and 1997 Ireland was governed by two coalitions, one FF/Labour and the other FG/Labour/Democratic Left.

During the last election debate, Micheal Noonan memorably described Bertie as being like a cock that crowed in the morning and thought the sun was rising because of him.
Fatty Harney may be more like one of those overfed battery hens that can barely stand up, but she still gives herself the credit for everything. When she was trade and industry secretary she went round to every new business in the country to take credit for it’s existence, then when the global recession came along she thundered that this was no time to be “playing politics” with job losses. Can you believe the chutzpah of this woman?

Another time Mickey McD was arguing with Eamon Gilmore that when labour were in power the country was going to the IMF for help even though the help they needed was to save the country from the consequences of Fianna Fails errors, and when “we” were in power the country was the fastest growing economy in Europe, etc, etc. Thet reminded me of two kids arguing over whose dad had the biggest car.

McDowell’s recent humiliations haven’t dented his arrogance that much. He wants cops to be able to issue on-the-spot fines of €200 to people who urinate in the street. That might not be a lot of money to him, but to the sort of person who’s got nothing better to do than piss against a lamppost, it might be an awful lot, though I hardly see it as being that much of a detterent. Then again, many of the people who piss on Lamposts are Ross-O’Caroll-Kelly types who can afford it and might ask if they can have a dump as well for €500.

McDowell also wants the guards to be able to take a DNA sample without people’s consent. This raises the unpleasant prospect of Gardai being able to stick their dirty little fingers into your mouth to take a DNA sample just because they suspect that you might have been involved in a crime.
Quis custodes ipsos custodes?, you might be asking ( I sure as fuck was) Who’s going to stop Micheal McDowell from pissing all over our civil liberties? Some might say we live in a democracy and we could get rid of the fat bald smarmy little Nazi if we wanted, but then if you watched FG’s spokesman on “justice”, Jim O Keefe agree with everything McDowell said you realise that the choice is between a smart fascist blueshirt and a thick fascist blueshirt; or tweedledum and tweedledummer if you like.

No PD conference would be complete without a few digs at Sinn Fein, and on Friday McDowell was saying that the IRA were a glove puppet on Gerry Adams hand. I’ve always thought that Micheal O Leary had has hand up Mary Harney’s ass. I could go further and say he had his whole body up there, but that would be dragging myself down to the level of a woman who described people who protested against Henry Kissinger as being Hypocrites. I don’t want to let that happen to me.

Preview

Preview

Cork has a long and noble history of fighting against tyranny and oppression, particularly when it’s imposed upon the denizens of the city by outsiders, but this weekend a bunch of aliens from another planet arrived and discussed ways to take away many of our liberties and we let them do so without even registering a protest. This isn’t a happy time in the city’s history. We’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of hosting the European city of Culture so far, with events of genuine cultural importance priced beyond the reach of the majority of the town’s population, who have to make do with a few fireworks. Even the business community could only find €8 million to spend on culture, they still managed to spend €100 million on a hideous new development across from the bus station. Then the city overcharges for bin taxes, with the result that many people are leaving litter thrown all over the city. Then the fucking PDs host their conference here! What have we ever done to hurt anyone to deserve this? It’s not that we’ve voted in any PD candidates in the last two elections, that’s for sure. Last PD TD we had was Maureen Quill, who used to remind me of a rubber mask I had when I was a child. I had a friend who used to work as a waiter in Iasacs and when the unlovely Ms. Quill visited, instead of giving him a tip she kissed him on the cheek, the sort of thing that leaves you scarred for life. To be fair to the people of Cork, it would have been really hard to protest against the presence of the PDs in our fair city, as they weren’t really in the city, but way out in Tivoli, which is a fair old trek out, even on a mild spring afternoon like Saturday last. As well as this, it’s getting harder and harder to organise any sort of demo here as the cops can arrest you for putting up signs advertising one, mainly thanks to the efforts of the PDs themselves. I decided therefore that the town wasn’t big enough for both of us and went down to Crosshaven for the weekend. I could be unkind and say that it isn’t big enough for Mary Harney alone, but I’m not going to. After all, if Fatty Harney was advocating universal vegetarianism and Free Love, I wouldn’t be pointing out how grotesquely overweight she was, would I? You could argue, of course, that with the nation facing a growing obesity problem having a Health Minister that looks like Jabba the Hutt sends out all the wrong signals, or that by spending so much on so-called “health care” which is really disease care and doing so little to promote overall good health is no way to care for people’s health. You could also argue that Harney’s policy of bringing in the private sector to run hospitals won’t do anyone any good except the greedy capitalists that run them, and you’d have a lot of support. If you take a look at <a href="http://www.monbiot.com">George Monbiot</a>’s writings on the experiences of the Private Finance Initiative in the UK, you’d wonder how Fatty Harney could even consider such a thing. In one privately built hospital sewage was running from the taps, and it didn’t even save the taxpayer in the long run. So why would she consider it? You have to ask why she’s so enamoured of Thatcherite ideology when Thatcher was a woman who hated our country and our people with such venom. Perhaps it’s that Harney hates herself because of her hideous body shape but that this hatred is repressed and comes out in as contempt for the traditional sense of community values that we’ve always had in this country and love for the dog-eat-dog ways of our neighbour. When I was reading an obituary for Saul Bellow written by that other former left-winger Christopher Hitchens, I got the sense that conservatism is something that happens people when they get older, like prostate problems and a growing interest in Snooker. With the PDs, though, you get the impression that Mickey McD was trying to convert his playpen into a detention centre and Fatty Harney’s first words were “Low Taxes” It’s good to see that we still have some checks and balances against the power of PDism in the country, as it looked like Mary Harney was backing down on the issue of who would build the second terminal at Dublin airport. This doesn’t stop them from taking the credit for all the country’s accomplishments, though. At the start of the conference, Liz O Donnell held up copies of the Economist from 1988 and 1997, one describing Ireland as the poorest of the rich and another as Europe’s shining light. Contemporary history 101: Between 1992 and 1997 Ireland was governed by two coalitions, one FF/Labour and the other FG/Labour/Democratic Left. During the last election debate, Micheal Noonan memorably described Bertie as being like a cock that crowed in the morning and thought the sun was rising because of him. Fatty Harney may be more like one of those overfed battery hens that can barely stand up, but she still gives herself the credit for everything. When she was trade and industry secretary she went round to every new business in the country to take credit for it’s existence, then when the global recession came along she thundered that this was no time to be “playing politics” with job losses. Can you believe the chutzpah of this woman? Another time Mickey McD was arguing with Eamon Gilmore that when labour were in power the country was going to the IMF for help even though the help they needed was to save the country from the consequences of Fianna Fails errors, and when “we” were in power the country was the fastest growing economy in Europe, etc, etc. Thet reminded me of two kids arguing over whose dad had the biggest car. McDowell’s recent humiliations haven’t dented his arrogance that much. He wants cops to be able to issue on-the-spot fines of €200 to people who urinate in the street. That might not be a lot of money to him, but to the sort of person who’s got nothing better to do than piss against a lamppost, it might be an awful lot, though I hardly see it as being that much of a detterent. Then again, many of the people who piss on Lamposts are Ross-O’Caroll-Kelly types who can afford it and might ask if they can have a dump as well for €500. McDowell also wants the guards to be able to take a DNA sample without people’s consent. This raises the unpleasant prospect of Gardai being able to stick their dirty little fingers into your mouth to take a DNA sample just because they <em>suspect</em> that you might have been involved in a crime. <em>Quis custodes ipsos custodes</em>?, you might be asking ( I sure as fuck was) Who’s going to stop Micheal McDowell from pissing all over our civil liberties? Some might say we live in a democracy and we could get rid of the fat bald smarmy little Nazi if we wanted, but then if you watched FG’s spokesman on “justice”, Jim O Keefe agree with everything McDowell said you realise that the choice is between a smart fascist blueshirt and a thick fascist blueshirt; or tweedledum and tweedledummer if you like. No PD conference would be complete without a few digs at Sinn Fein, and on Friday McDowell was saying that the IRA were a glove puppet on Gerry Adams hand. I’ve always thought that Micheal O Leary had has hand up Mary Harney’s ass. I could go further and say he had his whole body up there, but that would be dragging myself down to the level of a woman who described people who protested against Henry Kissinger as being Hypocrites. I don’t want to let that happen to me. <img src="<a" href=" imgefp=" imgurl="www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg" /></a><a href="http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg">http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&amp;imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg</a></a> Harney: Fat

Preview

Cork has a long and noble history of fighting against tyranny and oppression, particularly when it’s imposed upon the denizens of the city by outsiders, but this weekend a bunch of aliens from another planet arrived and discussed ways to take away many of our liberties and we let them do so without even registering a protest. This isn’t a happy time in the city’s history. We’ve made a complete dog’s breakfast of hosting the European city of Culture so far, with events of genuine cultural importance priced beyond the reach of the majority of the town’s population, who have to make do with a few fireworks. Even the business community could only find €8 million to spend on culture, they still managed to spend €100 million on a hideous new development across from the bus station. Then the city overcharges for bin taxes, with the result that many people are leaving litter thrown all over the city. Then the fucking PDs host their conference here! What have we ever done to hurt anyone to deserve this? It’s not that we’ve voted in any PD candidates in the last two elections, that’s for sure. Last PD TD we had was Maureen Quill, who used to remind me of a rubber mask I had when I was a child. I had a friend who used to work as a waiter in Iasacs and when the unlovely Ms. Quill visited, instead of giving him a tip she kissed him on the cheek, the sort of thing that leaves you scarred for life. To be fair to the people of Cork, it would have been really hard to protest against the presence of the PDs in our fair city, as they weren’t really in the city, but way out in Tivoli, which is a fair old trek out, even on a mild spring afternoon like Saturday last. As well as this, it’s getting harder and harder to organise any sort of demo here as the cops can arrest you for putting up signs advertising one, mainly thanks to the efforts of the PDs themselves. I decided therefore that the town wasn’t big enough for both of us and went down to Crosshaven for the weekend. I could be unkind and say that it isn’t big enough for Mary Harney alone, but I’m not going to. After all, if Fatty Harney was advocating universal vegetarianism and Free Love, I wouldn’t be pointing out how grotesquely overweight she was, would I? You could argue, of course, that with the nation facing a growing obesity problem having a Health Minister that looks like Jabba the Hutt sends out all the wrong signals, or that by spending so much on so-called “health care” which is really disease care and doing so little to promote overall good health is no way to care for people’s health. You could also argue that Harney’s policy of bringing in the private sector to run hospitals won’t do anyone any good except the greedy capitalists that run them, and you’d have a lot of support. If you take a look at <a href="http://www.monbiot.com">George Monbiot</a>’s writings on the experiences of the Private Finance Initiative in the UK, you’d wonder how Fatty Harney could even consider such a thing. In one privately built hospital sewage was running from the taps, and it didn’t even save the taxpayer in the long run. So why would she consider it? You have to ask why she’s so enamoured of Thatcherite ideology when Thatcher was a woman who hated our country and our people with such venom. Perhaps it’s that Harney hates herself because of her hideous body shape but that this hatred is repressed and comes out in as contempt for the traditional sense of community values that we’ve always had in this country and love for the dog-eat-dog ways of our neighbour. When I was reading an obituary for Saul Bellow written by that other former left-winger Christopher Hitchens, I got the sense that conservatism is something that happens people when they get older, like prostate problems and a growing interest in Snooker. With the PDs, though, you get the impression that Mickey McD was trying to convert his playpen into a detention centre and Fatty Harney’s first words were “Low Taxes” It’s good to see that we still have some checks and balances against the power of PDism in the country, as it looked like Mary Harney was backing down on the issue of who would build the second terminal at Dublin airport. This doesn’t stop them from taking the credit for all the country’s accomplishments, though. At the start of the conference, Liz O Donnell held up copies of the Economist from 1988 and 1997, one describing Ireland as the poorest of the rich and another as Europe’s shining light. Contemporary history 101: Between 1992 and 1997 Ireland was governed by two coalitions, one FF/Labour and the other FG/Labour/Democratic Left. During the last election debate, Micheal Noonan memorably described Bertie as being like a cock that crowed in the morning and thought the sun was rising because of him. Fatty Harney may be more like one of those overfed battery hens that can barely stand up, but she still gives herself the credit for everything. When she was trade and industry secretary she went round to every new business in the country to take credit for it’s existence, then when the global recession came along she thundered that this was no time to be “playing politics” with job losses. Can you believe the chutzpah of this woman? Another time Mickey McD was arguing with Eamon Gilmore that when labour were in power the country was going to the IMF for help even though the help they needed was to save the country from the consequences of Fianna Fails errors, and when “we” were in power the country was the fastest growing economy in Europe, etc, etc. Thet reminded me of two kids arguing over whose dad had the biggest car. McDowell’s recent humiliations haven’t dented his arrogance that much. He wants cops to be able to issue on-the-spot fines of €200 to people who urinate in the street. That might not be a lot of money to him, but to the sort of person who’s got nothing better to do than piss against a lamppost, it might be an awful lot, though I hardly see it as being that much of a detterent. Then again, many of the people who piss on Lamposts are Ross-O’Caroll-Kelly types who can afford it and might ask if they can have a dump as well for €500. McDowell also wants the guards to be able to take a DNA sample without people’s consent. This raises the unpleasant prospect of Gardai being able to stick their dirty little fingers into your mouth to take a DNA sample just because they <em>suspect</em> that you might have been involved in a crime. <em>Quis custodes ipsos custodes</em>?, you might be asking ( I sure as fuck was) Who’s going to stop Micheal McDowell from pissing all over our civil liberties? Some might say we live in a democracy and we could get rid of the fat bald smarmy little Nazi if we wanted, but then if you watched FG’s spokesman on “justice”, Jim O Keefe agree with everything McDowell said you realise that the choice is between a smart fascist blueshirt and a thick fascist blueshirt; or tweedledum and tweedledummer if you like. No PD conference would be complete without a few digs at Sinn Fein, and on Friday McDowell was saying that the IRA were a glove puppet on Gerry Adams hand. I’ve always thought that Micheal O Leary had has hand up Mary Harney’s ass. I could go further and say he had his whole body up there, but that would be dragging myself down to the level of a woman who described people who protested against Henry Kissinger as being Hypocrites. I don’t want to let that happen to me. <img src="<a" href=" imgefp=" imgurl="www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg" /></a><a href=</a>"http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg">http://news.google.com/news?imgefp=qeI3QNZ4-gIJ&amp;imgurl=www.sbpost.ie/post/pages/maryharneyonceagain.jpg</a></a>

Die, SUV drivers

I cycled up from Ballinascarthy in West Cork where my brother and his fiancée and their young child live this weekend.
The cycle down the day before had been reasonably pleasant, nothing like the fantasy I may have derived of cycling in rural Ireland from reading Molloy or The Third Policeman but pretty pleasant all the same.
Coming back wasn’t so nice. I was a lot more tired, the weather wasn’t so nice with an unusual easterly wind blowing, and the battery on my mp3 player had gone flat. There’s a stretch of road close to the end of the journey where I’ve often got so tired that I start to hallucinate that the road is going down instead of up.
I’m clearly not that fit, as it’s only a journey of about 30 miles and I met people who were travelling 2 or 3 times that distance every day. One “Canadian” I in Vietnam met told me he was travelling 100km a day which is about 62 miles in real distance. He told me he was aiming to get to Nepal, but I put a bit of a downer on his plans by explaining the situations in Burma and Tibet.
Nonetheless, it would still have been a reasonably nice cycle if the government ever lifted one of it’s stupid fat fingers to help cyclists. You’d think they’d have somewhat of an incentive to do so as we are one of the worst countries in the EU for implementing the Kyoto accord, probably because Mary Harney thinks Kyoto is a Korean town that Intel might re-locate to if we don’t bring down our corporation taxes even lower.
Our government’s neglect of cyclists is atypical by European standards. In countries like Holland and Germany there are thousands of miles of cycle path which means that older people whose reflexes and depth of vision may be compromised are able to cycle.
Here, you really need your wits about you to cycle, and if Flann O Brien or Beckett were writing their novels today, they’d be a lot shorter because their protagonists would be run over by an SUV.
Ah, SUVs. Bane of my life; polluting my air, taking up all the space on the roads; mysteriously, a couple of nights ago one owner was sitting outside my window for an hour in a particularly tank-like model with the engine running. It seemed like a crazy, inexplicable thing to do but no more than buying an SUV in the first place.
I was reading about a far-right American film festival organised by right-wing nutters who fear that Hollywood is controlled by liberal jews (I’d love if that were true) where one of the participants came out with something like: “So what if we invaded Iraq for their oil? We need their oil”
This is the way SUV owners think. They figure they must “need” a big car because there are so many other big cars out there that they’ll get killed if they get into a collision with another one while driving a small car, though god knows if they wanted to experience real danger they should try cycling. It’s the same philosophy that underlines American gun laws. It also leads to America attacking oil-rich nations so their people are slightly more safe from other Americans.
In a sane society SUV owners would be pariahs in the same way that paedophiles are now. Instead celebrities like Jay Leno and Schwarzneger boast about how big their cars are. Unfortunately it’s getting to be the same way here, and conscious of their reputation as the “Party on” party, Fianna Fail are doing piss-all to check this disturbing trend, unlike our more responsible neighbours in Britain and Italy where they make their owners pay top Euro to drive them into urban areas.
Last time I cycled down to West Cork I parked by the side of road to adjust my mp3 player and a middle-aged SUV owner blew his horn at me really loudly to warn me how dangerous it was to be listening to music when there were nutters like him on the road. Then I was cycling up last Sunday I stopped at that chip shop on the road from Bandon to Inishannon to get something to drink and noticed an SUV parked there with a family inside that were stuffing themselves with chips and their complexions suggested this wasn’t a rare occurrence. It led me to the melancholy thought that money can buy you lots of things, but not taste. Even worse was to come when I got past Inishannon and an SUV with two shaven-headed chavs drove up really close to me and blew their horn really loud and seeing my annoyance stopped long enough to gloat at my misery, though it was long enough for me to get their registration number. This sort of thing wouldn’t be tolerated in a civilised society, but in Celtic Tiger Ireland I wouldn’t even bother my arse trying to report them to the authorities.
The fact that people are even allowed drive these monsters at a young age is a fucking disgrace. There are more statistics than you can shake a stick at which prove that most accidents are caused by males under the age of 25, and more to show that people are more likely to die in a collision with an SUV than a fuel-efficient car. Recently there’s been a report that suggests that the reason males under the age of 25 kill so many people on the is that the part of their brain that deals with risk assessment isn’t fully developed. When there’s similar research about Marajuana the government wheels it out triumphantly as “Proof” that it’s draconian drug policies make sense, but with a report like this they shrug their shoulders and think about making some more TV ads.
It’s not all doom and gloom for cyclists though, as our government has signed over a lot of law-making powers to Brussels, which isn’t always a bad thing, as the EU are proposing a law which makes drivers liable in any collision with a cyclist. How great would it be if that law got passed? Then you could cycle out in the middle of the road in front of SUVs and there’d be nothing they could do to stop you.
Then they’d know what it was like to be treated with such disrespect.
www.wastemonsters.co.uk

Blair: Flair for failure

Yesterday I offered myself to the people of the Anglo-Irish city of Liverpool as an Irish nationalist candidate, arguing that the people of that city had been betrayed by the Labour government and that things could only get better if the city became part of the Irish Republic.

I don’t think the people of Liverpool are alone in being betrayed by Blair’s government.

It’s pretty fashionable to say that Blair is a man who’s totally out of his depth running a major industrial nation, that he’s delegated the real running of the country to Gordon Brown whose work he takes all the credit for, that he runs the country in an undemocratic presidential style, that he’s incapable of admitting that he’s made a mistake, that he’s a stooge for neo-liberal globalistation, that he lets his ego get in the way of important foreign policy decisions and that his skills as a campaigner and presenter of policy aren’t matched by his skills as a leader.

He has his defenders as well. In Sunday’s Observer David Aaranovich launched a blistering attack on his critics, like John Lanchester I never saw that coming.

Tony is married to a catholic, so he ought to know that we sin both in our thoughts and in our words, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. If I’d been writing this piece eight years ago, I’d be criticising the Thatcher and Major governments for the things they had done, like Smashing the Unions, destroying the public transport system and health care system, selling arms to Saddam Huessein and the House of Saud and a miriad of other things.

But just as Robert Rubin, Clinton’s first trade secretary criticised his former boss for not taking advantage of his eight years in power to do something about the massive inequality in the country and the time bomb that the country’s dependence on petrochemicals was fuelling; critics of Blair mostly argue that someone with such a huge majority shouldn’t be so satisfied with such minor victories. It’s noticeable that both Clinton and Blair’s most passionate defenders on the left can never come up with anything better than minor initiatives like Sure Start in the case of Blair or being able to come up with catchy one-liners like “I feel your pain” in the case of Clinton.

Of course their were obstacles for both of them to do anything positive, in Clinton’s case the Republican majority in both houses and in Blair’s the massive power of the Murdoch press.

The “Forces of Conservatism” of which Blair spoke in a famous early speech aren’t entirely mythical, but the sinister thing is that it’s archaic institutions like the House of Lords that have taken some of the nastier edges off some of his policies, like the Orwellian anti-terror bill.

The key to explaining paradoxes like this is that is that many people rightly associate the term conservative with being right-wing while it literally means being resitant to change no matter what side of the political spectrum it comes from, so when Blair accuses people of being conservative for opposing the removal of ancient liberties that have existed since the time of the Magna Carta he’s right on one level but there’s a cunning piece of prestigination going on that clearly goes over the head of people like Aaranovich.

Maybe I should cut his defenders some slack as they want to believe that democracy really works as it’s practiced in countries like the UK as, in theory democracy is a beautiful and noble concept. But I’m on the side of the people who scrawl on lavatory walls that if voting really changed anything they’d abolish it.

Many of the people who work within the Blair administration might think they’re genuinely forcing change, but I don’t think history works like that, that it’s really determined by social forces that politicians are powerless to effect and it’s often scientific innovation that pushes society ahead, or in the case of some recent inventions, back.

Religious types like Blair might believe in a notion of progress, indeed Blair’s own party used to sing a song about creating a shining city on a hill at their party conference. Others like myself see it as being cyclical, and argue that for the last 25 years the Anglo-Saxon nations have been moving in the direction of authoritarianism and inequality. When Blair talks about removing any vestige of Thatcherism that might be left, that’s all he’s doing: talking. He’s really the third part of an unholy trinity that began with the vindictive Thatcher herself who cast down plagues of oppression on her enemies, and continued with the meek, conciallitory, forgiving Major. This, neatly, makes Blair the Unholy spirit, which is pretty apposite as he’s kind of slippery and no-one really knows what he stands for.

Almost everything that the so-called Labour government has done is characterised by continuity with the previous administration. One of Thatcher’s most fervent beliefs was that the private sector did things better which led her to farm out many of the things that governments had taken a hand in since the Victorian era to people who had no concern other than making money, a process which Labour has mostly continued. It’s true that they did renationalise Railtrack, but that was more to do with pragmatism than ideology. Some will say that pragmatism isn’t a bad policy for a government, but when one party is ideologically right-wing and has no interest in compromise and compromise is all the other party does, the pendulum will continue drifting to the right.

This is more or less what’s happened. If you look at the figures for the gap between rich and poor they continued to widen for the first two years of Blair’s government, but then merely stabilised. When the tories get back in power, they’re going to start widening again.

People offer many different explanations for why Blair supported George Bush’s war in Iraq and gave us the bizarre spectacle of the most right-wing American president in a lifetime boasting of his friendship with the leader of the British Labour party. The Aaronovichs of the world will tell you that he really believed the universally discredited “evidence” of the existence of WMD in Iraq and yearns for the people of Iraq to live in a democracy just like the people of Britain, though he never talked about it that much before Bush got elected. Others cite Britain’s so-called “special relationship” with the US and Blair’s own massive ego, and the interests of British Oil companies.

To a history student like myself, the spate of wars that the US and UK have got involved in in the last seven years are the inevitable result of the downsizing of government over the last twenty years. When the modern state developed first in the 12th and 13th centuries, war was it’s only function and it wasn’t until after the French Revolution that governments took an interest in social affairs. After all, the French monarchy didn’t go broke because they spent all their money building hospitals for needy orphans, but on losing the 7 years war and helping the US to free itself from the British monarchy which Americans seem to have forgotten, but that’s a whole n’other story.

If you read Anthony Sampson’s book on the Arms trade, you’ll notice that before the Second World war European nations spent most of their money on arms while the US spent most of it’s money on building the country’s infrastructure, but the war completely inverted this process, with the Atlee government bringing in the golden age of Big Government in the UK which led to almost thirty years of you’ve-never-had-it-so-good social stability which broke down in the 70’s with various explanations, my favourite of which is that M15 thought the country was going socialist and engineered some catastrophic strikes.

But here’s the rub: Blair is a man with no sense of history, which is why he can’t see that he’s a merely a conduit for larger social forces. It’s this naivite that led him to think he could be the man to end the troubles in Northern Ireland and by extension the whole sorry history of Anglo-Irish conflict. In 1998 Blair came up to Belfast and all but pushed Mo Mowlam out of the way and took the credit for all her work, telling the world that the hand of history was on his shoulder.

Yet 7 years later, where has the Good Friday agreement got us? There haven’t been any more attacks on Britain by the IRA but then there was only one between 1994 an 1998. But many of the freed prisoners from both sides of the political divide have got involved in honest-to-god crime with tragic results for many people here. Then a clause in the agreement meant that anyone born on the island of Ireland could claim citizenship, which gave Micheal McDowell an excuse to bring in a raft of anti-immigrant legislation. Worse still, it means that Ireland can import toxic waste from Britain (Literally; I don’t mean the Daily Mail ) and much of it will be incinerated in the Ringaskiddy area. Thanks for poisoning me, Tone.

But Blair’s biggest failure has got to be the Fox-Hunting debacle. The Labour government devoted over 600 hours of parliamentary time over almost 8 years to this issue, and, in spite of the fact that most of them are lawyers, still totally fucked up the wording of the bill so that it’s still legal to shoot a fox and feed it to dogs.
Eight Fucking Years! In that timespan Alexander the Great conquered the known world and Napoleon made himself emperor of the part of Europe that was worth being emperor of. But Blair couldn’t even get the better of a bunch of bloodthirsty aristos.

He’ll still get re-elected of course, as the electoral system is so heavily balanced in his favour and they have the media stitched up so much that most genuine liberals are afraid to vote lib-dem because they think Charles Kennedy is a flaky alcoholic. Yet that’s the democratic system that people fought for centuries to achieve.

Right, Tone?

Seamus goes to Liverpool?

A couple of weeks ago I ended a piece on Sectarian identity in Liverpool by suggesting that the city’s problems might be resolved by it becoming part of the Republic of Ireland.

I was joking of course. The logistics involved in building border crossings everywhere would be enough of a deterrent by themselves, though this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if Ireland and the UK both signed up to Schengen, which is of course an other issue entirely.

As well as this, in spite of the city’s predominant Catholicism and Celtic heritage and the contempt for which Westminister governments have displayed for this once-great city, most Liverpudlians probably think of themselves as being British, though not to the extent that some people in places like Burnley and Blackburn do, though what could stop them from bringing a big bag of doorknobs over to Liverpool to introduce to any Irish nationalist candidate? (I could be facetious and say the parlous state of British public transport, but I won’t.)

But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realised that it’s not really that absurd after all, when you consider that Britain owns a bit of Spain, which in turn owns a bit of Morocco, which in turn owns Western Sahara. The difference is, of course, that while Liverpudlians are “owned” by the British state in a very real sense as the UK is very obviously a monarchical state, if Liverpool was part of the Irish republic they’d be citizens who’d get a chance to vote for their head of state every 14 years or so.

The dog’s breakfast that Charles and Camilla have made of their wedding plans has given a fillip to the Republican movement in Britain, which I’ve always had sympathy for, but the monarchy isn’t going to dissapear any time soon, because, as Johhny Rotten sang, those tourists are money.

The reason I support groups like Republic is partly because if there was a genuine debate in Britain about becoming republican, people might start to know what the word meant and then they might feel silly claiming that the Republic of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. (I don’t think it would stop them altogether). As well as that, the loyalists in the north of Ireland wouldn’t have a Queen to be loyal to.

I was going to get to that, wasn’t I? It’s obviously central to my argument that a bit of North-western Ireland is still part of the UK even though only half of it’s inhabitants claim British ancestry, whereas a much higher proportion of her majesty’s Liverpool subjects have Irish ancestry. If someone could draw attention to this by standing as an Irish nationalist candidate in Liverpool it’s possible that they could make some of the northern loyalists realise how ridiculous their position is. (I stress the word possible, as if the coverage of the Pope’s death in the British media doesn’t make them see the absurdity of their position, it’s hard to see what could.) It would also draw attention to the Republic’s shameful treatment of it’s emigrants. Then, if that person got elected, how bad would that be? More candidates could follow suit, and who knows, maybe even hold the balance of power in a few years?

Liverpool voters are clearly looking for a candidate to rally around. After years of neglect by the Thatcher and Major governments, the Blair administration thanked the people of the city by betraying it’s dockworkers, then in 2001 added insult to injury by parachuting millionaire aristocrat Shaun Woodward into one of the town’s constituencies, dragging along every single-issue left-wing candidate into the city in his wake, though, disappointingly he still got elected to represent a government which hasn’t done a whole lot for the city.

Then, after watching the first half of Liverpool’s heroic victory over Juventus last night, inspired by fans singing the fields of Athenry, and then turned over to Sky News at half time to hear that the election was called, I wondered why I couldn’t be a left-wing single issue candidate in Liverpool. Obviously I’m not a subject of the UK, and even more obviously I’d have no wish to be. The prospect of being beaten up by the BNP doesn’t appeal to me so much either, though I’ve been beaten up by English fascists before and lived to tell the tale.

It’s a shame that while Irish emigrants to America managed to hold on to their identity, many of those who went to England were so scared by the “No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” signs that they gave up their identity in a way that people from of Afro-Caribean origin and their domestic pets couldn’t.

Yet the ambivalent attitude that the rest of England has to the city of Liverpool is surely rooted in race. While they’re quite happy to take the credit for The Beatles and the local, non-Everton soccer team, most of the population of the country sees the town as being crime-ridden and it’s residents as being pugnacious idiots who exist purely for their amusement and as subjects for their condesencion. Which is pretty much how most English people see Ireland, in spite of the fact that the Republic is richer than the UK and the rate of violent crime is far lower. It’s pretty obvious to me that the reason so many British governments have neglected the city is because they don’t see it as being part of England at all, that the Irish immigrants who came over there in the nineteenth century may have had a function once but now their children are abandoned to live on the meagre benefits that the state throws at them.

For those of you that don’t know, benefits are about 30% higher in Ireland than in the UK. The minimum wage is about 20%, corporation tax is lower which makes it more attractive for foreign investment and unemployment is much lower, even before you consider the massive fraud of having so many people, especially former miners, on incapacity benefit. Rather than smash trade unions as the UK did, Irish governments of the 80’s and ‘90s developed a complex social partnership system which was the basis for the country’s current economic success.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that we should share the benefit of our new-found wealth with our cousins abroad, and I’m equally sure there must be at least a few people of Irish stock in Liverpool and elsewhere in the UK who want to live in a Republic where the only queen they have to offer any allegiance to is Paul O Grady.

Eamon de Valera and others often suggested that the solution to Northern Ireland’s problems was to exchange the protestant population their for the Irish community in Britain, which the Brits always dismissed as being impractical. My proposal instead offers a chance for Liverpudlians to come back to Ireland without even having to move.

Who wants to help me? All you’ve got to do is put me up in a place in Liverpool between now and May 5 and feed me lots of vegetarian food. I’ll pay my own deposit, which hopefully I’ll get back.

Hope to hear from you scousers out there, aw’right?

Next: Pope George Ringo

It's been hard to avoid mention of Pope John Paul II in the last few days, especially if you live here in Ireland, for which the Pope had a special place in his heart, having spent a week here in 1979.

We gave him quite a welcome here, it seems, with about 40% of our population coming out to see him when he appeared in Dublin, Drogheda and Limerick. When I found out that he never came to Cork that was probably the moment that started me on the path to athieism.

I joke, of course, though I wish some of the people writing encomia to him were as well, though it's obvious that they're serious. The funny thing is that when many famous figures die unexpectedly newspapers rush out obituaries that might be way out of date, but the Pope's death was a foretold one but they could have used some old ones anyway as the Pontiffs pontifications have been pretty much the same for the last twenty years.

One pundit claimed that JP2 was totally ill at ease in the modern world, as if he was living in a monastery in the side of a rock living on wild berries and not someone who travelled round to almost every country in the world and then get carted around in a state-of-the-art popemobile.

Another told us what a great man he was to kiss the ground in Scotland thus acknowledging that it was a different country to England. I think it was really because he was told that the dust on the airport pavement was the most nutricious food he could get in that country, and if he'd eaten one of their deep-fried Mars bars people would have been wheeling out those obits a long while back.

Others give him credit for ending communism by giving financial and moral support to Solidarity and by refusing to apease communism the same way previous popes had appeased Nazism.They're the people with the sort of simplistic notion of history that probably expected the problems of Poland and other Eastern European countries to be magicked away when they became good capitalists like ourselves. Instead, many of them come here seeking a better life, and it's the same people that welcomed John Paul to Ireland that voted against European expansion, often because of their oppostion to abortion.

Being educated in a Convent school, you get an impression of what it's like when a group of elderly men in Rome decide how you lead your life. One of the nuns who taught me showed us some pictures of a Polish dude at various stages of his life. It obviuosly turned out to be JP, though it wasn't obvious to most of us until we saw snaps of him in his 40's, though the Sister claimed she knew him from the pic of 14-year-old Karol. That seemed freaky to me but then she's a bride of Christ and JP was Jesus' point man down here on the Earth that the pontiff kissed so extensively, so it all made some sort of sense to her.

Then there was my religion teacher who wouldn't decide on any moral issue until she read the Vatican's opinion. It's true that there are a lot of complex moral issues out there but I don't know if some aging clerics are the right people to delegate the job of deciding what's wrong and what's right, particularly when the book they base their judgments on was written between two and three thousand years ago. (For a left winger like me it's a bit easier: I find out what George Bush or the Daily Telegraph thinks and think the opposite.)

When the Bible was written, the Jews were hunter-gatherers being chased round the desert by various pastoralists like the Babylonians, Egyptians and Romans and were always just on the edge of extinction, which is why they had to develop such strict laws encouraging early marraige. The contrast with Buddhism, for example is striking, as the countries that practiced it never faced the threat of extinction, so, for example, they have no proscription against masturbation as it doesn't really hurt anyone.

Times change, though, and whereas the Jews have come perilously close to extinction more than once, the same can't be said of Catholics, who number around 1.2 billion at the moment, and are growing fast. Most of this growth is in places where people most need spiritual sustinence, like Africa, but the Catholic Church thanks Africans for their often zealous support by refusing to allow them to use contraception. As a result the population of Africa is projected to rise to 2.3 Billion in 2100, a 23-fold increase since 1870. The only thing that's keeping it in check is AIDS, which will continue to cause misery for millions as long as the Church opposes condoms.

Unless you take Genesis 1:28 seriously, this can't be a good thing, but the problem is that many Vatican clerics do, that they genuinely think that we can keep using up the Earth's resources indefinately and that God will provide for us. Others believe that the end of the world is actually a good thing, as then they'll all be beamed up to heaven in the Rapture. I've got news for them: The book of Revelations, from which this theory was culled, was written under the influence of hallucinigenic drugs.

Those of us who believe that the Earth is a complicated and interdependent system and recognise that our lifestyle isn't sustainable can only hope that the people of Africa realise that their own belief systems pre-date Christianity by thousands of years and that Religion is merely another form of imperialism.

If, like me, you don't want Africa or Asia to become unsustainably over-populated there are some positive things you can do, like donating money to the international planned parenthood federation. Or you could just buy a big box of condoms and send them to a village in Africa.

I'm hopeful that the modern world will reciprocate the Vatican's contempt for it, particularly as the new Pope is almost certain to be a conservative, but the signs aren't that good. It may seem to us here in Western Europe, even in a largely religous country like Ireland that the influence of the church is on the wane, that shopping or football might be the new religions, but elsewhere religous fundamentalists are outbreeding the rest of us as they get married earlier and don't use contraception.

This is Pope John Paul's legacy. The papacy used to be a great world power, but now their influence is limited to woman's wombs. Unfortunately this is where babies come from who grow up to be adults who use up a share of the Earth's dwindling resoursces.

Some things do get better though: During the investiture controversy a "Holy" "Roman" "Emperor" was forced to kneel naked in the snow to beg for the pope's forgivness, but now I'm able to criticise him to my heart's content.
Along with the rise of the Evangelical Right in the US and militant Islam, he's helped to bring about the end of humanity from chronic overpopulation.

Yet I doubt anyone mentioned this in the hours and hours of coverage the Pope's death recieved on RTE, which shows we've got a long way to go before we become a truly secular nation.

What's the dirt on Bert, baldy?

I hate to see a man being kicked when he's down, so now that Michael McDowell is eating humble pie (No, it's humble pie, Mary) after his humiliating climbdown on immigration and the even more humilating Brinks Theft, I'm not going to point out that he's a fat, bald egomaniac who looks like Martin Boorman and has yellow teeth.

Maybe after €2.7 million was stolen the other day McDowell will be able to empathise with those people who've had their freedom stolen by his Garda goons and been sent back to Africa. Maybe he knows how those of who value civil liberties that we had even in the dark days when John McQuaid had a veto over the government feel when McDowell sneaks in and steals them in the name of protecting us from a non-existant terrorist threat.

It was sickening to those of us who base our opinions on reason rather than prejudice to hear McDowell's cold-blooded defence of his initial refusal to let Elukanlo Ulonkunle back into the country. He's a man that almost started crying when he found out what happened to Jean McConville 30 years ago, yet when he's faced with the dilemma of an African youth today he suddenly changes into his cold pragmatist hat.

Few in the Irish political establishment in the Republic have any time for Sinn Fein and even their defenders can say little in defence of some of their actions. Yet no-one can defer to Mickey McD in their visceral hatred for the organisation. Yet the more I hear him criticise the Shinners, the more I suspect that he's secretly jealous of the arbitrary powers they give themselves and would love if he could unleash the gardai on immigrants with complete lack of concern for due process.

The robbery a few days ago should be a wake-up call for Fatty McDowell, as that robbery happened in the country with the second highest proportion of police officers in the OECD, but most of them are employed bullying immigrants and small-time drug dealers. To top it all, Boorman-boy spent €12 million and one third of the gardai in the country protecting George Bush and Condoleeza Rice from tree-huggging hippies like myself.

Instead, he blames the private security firms that fill the gap left by his catastrophic misuse of resources. It's odd that the PDs insist that the private sector do everything better but don't seem to know how to react when this argument is proved to be as flabby as Mickey McD or Fatty Harney's belly.

The week before McDowell's fervently held-belief that he represents the views of the plain people of Ireland, to whom he stands up against tree-hugging, muesli-eating liberal elitists in RTE, the Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune was also given the lie by pupil power in Dublin. Watching those Dublin students on TV made me prouder to be Irish than any time for a while. There's a theory that opressed peoples all secretly desire to be opressors themselves and the Israeli government are always happy to provide them with evidence. I'd always thought we were different but for a while there it seemed that we were more like the Nestor figure in Ulysses who insisted that the only reason we never persecuted jews was that we never let them in. It seemed that we were quite happy to donate shit-loads of money to African children even when the country was a basket-case, but that we didn't want any Africans in their own back yard. It doesn't seem like that to me any more, especially after another community in Mayo, an area with little history of multi-culturalism are sticking up for another immigrant.

This won't stop McDowell from pandering to any lingering latent rascism. Though I disagree with everything he says about everything, I admit that like my grandfather would have said, he's a clever man who has complex views on the state and what it's role is relative to the people that it governs. It seems that when it comes to alcohol, drugs and pornography he thinks that it's the state's role to protect us from ourselves which is why we have among the harshest laws in the west on all those issues. Yet on issues like immigration he feels it incumbent upon himself to pander to our darkest, most negative instincts.

Of course, he feels he's entitled to do this, as unlike Sinn Fein, RTE, or people sitting around in internet cafes like myself, he's a member of a democratically elected goverment. This is presumably why any time anyone challenges him about any of his fascistic policies. I guess he's able to block out the fact that only about 3% of the population actually voted for the PDs. The funny thing is that it's usually people who live in working-class areas that vote for fascist parties as they're the people that actually have to live among immigrants , but most PD voters come from middle class areas like South Dublin.

So why does a party with so little support have so much power? It's a question that Michael McDowell should answer when he claims to be defending democracy against the likes of Sinn Fein and Al-Quaeda. How did he get such an important post only weeks after comparing Bertie Ahern to Ceaucescu?

In the early days of the internet there used to be a site called cogair.ie., cogair, of course, being the Irish for Whisper. Run by journos who knew stuff that they couldn't print because of our insane libel laws.

One persistant rumour was that Bertie wife left him not because of mutual differences but because he was beating the crap out of her.

If a high-powered lawyer like McDowell knew something about this that the rest of us didn't, that would make it really hard for Bert to give the PDs, who're becoming an increasing electoral liability, the heave-ho, wouldn't it?

But then, if it ever came out that our so-called minister was blackmailing our leader, that wouldn't look good for McDowell, or for the other two members of the anti-holy trinity that run our couuntry, Mary Harney and Micheal O Leary.

But sadly for Mary Harney, Humble Pie is a strictly metaphorical type of pie.