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.