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.