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
In one of them I was telling people that when I crossed the border from
That was because
Since I came back, I found out that
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 90th 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
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
Another irony is that in
So maybe it’s the people of