Awwwh...George Ree

Mr. Lee went to Leinster House. He then went home. Irish Politics is two bit flea circus to the Funderland of, say, the Athens of Pericles. George Lee discovered that being successfully courted by FG was all that Enda Kenny had in him. Other than that single master stroke, Kenny has shown all the political nouse of a particularly careless dog in a manger.

It's not clear to me whether or not George Lee should have left or tough it out, or take any last minute front-bench buy off. FG really didn't handle him well. He was more than just a crowd puller, which is what he was being used as. Some media reports, however, suggested that some in FG didn't like his profile or his brain. They liked him like FHM likes Abi Titmuss: clearly for her editorial skills.

Irish politics is funerals and medical cards and all the guff that comes when national politicians have to deal with the minutiae of the village pump, the preserve of the Maurice Hickeys of this world. Our politics of clientelism brought us the construction boom, the very state of affairs that will lead us to be next week's Greece. Do they care? Possibly, but Lee's assertion of an 'institutionalized' body politic seems too accurate to dismiss.

In the End Mr. Ree was in a very very ronery place. Maybe one day he could have made it, but he wanted to help in the here and now, in a situation he felt he could solve. In fact, that's not what politicians do. They fudge and cajole and gladhand. Are these the acts of statesmen? Nope, but then again, name me any figures in Irish politics who'd fit that moniker. There's more of a chance of Stephen Hawking moonwalking than managing to count such figures more than one hand.

Life in Leinster House, you see, has all the dynamism of an over 90's swingers' party, it's purring old boys and the mock solemnity of the parliament's hallowed halls: Floors as shiny as Jacky Healy-Rae's cowlick. Even the very foyer is emblematic of the republic's stagnation. For every Free State turncoat, there's some Anti Treaty gunman gawping at you. They should replace them with the most disturbing works by Francis Bacon they can muster overnight and shake them out of their cosy slumber. Meanwhile big farmers made good and teachers with no other promotion prospects strut around as if being there equates great intelligence or achievement. It doesn't. For many, getting elected involves getting enough yahoos down your local to put a number next to your name and hope that the maths does the rest. Then hold on for dear life so the Taoiseach's aide-de-camp can come wave you bye-bye one your way to the great Dail bar in the sky, whilst the least dimwitted of your offspring assumes what he thinks is rightfully his, which is all bullshit anyway.

George Lee knew this, though maybe not explicitly. Hanging on for dear life, is not about shaking up the system to which you cling. Reforming the banking system is not going to happen. Changing our dependency on construction and manual labour is never going to happen when the decisions politicians are happiest with are ponying up the cash for a John F Kennedy visitors centre or some such parochial nonsense. Two words prove my point: Digital Hub. Nuff said.

You may as well be straight with the electorate and shove off. It was the wrong place to go to, but the right place for him.

Football, the Brits, the War

I go away thinking that the Second World War had become a thing not of memory but of Sunday afternoon war movies that, interestingly, aren't part of the Sunday schedules anymore. That's because they're from my childhood, when there were still enough war veterans around who needed a reminder of their brush with awfulness as they dozed off after their Sunday roast.

They're mostly dead now, and the war is now just a set of cliches that get trotted out when needed. As happened the other day with the German Football teams away strip. You know it's a World Cup year when...

It's black, you see. It's interspersed with bits of gold that to me were redolent of the flag of the liberal German movement of 1848, and of the Urburschenschaft, the first nationalist college fraternity, founded in Jena, whose colours formed the basis of the flag, now used by the democratic Federal Republic. They, on the other hand, thought that the new jersey looked like the uniform of the SS!



I forget that I can read. I forget that I, unlike some yobs the British media pander to, am reasonably historically literate.

One, the SS never trotted around in airtex shorts being told your glory days are behind you. Two, the guys wearing the kit at best had grandparents who were kids during the war. Why trot out this shit? Because there's a world cup, and it's what you do.

A friend of mine asked, what have England and the English media got out of this episode? Getting to annoy the Springer media in Germany, whose title Bild and Die Welt went to town on this story is certainly one significant but not very difficult achievement.

What puzzles me, though, is that this didn't happen when people who remember the war are extremely old. Stranger still, it's only really been going on with the English media since the 1996 European Championship. That time, it lead to the death of a Russian, mistaken for a German in Southampton after England crashed out to the old enemy.

Even still, that was 14 years ago, and little has deviated from this cycle of behaviour in the English press. Given that it's only January, more is set to come.

Martin Cullen cries rape

Martin Cullen. See also: crass, petty, vainglorious, hyperbolic, stupid, bombastic, insulting, egocentric, incompetent, blathering, attention seeking, childish.

Is media intrusion a bad thing? Sometimes. Is it invasive? Yes. Did Minister Cullen feel violated? Maybe. Is it rape? No. Cullen used a word which, frankly, should cost him his job, so obscenely inappropriate and insulting to actual rape victims, was his choice of words. In the meantime, his credibility will just have to do. He managed to demean victims of sex crimes whilst simultaneously creating a sideshow that will divert attention what he claims to champion, namely privacy. He has successfuly scuppered any attempt at reasoned and intelligent debate about privacy, the media, and how to legislate without going all "Spiegel Affair" in the process.

Gobshite.

Crimble ...

There’s a cruel myth making the rounds that Christmas is a time of cheer, hope and quiet contemplation of the year we’ve had. No Christmas is likely to be as unrecognisable compared to this description than the miserable holiday season we’re facing in Irlande sur mer for 2009. Santy doesn’t own a pair of waders, Rudolf can’t swim and parking a sleigh will be a pain in his sack if the jolly old man hasn’t got the right change for the pay and display system.

I’m not enamoured with Irish Christmases and yes, I’m going to be Grinch-like about it. The holly and ivy drinkers in their awful sweaters drinking Smithwicks Shandies in my local, roaring on about golf and how much their wives cost to renovate; The inevitable futility of avoiding family for 364 days of the year, only to be trapped in the same place for a day of overindulging on cold turkey, colder ham and positively Baltic Merlot, with side helpings of a vegetable which resembles decomposing rabbits tails and tastes as much. The inevitable Christmas row is all that keeps me going. In our house it’s a two day, bilingual extravaganza, and sure the craic is mighty.

It’s the one aspect of the Christmas on this island which is true to the real character of the Irish. We don’t get on with each other. If we did, we’d be as interesting a Mormon stag night in Brussels. We’re noisy, we’re cranky, and without the safety valve of Christmas, there’d be civil war, I’m telling you.
The thing is, that the Christmas sold in Ireland , snow, red Coke trucks, Gemütlichkeit, are only likely to be part of our actual Christmas experience, if Ireland were taken piece by piece to Bavaria to be a ride in a negative equity horror theme park. Christmas, in other words, is consumer fraud with a Bing Crosby soundtrack. It’s the chance for RTE to run The Wizard of Oz during the Six-One slot, when Brian Dobson has to be taken to hospital due to a mince pie overdose. Will anyone notice the difference between footage from Co. Godknowswhere and Kansas? I have my doubts. There are plenty of people out there with green faces and stripy stockings who’d pop up in your average vox pop, anyway, normally on Nationwide selling organic marmalade.

To make things worse, this year we’re likely to get the full wrath of Aidan Nulty – cloudy with a chance of everything falling out of the sky – accompanied by a winds not seen since Ian paisley’s unplugged gigs in Belfast some decades ago. It’s hard to get into the festive spirit when walking upright is hard enough anyway with a vat of mulled wine in your veins and shopping bags ready to burst. By the end of your foolhardy trip to town, you’re standing in the pissing rain, your assorted presents at your feet as your bags finally give up: a sodden Santa watching the cardboard box of a Fisher-Price trike serve as a rescue raft for your town’s rodent population.



Some things though, are definitely true. People have been complaining for years that Christmas comes earlier every year. In November, the decorations went up. Two weeks later, they came down, thanks to some force 30 gusts. Methinks it’s time to batten down the hatches. It’s beginning to look a lot like carnage out there.

Age and Reason

"What people don't realise is that for our generation, nothing was normal." Rudolf Garmatz, my grandfather, is of the generation born at the same time as the ill-fated Weimar Republic. He knows all about the simple strangeness of life. His life began in what's now Poland, formerly the province of Pommern,from which he left, as one friend pointed out, as if predestined. His life was not bound to the earth of the east. Berlin, the front, north Africa and all the awfulness of the Ardennes, to Hamburg, where his first home was as simple as it was strange. An old map room in a school, he received a letter from my grandmother that they had been allocated it by a school comptroller who took pity on them. No electricity, he wired it with with old power lines he gathered up from the rubble of early 1950's Hamburg.

Nothing was normal. This thought came to mind again when I went to see Robert Fisk in the National Concert Hall, thanks to my wife who thought I'd like it. She was spellbound. I was distracted by the inordinate number of know alls using the opportunity to ask Fisk questions in order to make inane, crass and stupid statements in the deluded belief that he, the great Fisk, would reveal them as a true prophet. Any hope for intelligent discourse was hardly going to come from this audience, surely.

Towards the front, an elderly lady sat with her hand up, the only woman who asked question. When she was finally brought a microphone, she asked question which was staggering in its simplicity, honesty and genuine curiousity.

"I'm 78 years old" - she can talk as long as she wishes to, whispered my wife - "and you may find my questions silly."
"They are not!" Fisk assured her, as if he'd been impugned himself. It was charming. "Well, I was wondering, where do the israeli's get their oil from? And, How's Mordechai Vanunu? Is he dead?"

Fisk seemed startled and took a brief moment to bring himself back to her question. He answered her questions with as much detail and clarity as he could. She seemed satisfied. Older people can sometimes see through the world, that we younger people can't. If we're to have any hope of progress as a society, then our discourse needs to be both simple and inspired. No joy yet, though some hope exists.

Yes

I am voting yes. I have every reason to vote no, but none of them have to do with the treaty. The treaty has to do with how the EU is run. Not poverty, divorce, abortion, neutrality, the colour of Angela Merkel's trouser suits.

It's as simple as it is necessary, and sooner or later, we'd better face up to the fact the the EU saved us when we needed the cash, kept pumping it in when things were picking up and saved us again...from ourselves and our greedy coven of bankers, who colluded with the government in a conspiracy of stupidity to bring us to the brink of disaster.

This has nothing to do at all with the Lisbon Treaty, and for what it's worth, a strong European Parliament is no bad idea.Which is in the Lisbon Treaty. Well, stronger. A good start.

And we have a population the size of Berlin.


And the economic management skills of a drunk teen minding a baby. which again has nothing to do with the Lisbon treaty, which is about reforming the internal structures of the EU. Which we need.

Questions?

Ryan Confidential 2

The focus is still on the religious orders in the abuse scandal that is to us what the stolen Generations are to the Australians. Like the ozzies, we're unlikely to embrace the full truth, which would require looking at how we were complicit. As some suggest that any visit by the current pope would be unthinkable, given the scandal, how many people embraced the previous pontiff in 1979 when he was here? where was their outrage? Or did they not know?

The Religious need to be taken to task, and also to the cleaners, that's fine. but consider this: does the obsession with financial compensation, and the studied ignoring of the state's role, of the role of our population in a particular complicity really do anything but cheapen the suffering of children, for whom nobody spoke up.