Guten Morgan!

Guten Morgan!: Mrs. Thatch!

2012-01-08T22:48:00.000Z

Mrs. Thatch!

2012-01-08T19:12:00.001Z

Press coverage around 'The Iron Lady' has shrieked of a conspiracy, a right wing glossing over of Mrs. Thatcher's dark side. The film's makers have even been accused of, duh, duh, DUHHHH, humanizing Britain's only female PM. The truth is, it does, and that's no bad thing.

If you don't like 'The Iron Lady', that's fine. It's not your cup of tea. You may carp about its lack of historical detail, or even accuracy. You might wish, it focused on the miners' strike rather than on Thatcher in the advanced stages of dementia, talking with her dead husband Denis.

Most of the objections to this film are simplistic and ideologically based. They think she was an evil negative force in the world and want their viewpoint to be given celluloid validation. They're not looking at the actual film,which although superficially about a major political figure is actually about the transitory nature of fame and power.

A case in point, the controversial scene where Thatcher goes to buy milk a the beginning of the film. Scurrying back to with her shopping, bemused and confused, what's clear is that Thatcher, like many of the elderly, is invisible to the rest of us. Her battles, her passions and her considerable fame, such as it was, are irrelevant to the majority of the population alive today. Even her son Mark lives abroad and has no intention of coming to visit 'Another time perhaps', she suggests when he calls. As with many elderly parents hoping to see their children, even the longest serving British PM of the 20th century lacks definitive powers of persuasion with her absent son.

Britain's current leader, whom Thatcher, played by Oscar-bound Meryl Streep, calls 'quite a smoothy', will go the same way.

The last vestiges of her former glory surround her: the official portrait on her kitchen wall, the secretary half-heartedly leafing through her Filofax for appointments, these are physical manifestations of the obscurity all people are destined for.

Some bits of the film are inspired, others not so. Her early years are brilliantly captured, and it wasn't all good. However, portraying Thatcher as instrumental in ending the Cold War (she was famously opposed to German reunification, the final political act of the Cold War) is just wrong. It also skirts over her internal conflicts with the Heathites in her party, which could have truncated her leadership had it not been for the Falklands War.

Some viewers also mightn't get all the historical minutiae, and that's a shame. Dealing with it would make a great film, or a long one depending on how good it's rendered, but that's another film, not currently showing in Omniplexes around the world.

If the film's director, writer and stars all argue that the film is apolitical, it's not to hide an unpalatable political narrative, it's just the film isn't particularly political. Thatcher's family and friends have also been frosty about the film, so it's hardly the hagiography it might be construed as being. Furthermore, the charge of humanizing Thatcher, the same charge leveled at the makers of 'Downfall' about Bruno Ganz's depiction of Hitler, is an outrageous distortion of Thatcher's term in Downing Street. She may have been, in the words of Ben Elton, a 'nasty old witch', but she was a democratically elected 'nasty old witch', who respected and understood the cut and thrust of democratic politics, and thrived on it. And was shown the door by it.

Incidentally, for an accurate account of Thatcher's years in power, google BBC's documentary, 'Thatcher: The Downing Street Years'. For an entertaining, semi-fictitious drama about a significant historical figure, watch The Iron Lady.

GE11 - it's the Big one!!

2011-02-02T14:24:00.000Z

I'm working on it okay??!!!!!

The Election's off to a hectic start, and just about everyone has an opinion on what'll happen. From Fintan O'Toole to the fool who said on Twitter that Labour were a civil war party, they're all at it. I will as well. God knows how to make it funny, but we'll figure it out...

the absurdest of times calls for the seriousest of debates. It's not what we'll get, but we might just stumble ona few truths along the way. .

The End - a Kenny

2010-06-15T09:39:00.001+01:00

It's truly a matter of some skill: the implosion of FG the face of the least popular government in the history of the state. Only the blueshirts could, like Ronnie Rosenthal, hoof the ball into the car park when all that's in their way is a lot of net. This is of course not the first time that FG lost its bottle in the face of flatline polls. The problem is, though, not the polls or Enda Kenny per se. It's their judgement to begin with.

Having lost the country's most famous economics commentator, having sidelined the young and restless in the FG family (Please, if anyone finds Lucinda Creighton, then contact the papers before she ends up on the side of a milk carton), after letting Leo Varadkar speak in public ever, it can only be said that they have neither the guts nor the guile to lead anyone, let alone themselves. So it's now a choice between Eamon Gilmore and a Labour front bench as familiar as the Angelus at tea time or Brian Cowen. Will it be whiskey or the gun?

Go on the real super eagles!!

2010-06-13T11:35:00.000+01:00

Okay, so I'm biased. But like it or lump it, I'm rooting for Germany. Australians may find that comment funny, but this is just getting serious.

Germany have the youngest team since 1934, when the coach was a bespectacled Nazi called Otto Nerz. These days it's a dandy called Jogi, and the mentality is more attractive than in those dark days of the 1930's: is it typically German though? They want to win. Check. They have a focussed training program. Check. They wear snazzy white jerseys. Check. After that, it gets more interesting.

Contrary to the lazy assumptions of many people, the Germans aren't gong to win on the back of mythical eficiency. They'll be a glorious, romantic mess, and, yes, they'll get through the group stages demonstrating that they are resilient, resourceful and willing to give it their all. But they're not efficient and haven't been in two decades. It's going to be way more interesting than that.

This is just about as good as it gets for the world Cup, where every macth so far has been as dull as the drone of a Vuvuzela. A Young, hungry and slightly ramshackle German side against an Aussie selection of seasoned pros, who'll bring the game to them with guile and no little style. Thankfully Croatia aren't playing, so they have no obstacles but their own will to win.

In the end, I'll be shouting for the Germans. They need at least a couple of fans from our part of the world, so bring it on.

Nachdenken ueber Rudolf G. With apologies to Christa Wolf

2010-04-08T13:19:00.003+01:00

My uncle Paul put it best. We can't afford to lose any more gentlemen. So it was true of my grandfather, Rudolf Garmatz, nicknamed 'Apo', whose name I still haven't deleted from my phone, a thoroughly modern activity that people must perform when someone dies. I don't think I ever will, nor do I want to. Not out of melodrama, but because he should still be alive. It suited him so.

The man I was conscious of as my grandfather began quietly, and ended quietly. In actual fact he'd been born in the middle of a storm in 1919. To me, as a small child, he was the quiet one. The first phase of this perceived silence, was because he was so in awe of my grandmother, that he couldn't get a word in, if he wanted to at all. He worshipped her until she died in 1992, and then she left him unexpectedly, and with characteristic panache, alone. For the first time since 1946, the year he met her, he opened his mouth.

Anyone who met him was suitably impressed. Exceedingly well read, and clever enough to have processed his reading, he had the ability to talk to you about anything and always assume you knew what he was talking about, without that awful knack of lesser people, who rub your nose in the slightly less scant knowledge they possess. Perhaps it's because he never assumed to know as much as he actually did. I only ever saw it in one other person, Brian Jacob, a Geologist who, like Rudolf, the world could have done with for a few more years.

Rudolf was a man's - and woman's - man. He could speak as easily to Franconian Farmers as to Paul McGrath or Helmut Schmidt. He could say enough to be interesting but leave showing off to everyone else.

The sheer span of his life, his 90 years, a colleague commented, took in so much of what we call history. He called it his generation's "absence of normality". He remembered the hyperinflation as a small child in 1924, took in a lot more in the years after - the Hitler period, war, the everafter; Some things we knew about, other things, we found in envelopes, were curated over a lifetime: official letters from places no longer existing like Stettin, ending in "Heil Hitler" lie next to postcards from army comrades and drinking pals in Berlin in the early 40s. North Africa, medals, pictures of a dashing man in uniform - he was still regarded as something to look at until well on in his life; Postcards from his girlfriend, my grandmother, a pair of smart, emryonic hippies. Wirtschaftswunder, cars and work, the union work, "Scheiss GEW" as my grandmother thundered. Other stuff emerged from the envelopes - the secret life of a polymath, letters to the asking him demonstrate a slide rule he'd invented for the newly established West German Army. They didn't need it after all - neither did he need them as it happened. He wrote Maths books instead. He loved the creativity of Mathematics like no teacher I ever encountered in Ireland: games, a counting method using your hands like a rudimentary binary code: Leibniz for the playground.

Those yellowed photos and notes you dredge up from a box in the attic of your mind are in death, what you survey as the debris of a lifetime, partly in fascination, partly in horror, partly in joy. To every raised eyebrow, every 'wow', he sits in his chair saying, 'Oh that', or some Teutonic growl like that. No man ever rolled the letter R quite like him, nor did any man play down his own contribution to the world as effectively.

In the last decade of his life, we'd go to his birthdays because we knew - though we tried to ignore it, that not many more might come along. Not that we let on to him. Anyway, if he cared that there weren't, he hid it well. He had the dignity that allows a man to do what he likes, without the slightest hint of self consciousness. As if he didn't mind what people thought, but he'd wear a shirt and tie anyway. The man could drink without the affliction of looking like it was a dirty activity, and give you a great time without you noticing, always with ice cream soaked in Bailey's to sweeten the deal.

When a loved one lives in another country, it's hard to explain, especially to Irish people, how they can be close to you. I'd say in the last weeks of his life "My grandfather's 90, and he's not feeling so well", a look of sympathy would be replaced very soon with a blank stare, as understanding was replaced with 'who-gives a shit', when it turned out he lived several hundred miles away in Hamburg. He might as well have not existed as far as they were concerned. Sure wasn't he foreign?

That's why I was angry when he died, in the midst of a storm, as it happens, peacefully in a hospital in Klein Flottbek. The storm caused a rush of wind to blow the flagpole down outside his, now his son's, home.

It was hard to explain why I'd be upset - "sure wasn't he far away anyway, and you can't be close to just anybody?" For the misty-eyed Irish, not being able to understand the irrelevance of location is as maddening as it is perplexing. They of all people should have understood. To dwell on how the place of my birth let me down yet again, however, wouldn't have been Rudolf's style, which is another reason why I'm not half the man he was. And writing it in a blog would have drawn a whithering response from him anyway.

So as I think about him, I consider many things, some the self indulgent rubbish that bereaved people consider on the way from Miss Havisham to getting up for work: how I'd lost a father figure that no one, not even my own dad could have been - he was a daddy, not a patriarch like Rudolf. The latter outlived the former by twelve years to the hour, living exactly twice as many years.

Other things remembered are tangible. The every morning drive to the bakery, the iconoclasm of calling a bread roll a 'Schrippe' rather than the locally preferred term 'Rundstueck'; cutting up apples at the dinner table, eating cherries by a windmill next to local orchards, and spitting the stones out accross the levee towards the river Elbe and Hamburg. In silence.

After all, why ruin a good moment with chatter?

The evolution of Mary by Albert Einstein

2010-03-24T10:46:00.002Z

From the online edition of the Irish Times: (about her!)

“Have I got this right? One of the wost ministers (ever) who was too lazy/stupid/unprofessional to do anything to stop the abuses in FAS - or to bring those officials in FAS to account - is now moved to a new department with FAS following her?
God help the children - the mind boggles at what calamities are coming their way.”

Even the ASTI should be able to kick her ass. Surely.

See more @ http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/politics/2010/03/23/reshuffle-early-verdict/

Bon Anniversaire

2010-02-28T15:42:00.003Z

Normally on days like this, I get a bit maudlin and ramble on about how much I miss my dad. It's true, to paraphrase Shakespeare, he was from this world untimely ripped, and we are the poorer for it. But the times of looking back with regret and sadness just aren't those of now. A man like that needs people to look ahead, the next plan, the next project and give it your all. What if he'd lived? As he would have said, 'if my aunty had balls she'd be my uncle'. So we've resumed the struggle. Mooney last week and an adventure in rural broadband next.

That's what I'm going to do to mark his 12th year of passing, of being my past, when I was someone else: I have a bag of ideas to open up,turn upside down and empty onto my living room floor. Make sense, make art make fun.

So to my dear departed da, happy anniversary. You'd have loved the future. D.

PS. if you want to see how good he was, just watch the video of him being Bertie and enjoy

Radio (is the ) One

2010-02-25T18:17:00.003Z

Here's the link to my appearance today on the Mooney Show on RTE Radio One. About halfway through the show. Talking property and Tedfest. Some combination!

click here

Awwwh...George Ree

2010-02-08T21:36:00.003Z

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

2010-02-02T20:53:00.004Z

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

2010-01-23T09:57:00.006Z

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 ...

2009-11-30T19:39:00.002Z

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

2009-11-07T17:59:00.002Z

"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

2009-10-02T16:24:00.003+01:00

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

2009-07-01T12:06:00.003+01:00

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.

Ryan Condfidential

2009-05-25T11:25:00.003+01:00

The story of 150, 000 boys and girls abused in the care of the church, supervised by the state, has been described as a holocaust of sorts. I find the notion distasteful, but they do share a common bond. The cowardice of ordinary people to do the right thing.

Whilst some will demand pots of money from religious orders, and whilst Diarmuid Martin does his best say what needs to be said, much of the outcry over the report ignores the fact, that we, our elected officials and our civil servants failed to hold the church to account, as was our duty. We failed to get beyond parochial defensiveness when the failings of our industrial schools was exposed by outsiders, irrespective of their pre-eminence in the field of childcare. We failed every child and woman and man who was ever sent to places that Dickens would have lambasted a century before.

Ireland is at a low ebb. The economy is in tatters, our morale is rock bottom. People are scared and leaders are doing nothing but grin offensively from posters or fast tracking passports. In the midst of that, you can be guaranteed we will be told not to dwell on the past, not to examine who we are and who we were, to repress what cannot be repressed.

We have never defined ourselves beyond crude caricatures, a reaction to the London Illustraed News showing us to be dressed monkeys. We never came to terms with the famine, with colonialism, with the Great War or with our movement from the apron strings of Britain to those of Rome.

It's more than just about money. It's about looking at our true selves and the ugliness of our national soul, gnarled by decades of self deception and complacency.

Liverpool and why I hate my football club

2009-04-22T11:30:00.002+01:00

I'm a Liverpool fan. have been since I made the decision in 1985 that, according to the copy of Shoot from 1974 that we had, that Steve William' kit was just a little to stupid looking for my liking. that said, it was still a close call. I think I regret the decision, and I'm going to tell you why.

Since before Michael Thomas buried Liverpool's ominous 1989 season, I have had my heart broken more times by my football club than all the humiliations of asking girls out in my teens ever could. First it was John Aldridge having his penalty saved by Hans Segers, the first penalty to be saved in an FA Cup final, then it was Souness replacing Kenny Dalgliesh, and replacing a team of genuine beauty with one as pretty as the face on Paul Stewart's head.

if you're married to a club, then mine has been a loveless marriage, until those frilly tarts in Arseenal started pirouetting around Highbury to the tune of Thierr Henry's sexy football ethos, I didn't know how to get turned on about football at all.

And then last night it happened again. Goal after goal, they couldn't find the killer punch, or learn how to outwit ARashavin or the supply he had to the goal.

The bottom line is: I want the Premiership. I want to love my club again!

Budget - not just the sound a car makes when hitting a pothole

2009-04-07T21:12:00.003+01:00

I spent the last few weeks paying a little game. The game was to try to predict what the government was going to do in the budget. I had to give up, unfortunately, due to one inalienable fact. The third generation Fianna Fail aristocracy running the country are SO incompetent that it's hard to know what they're going to do.

And so it was today. After the sideshow regarding locking everyone, including the members of the press, into the Dail chamber, Brian Lenihan (the second) set out his second budget, because his first one was, frankly, bollocks.

What was the aim of the new budget? What was its purpose? Mainly to look tough. They want to look serious and credible. Some things were interesting: the nod to social democracy in the shape of one year's free pre school for all children in other times could have been visionary, but it wasn't placed in the context of a broader social programme.

Setting up a toxic bank was interesting, but will it restore confidence in our banks, or will it be seen as a sop to developers who borrowed more than they could repay?

And did the government sufficiently grab the state's finances by the scruff of the neck and amend for how the government frittered away record tax receipts over the last decade, whilst doing nothing to stop banks from lending to any gobshite and pumping up a property market to the point of disaster.

George Lee said it didn't add up. They spoke of having a five year plan. I watched the whole thing and saw no such plan. I hope they're right and I'm wrong, but I'm gonna keep wearing my pre-browned recession trousers just in case.

Spamalot!

2009-03-12T21:52:00.002Z

It says a lot when the spam in your email reflects the economic shlamozzel we live in. Spam during the boom years was all about cosmetic surgery. Have a nicer nose, bouncier boobs. Well, all booms go bust as badly as a doctored bust can go boom. Bubbles burst and now my spam folder today bore such cheery opportunities as 'foreclosed homes' and 'filing bankruptcy?'. It's like looking at the world through the eyes of the PM of Iceland, YongBron Coewenstottir.

Thanks to this junk everyone can make sense of the crisis in Lehmann's terms...

Waste Not want Not

2009-02-17T14:41:00.005Z

Many people recycle. I do. Germans and people who are forcibly made to wear Birkenstocks do. Most American sitcom writers do but don't admit it. And yet there are two good reasons why it's bad for you. One, there's no value any more in rubbish as a commodity. Fact. The price of waste collapsed like Jabba the Hut in a marathon stair climbing contest. Second, it's bloody dangerous.

I destroyed myself this morning going into my back room to find things to stuff my car with. In the end, I nearly perished. My legs got trapped under three tons of jumbo sized milk cartons, and no one could hear me call for help, as Styrofoam became lodged in my mouth. After I was eventually rescued by a St.Bernard dog and a news crew, I nearly sliced my finger off, washing the inside of an empty tin of fruit salad.

Another great piece of recycling is Madonna, queen of the reinvention, who's apparently now a cougar. Our Lady of the Fishnet was snapped with Jesus de Luz, a 22-year old product of the model breeding program in operation Brazil, ever since Mengele visited there after the war. The world media savoured pictures of the pair. Not even The Sunday Times could resist the entitling their snap with the obvious 'Madonna and Child'.

Madonna is not Michael Douglas, nor is she the nonagenarian squillionaire peanut-in-a-wheelchair, who Anna Nicole Smith married. Perhaps, and I'm just putting it out there, there might be a double standard here. Madonna is a woman, but she has every right to a mid-life crisis as any man, including engaging in near comical flings with unfeasibly young people, who have none of the life experiences she might have.

Her right to a life notwithstanding, it won't stop people mocking her. Let's hope she never gets a comb-over and a Porsche!

This week, a video!

2009-02-14T16:03:00.002Z

As an experiment, I'm going to try to not only blog in writing, but from time to time, I'm going to use the wonderful gadgets on my laptop in order to present my notions and ideas as they come out of my mouth, sometimes after gestating in my brain. Uploading pictures would take too long and take up too much memory, so instead, I'm going to do it this way. Sometimes writing on the internet is like shouting your name in a dark cave, where only bats and Facebook stalkers will here you, but I hope that even the bats will take notice and enjoy my stuff.

That's not to say I'm not going to let you away so easily. Enjoy my video, it's a bit of fun more than anything else.

I leave you with this thought. Can a man get by on less than €2 million a year in these hard times?

Winter of Discontent....

2009-02-06T16:41:00.005Z

Our huskies are dead. That's right, I took a hatchet to the bastards. I had to look into their big, brown, vacant eyes and somehow detach myself as the grim deed was done. It was necessary and totally humane. For us. We were cold and hungry, and their meat and fur helped nurture what was left of my wife and I on our trip home at the end of an arduous week. We had been camped out on the M50 for much of the last three days, and before that, we were forced into the purchase of said huskies from a dodgy looking Eskimo following our near fatal expedition on the N7 out of Castledermot. Cars slid and slipped, vans hilariously got stuck head first into holes like Winnie the Pooh. Buying our snow-hounds seemed a good bet as a glacier formed rapidly from Carlow to Dublin. South Leinster looked like the Baring Straights, though we couldn't see Russia from our house. It turned out to be just another panic buy.

Instead of venturing forwards with our new dogs, however, we turned back and went home; took a mad, bad and definitely sad trip on public "transport" the next day and found that the weather was, like manflu, not so much bad as it was messy.

All because a few county councils couldn't have been arsed gritting the roads, thereby risking our already fairly peeky looking economy as 9% of us stayed at home (not including the near 400,000 who have nowhere to go in the morning anyway).

Maybe it's stay at home telemarketing for everyone. It's better than waiting for the powers that be to do up a recovery plan and grit the damn roads!

I'll get by....

2009-02-01T15:49:00.002Z

This is the first time in about a week that I've had the time to post anything on my accursed blog, accursed, that is, because I use rude words in disbelief that I don't write enough on it. There's only so often you can get indignant enough about the country to write, without having to resort to a cocktail of Pepcid and gin to keep the show going. Ireland has been mentioned in the same breath as Iceland by Jose Manuel Barroso, and not because of our innovative music industries.

Iceland is run by corrupt inbred weirdies who look like they escaped from Royston Vasey, so being likened to them in any respect I don't think is a good thing in any way. did I mention they're also inept? Just saying....

Amid the current turmoil and Brian Cowen's grossly offensive, "It's my country and I'll fuck it up if I want to" rant, and the utter contempt shown to the our parliament in fixing the unfixable, Sebastian Barry went under the national radar, winning the Costa Book Prize, the old Whitbread prize. No fanfare to speak of. Yes, the Irish Times reported the win, duh! They would. No one else however saw fit to really mention it or its significance, beyond the fact that he won and the cash prize he received(quel surprise). Why?

We Irish have a contempt for success and particuarly for intellectual discourse. Successful writer? not interested. Don't read anyway. Why would you, sure? Reading won't soup up your Subaru Impreza, will it? This malaise is not limited to Barry's literary success. It's the very reason why the political classes are incapable of dealing with our current crises - they're ignorant, illiterate and arrogant. Cowen's abovementioned rant is just one example of this. There are plenty more that you can no doubt think of yourself.

So as writers go unaknowledged and tough decisions go unfaced, we get to sit quietly and watch the sun go down on our glory years, whilst being beaten over the head with a fraying Chloe Handbag and a copy of the Irish Times property Section.

Irregular Regulator

2009-01-10T12:28:00.005Z

The Financial Regulator has decided to retire early. After doing the career equivalent of being Brezhnev's body double after the great man died, Paddy Neary finally jumped ship. An internal report gave his office a good kicking for its handling of the Anglo-Irish Bank "let's allow executives to hide loans from everyone, which is eeeerily like criminal activity (allegedly) but isn't, because they were going to give the money back, honest" scandal.

Well, that's about time he went, isn't it. He fell honourably on his sw...I mean, he put his hands up to his ultimate respons...Well, he saw it com...

...He took early retirement rather than risk being sacked and humiliated. How brave! His office did nothing to prevent bankers behaving recklessly with other people's money. Officials under his command instead alternated their activities between updating their Facebook pages and burying their heads up their arses. His office wasn't up to the job of regulating Neary's private sector buddies and the blame was placed not on him as the F.R., but on lower level types, who failed to pass on warnings of the Anglo shenanigans to the top dogs in the Financial Regulator's office. "I'm going, but it was the underling's fault" is the message of his departure: The buck stopped somewhere near reception.

He'll no doubt be rewarded for his essential negligence with a cosy state pension and without censure or reprimand officially blemishing his Resume. Wonderful that he had the foresight to avoid that disaster.

There is something even more galling to note about this. Aside from witnessing the cowardly sneaking off of an official who did some disservice to this state, not one thing will be learned from the sorry episode. The banking sector, now in free fall, will once again be allowed to behave like kids in a sweet shop the next time things are good. Which will again hamper efforts in the struggle with Ireland's underlying economic vulnerability and our essential greed.

If he fancies, Neary has one option to while away his newly found free time. He could get a part time job giving out dole money, though it might be stressful for him. The queues for his counter would be massive. Sure it'd be easier than winning the Lotto!

Hot Lisbon Action

2008-12-21T12:28:00.008Z

We will be doing another Lisbon Treaty vote. As I write this, I can hear Brian Cowen's loud, fevered scribbling of a plan on the back of a cigarette packet to get the blasted thing passed - with as few casualties as possible. Will it work? Yes, despite his best efforts!

This is the second treaty we fucked up the first time out. He and his predecessor couldn't get Nice passed on the first attempt despite facing an opposition of racists and headbangers. This motley crew included a tree hugger imitating Peter Tork of the Monkees and a Nazi midget who thought a European treaty on the administrative structures of the EU would cause a rash of mass abortions and black masses, populated by blacks.

Nevertheless, it happened again. Bertie bolted and Cowen campaigned as convincingly as Pete Postlethwaite playing Giuseppe Conlon could convincingly portray Lara Croft. Lisbon was a treaty advocated by babykillers and Euro-Imperialists, they said, and a great plague of locusts would come and devour our crops and and and and...
The truth is, that Lisbon is about the ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURES of the EU. Nevertheless, Cowen couldn't make that simple point, and didn't get it passed.

Si here we go again. We are presented with (cue fanfare) a set of declarations, non binding, and which have absolutely nothing to do with the treaty. There's statesmanship for you. The actions of the government speak for themselves. Lisbon has been a grade A farce, and this while we may need to go play it old school with Brussels, getting out the begging bowl, looking pathetic.

While the country's burning to the ground, we saw the great man Cowen doing what you'd expect a latter day Nero to do. Last Thursday, after his great press conference where no plan was proposed to save our economy, he was singing carols with the Civil Service choir.

You Gotta Work!!

2008-12-21T12:16:00.007Z

I'd love to work in an office in Ireland. They're places where boys and girls dress up in their parents' clothes and play grown ups for six hours a day, before running away to be the children they really are. You'll see many and most such office monkeys in the wild, their shirts hanging out of their pants, trainers clashing with cheap black work suits, whilst bags of crisps and messy pints get passed around sticky pub tables. It's not all fun though. Ministers are going cap in hand to jittery multinationals. This could be the Cretaceous period for this species, after the asteroid hit. Now they're forced to do a perverse re-enactment of every bad western, where the employer shouts "Dance!" and the office monkeys have to dodge a hail of bullets.

Having done a little snooping around in a Dublin office last week, I copped the real reason for their imminent doom. They dress so badly, that sartorially more evolved cultures are pulling out of Ireland in disgust. I saw some humdingers: Footballers' haircuts on top of tight fitting suits last seen in Goodfellas and which have since infested the formal section of River Island. Girls turn up at 9am Monday to Friday like a cross between Flamingos and Sister Wendy, teetering in heels in no way meant for anyone but Ru Paul. It's no wonder that foreign bosses are confronted with a choice: invest in gift vouchers for H&M or pull out altogether. The cost of the former would simply bankrupt any firm on earth. Look at Dell: being American, investing in the dress-sense apocalypse in Dell's native Texas has practically bankrupted the company. Investing in threads for their Limerick plant would push them over the edge.

Clearly this is a critical moment in our economic history and needs must when the sling-back hits the fan. Having watched Law and Order, I'm clearly qualified to enforce a new regime. After all, there are fashion crimes so heinous, that they must be investigated by an elite group, the Fashion Victims Unit. These crimes go all the way to the top in our society. Just look at Mary Coughlan. She's as dainty as Jonah Lomu, as stylish as Jackie Healy-Rae. It was only a matter of time before people saw her fashionista status was simply an invention of hacks, shell shocked by back to back episodes of Sex and the City on DVD.

You can, however, help defeat this great threat to our society. Frog-march a shabby looking loved one into Massimo Dutti. Flights to Milan are cheap - why not book one for some lady who thinks trouser suits were meant for people other than Marlene Dietrich. Beat your husband the next time he wears a brown, diagonally checked shirt with a pink, striped tie.

This is your task. Our economy needs you. It's your patriotic duty! Dress to impress!

Branded a Sicko!

2008-10-31T00:34:00.004Z

What do Conor Lenihan and Russell Brand have in common? A lot more than you think....

Brand has the persona of a hybrid Lenny Bruce and Albrecht Duerer. Conor Lenihan is the Fianna Fail's Cumainn clown. Lenihan branded Leo Varadkar a fascist in what has to be the most tedious and embarrassing media 'row' to happen in this country in aeons. The remarks were made during a debate on what is actually an important issue, namely cuts in education. Lenihan made a reference taken to be about Varadkar, complete with Nazi style salute to cap it off.

Brand, as you know, unless you've had the blessing of total sensory deprivation over the last week, is responsible with Mr. Jonathan Ross for a prank voicemail message on actor Andrew Sachs' phone, leading to both being treated in the media furore in much the same way large black and white animals are smacked about in a Badger baiting contest. They made references to Brand's relationship with Sachs' granddaughter.

What Conor Lenihan's fascist jibes and Brand's idiotic and possibly illegal prank have in common is that neither was particularly funny. Similarly, both rows have lead to questions about what we deem to be in good or bad taste.

I don't think it's in good taste to call someone a fascist. I also don't think it's in good taste to leave offensive messages on someone's phone about what you've done with their granddaughter. I also don't think it's in good taste to be distracted by these pathetic sideshows when central Africa is on the brink of genocide for the second time in as many decades.

For both rows, there's the same response to be made. If you don't like Russell Brand, don't go to see him. It worked to get rid of Bernard Manning,thank God. Similarly, Brand has not said or done anything his peers have not already signed off on. Is it right to make sleazy jokes about your sexual conquests? Is it right to crack wise about the Holocaust? Maybe not, but sometimes comedy can reveal truths that other art forms don't reveal. If a minister repeatedly says things which make you want to slice your tongue off to distract you from the pain of the embarrassment he causes, then don't let him back into Leinster House at the next election. He has not earned the right to rub shoulders with statesmen....

...Sorry, that last line was in particularly bad taste, as it didn't reflect reality at all!

I find neither Conor Lenihan nor Russell Brand terribly clever or amusing. Neither politics nor comedy are enjoying a golden age right now, and real genius is thin on the ground. I choose, therefore, to avoid them, let them on, and hope someone will, as Andrew Sachs suggested, "do better".

Don Giovanni

2008-09-06T10:59:00.003+01:00

There were a few scary moments where international football wasn't on the telly, but we're okay now with the world cup qualifiers under way. There's been talk of resurrection and renewal from a few different quarters, but do we have it? Is any of the Tra-hype worth the ink? Answer: no.

We were not going to Tiblisi, which was good. Shorter flight, less of a chance of being brutally murdered. Instead the Georgian away fixture was being at a neutral venue. Surprise, surprise, since Georgia is the wobbly pub table du jour, upon which America and Russia are doing some retro 80's geopolitical arm-wrestling. Instead, it all happened in Mainz, Germany. Admittedly there's an irony in using the term 'neutral', given that Germany is in NATO and Mainz near several US bases, however irony has never been a FIFA strong point.

The buzz was far from deafening, however. Despite the relative closeness of the neutral venue to us - Mainz is barely an hour from Frankfurt airport - it didn't seem to enthuse people to march arm in arm to Dublin airport to watch a festival of football.

The fact is, that unless people have an interest in history and culture, the reasons for going to Mainz did not include a guarantee of passionate football by a group of men who want to play for the pride and honour of their country. The spirit may have been willing, but the bodies weren't following.

Previous fixtures under Trapattoni haven't given that much cause for comfort. For example, I attended the macabre spectacle of Ireland v Serbia at Croke Park. We arrived late and left early. The place would have had a bigger gate for a ladies minor football semi-final. Those who did attend had clearly worked as extras in the film "Awakenings": the bestial awfulness of the game sent the rest of us into a coma as well. Despite our best effort to get a few songs going - no one wanted to join in for a few bars of 'You're not really Russians' to the tune of 'Guantanemera' for the benefit of the Serbs - there was a serious feeling of being underwhelmed and uninterested. Things did not bode well, and the display in Mainz demonstrated a similar lack of energy.

Admittedly, not everyone was lacking animation. Trapp is 69, and has more verve and passion than any one player on the pitch in a green jersey. Even the score, 2-1, suggests a job done with some efficiency but not much else. There's an awful lot of convincing still to do.

So, it's on to Montenegro, the latest country to dump Serbia, and yet another young country whose infancy is troubled. For all of that, however, we can't seem to stuff these teams, despite the genuine administrative and logistical obstacles on their own paths to glory.

Whilst other teams from Europe's developed footballing world, such as Germany, can stick six of the best past minnows, we're left scrapping it out with teams that, frankly, have no tangible reason to put up a serious threat to us, and we've been at this since the McCarthy era, if not even earlier. Trapp has merely brought stability, but self-belief, even flair have yet to materialise.

Another bout of underachievement on Wednesday may drive the excitable Trapp to distraction, which is the fans can relate to. We're already distracted, by reruns of Southpark.

Bijoux Carleau

2008-08-04T12:36:00.003+01:00

I want briefly to mention a thought that crossed my mind yesterday. Carlow's population is just shy of seventeen and a half thousand people. There is probably one home furnishing store for every two families (or so it seems). All have reduced prices to the point that proprietors are nearly giving you cash and one of their children in order to encourage a shift of their stock: sales that reek of 'last ditch effort'.

The answer to this is simple: Noone has any money, their stock is shite and everyone has everything they need anyway.

What do you think this means for the out of town shopping malls which are still insisting on mushrooming around the edges of a town for whom the word bijoux might have been invented?

Just a thought.

What did they do with our money??

2008-07-04T14:49:00.004+01:00

I’ve always thought there’s something scary about Fianna Fáil in power. Long before I got wise to the notion of endemic corruption and incompetence, Fianna Fáil were the worrying shower who’d turn up at a state shindig and look like knives and forks were used not for consuming food, but for picking wax out if their over-hairy ears. Then they got in 1997, and declared that everything was fantastic, and let the good times roll!

Some years ago, at the height of the boom, I was at a barbecue in the former Stasi stronghold of Wandlitz, where those loyal to the East German Secret police were rewarded with plush villas, whilst everyone else was sitting in small flats with mullet hairdos. During what turned out to be an extremely drunken night, a German fellow asked me a question that to this day sends a shiver down my spine: ‘What did you do with our money?’ I regaled him with tales of the Luas, the BertieBowl™, of decentralisation and other, apocryphal tales of state wastefulness.

Now that our state’s tax take has a hole about the size of a small country, that’s a question I’m redirecting to Leinster House. What did you do with our money, Brian?

Well, all good things come to an end, but if the last eleven years are like anything, then it’s like the three night bender on the heel of payday. You think you’re amazingly wealthy, so let’s go nuts. Afterwards, you go to your ATM because you need to get a burger and a cure, only to have the scary green words “insufficient funds” flash in your face, taunting you, ‘cos the homeless guy tugging at your trouser leg has more savings in his paper cup than you have in your current account.

Maeve Higgins has the best analogy for our current problems, of the child who spent all their pocket money in one shop. Well, there won’t be any more pocket money until they've earned it. I think Brian Cowen’s pay, and that of his hench-people, should be withheld, until the mess we're in is cleared up. God knows what Mary Coughlan will do for a new pair of slingback Manolos. Knowing how things are, and how long it’ll take to fix things, the next time you’re at the hole in the wall, the guy who’s tugging at your trouser leg will probably be Brian Lenihan.

Euro 2008 - an apology

2008-06-30T12:00:00.002+01:00

I would like to unreservedly apologise to anyone who read my previous blog on the future of German football. Any similarity between the German team I described and the one that showed up in Vienna last night was purely coincidental.

I would further like to say to any Germans who may stumble across this page, that you should write to your MP, get out on the streets and start petitions for the banishment of Per Mertesacker, Christoph Metzelder and Philip Lahm to a country far less pleasant than Germany, but which for their own torture, will behave like a creepy imitation of the Heimat: remaining in Austria is the only way to properly torture them for their cretinous antics against a Spanish team which was far superior.

Then again, the Leicester Celtic under-12's C team would have played both sides of the park. The only winner last night was King Juan Carlos of Spain for his "Jim Robinson from Neighbours" impression. uncanny....

Mediterranean football - balls to it!

2008-06-27T23:27:00.008+01:00

Euro 2008. Quarter Finals. Italy versus Spain. The pundits said it would epitomise the ballet of modern football. It turned out to be garbage. Spain went through on penalties, and they did so possessing a set of principals only slightly more attacking than their Italian counterparts, whose game is as negative as it is morally and tactically bankrupt. Not long before, Portugal went out to Germany. France never turned up. The teams of the south, who claim to set the standard for beautiful football, are on the wane. Infuriatingly, some pundits are like stalkers in their obsessive love for Mediterranean football. The sooner they get help, the sooner they may see positive, attacking football is also found north of the Alps. And no amount of tired clichés about German football are going to hide it.

During this European Championship, southern European football went on trial, and Christiano Ronaldo has been the first prisoner marched to the scaffold. Behaving like a play-acting, narcissistic arsehole, he does as much for football as out of season oysters do for encouraging bulimics to keep their food down. The fans of Man United know this by the shabby way he has treated them in his move to Real Madrid. So when Portugal got knocked out of the Euro 2008, I punched the air, wishing he was Patrick Battiston to my Toni Schumacher. When watching Germany versus Portugal, one thing was clear. Germany has a hard task ahead to earn unqualified credit for a new style and attitude that confounds and irritates British pundits. And after the Turkey match, it proved impossible. They’ll always prefer the likes of Ronaldo.

What bothers me is not his skill. He’s got oodles of it, that’s for sure, but I have two problems. One is his dreadful attitude to the game. He spends half a match querying, barracking, harassing officials, then walking away like a petulant schoolboy when being reprimanded for unprofessional and unsporting conduct.

The second problem is watching football with UK commentary. British commentators are so pathologically smitten with Mediterranean football. They don’t look past the fact that it’s long been no more than hype: no style bar some dodgy haircuts, and definitely no substance. Even the BBC, following the epic semi versus a resilient, brilliant Turkey, could have had the decency to say that truly, this was a game for attacking teams, and Germany was one of them, as inventive and frantic upfront as they were wobbly at the back, pound for pound as good as the Turks. No new analysis, no good will.

Typically, there’s mention of the traditional German style – mechanical, efficient, bla bla blah. So when David Pleat admitted that the England team lacked the flair of the Germans, I nearly fell off my chair with laughter. The reality was that Germany played at times with skill and panache. Not that this fact should be surprising. Michael Ballack plays for a top English team. He can do just about anything, from skilful play on the deck, to wreaking havoc in the air. All of which has been improved by thankless trips to Middlesboro and elsewhere. Between Ballack, Jens Lehmann and Thomas Hitzlsperger, there’s a decade’s worth of experience playing in Britain. They know the best and the worst of the English game. A new, positive German game is infused with the running, passing style the Premiership displays week in, week out.

The one player who incorporates old school and new school Germany is Christoph Metzelder. Bearded like Manni Kaltz, he has the heart warming presence of a Bond villain. When he wasn’t steaming with adventure down the middle of the pitch, he was happy kicking lumps out of Portugal players, who were themselves busy lashing out at German players when goal number three found the back of their net. Germany wasn’t blameless in sticking the boot in, no way. The petty chicanery of continental football was there for all to see from both sides.

ITV’s coverage in particular is geared towards casting Germany and Germans as footballing hate-figures. They could play the sexy football of Arsene Wenger and it wouldn’t be good enough, because British pundits don’t see the ooh la la frills of southern European football. German goal number one is the prime example: a goal from nowhere, created in space no greater than Paris Hilton’s waist size, crossed to seemingly to no one, when Bastian Schweinsteiger, tracking the creators Ballack and Podolski on the far side, swung in towards the near post to kung fu-kick the ball into the back of the net. The flair is there, but the commentators were unconvinced. They just saw it as a freak.

When the German team clung on at the end, the whole game was won on grit and determination alone. All the same old stereotypes we’ve heard before were rolled out.

German football has changed drastically in the last five years, reverting to their classic style of the late sixties, embodied by the glorious 1972 team that stuffed England at Wembley. Similarly, Portugal is reverting to the thuggery of 1966, when they all but ended Pele’s World Cup, and could have ended his career. Things always come full circle.

There’s the odd shade of injury time doggedness from Germany, that’s been around since the 1930’s. Still, I prefer that to the childish antics of Ronaldo’s camp, referee-hectoring, Ronald Koeman-style lack of sportsmanship. That, frankly, football can do without. He may have skill, but he’ll never be a great player with that arrogant head on his shoulders. Thank God he’s leaving United. I can hate them a little less next season.

The final will show the truth about football in Europe. That messy as it is, at least Germany have tried their best to have a go. Spain has been underwhelming, and were involved in the most tawdry, tiresome game of this tournament against the discredited Italians. The pressure is on them to show their mettle, just like the media will sweat if their blind spot for good football is put to the test.

Watch out, Sammy's about!!

2008-06-13T12:32:00.006+01:00

I tired this morning of Lyric FM's ultra soothing strains of 'Queen for orchestras' laced with Prozac or whatever it was. As I was weaving through the traffic, I had a mental picture of Nurse Rachett in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, her steel blue eyes sharpening as she calls for medication time. Cajoling the inmates of Ireland Mental Hospital into consciousness, I flicked over to the news, which was it's own peculiar medication time, with some very bitter pills to swallow: Take one lost Lisbon treaty (which was eminently winnable for any competent government) followed by the bitterest pill of them all. Sammy bloody Wilson is Norn Iron's environment minister. God help us all, the chief lunatic has the running of the asylum!

Apart form the fact that I bet he can't even spell the word 'environment', it seems that our boy Sammy has a novel idea for Norn Iron's econonmy - let's take in nuclear waste from around the UK in exchange for what he calls 'high paid, high tech jobs'. Very environmental. The jobs in question, it obviously never occurred to him, mount up to the same as being high risk, high paid rubbish dump attendants. Not only will the waste be pretty rank, but it won't stop being fatally toxic ... ever. So unbelievably dangerous and bad is radioactive waste, that when Rapture comes, the Almighty himself will come down with a bad case of radiation poisoning, and the Apocalypse will have to be postponed until his recovery.

Hang on a sec - maybe he's on to something...

...No, on reflection, he's not. He's out of his bloody mind.

It's not surprising that a government official in Ireland comes to a position he neither has an aptitude for nor interest in. Ireland has a great tradition of putting unsuitable people into unsuitable positions of power, particularly in environment and heritage. This is where ministers for years have taken a nickels and dimes attitude to things they should be more mature about, e.g. Tara, the Luas, Wood Quay back in the 70's - the mac daddy of all environmental policy disasters to face our capital.

What is clear is this. With Sammy Wilson's particular brand of madcap policy initiatives, if a China Syndrome doesn't kill us all first, then at least he'll be synchronising the North's policy making idiocy with that of the South - Irish unity is on the way. Thanks to the D.U.P!!

Unnatural Habitat

2008-05-13T17:16:00.015+01:00

Habitat’s closure of operations in Ireland last week had zero fanfare. Not so much as a fart from the saddest little trumpet in the world. There was just a simple notice on the door of Habitat’s bloated flagship store on Dublin’s College Green, which informed customers that trading had ceased. There was no special help-line for the one and a half million billion slightly pushy well-to-do ladies, who now have one less place to drag their bored, slightly embarrassed partners around. I bet the men were quietly punching the air though, now that Saturdays will be less one other completely boring, utterly vapid obstacle to watching football on the telly.

Habitat is the glamour club – the Spurs ca. 1989 - of interior furnishing stores. So when its closure in Ireland failed to cause hysterical national mourning, I was so shocked, I spilled my vanilla latte all over my gorgeous DKNY shirt, covering my freshly waxed chest with second degree burns and a vague smell of burnt milk. Instead, you could feel the country exhale with relief that times are finally changing: Bertie is gone, and good riddance, and so are the shiny distractions of his culturally vacuous times. The arrival of Brian Cowen as head honcho means that for the first time in a generation, we stand a chance of finding ourselves again, and not before our souls have been completely sucked out of us by the UK high street cloning project that we've been involved with for the last age.

There were, however, a few thirtysomething wannabe yummy mummies sitting on the curb outside the entrance, clutching their ageing Fendi handbags, the stitching coming undone like their feeble new-monied minds, as they sobbed into grande Cappuccinos the price of an Italian football bribe from the filthy, overfull McStarbucks across the road. Morale is low with these label monsters: Their Fake tan is peeling like wall paper in an old folks home and their Mastercards have burst their limits, in much the same fashion as their once swanky Guess jeans. No-one told them that Cappuccinos make you fat and even if you did they wouldn't believe you. Within minutes, the riot police were able to disperse them efficiently, luring them down dark alleys using knock-off Marc Jacobs sunglasses as bait, then bundling them into the back of a cattle truck for processing.

I'm delighted it's gone, though, and not just because I was stupid enough to pay a million Euro for a Chinese lantern I could have made with some Kleenex and straws. Habitat was a place that had about as much class as a B&Q-store rampaging on a cocaine binge. Habitat flourished on business drummed up by pandering to our worst instincts of fetishistic consumption. Their stock was overpriced, over-hyped, and worth a fraction of what they demanded, all in the name of lifestyle shopping. And we were the gobshites, blinded by our own vanity, for buying into that lifestyle in the first place.

The decade and a bit that is bookended by Bertie Ahern’s tenure as Ireland’s leader gave us plenty to reflect upon, but absolutely nothing substantial. A lot of dumb show, embarrassing melodrama at the tribunals, the odd bit of excitement. The one golden moment of history in Norn Iron owed its momentum to Tony Blair's 179 seat majority in Westminster, rather than Bertie ineffectually shambling up to Stormont. In short, Bertie achieved nothing substantial, because he wasn't a politician of substance. And his only gift to us domestically was a divided society and the economy, which is slowing down rapidly.

The fact is, however, that the the Celtic Tiger never existed anyway. It was just a myth cynically dreamt up in the rush to spin Ireland into being like Britain in the 80’s, all brash and tripping with on a dangerous cocktail of hubris and credit cards. The truth is most people are fighting to make ends meet. The truth is, that somewhere during the last decade we confused expense with success. That's why Habitat closed down, and that's why it's a sign of better things to come.

So to all the temporarily hard up, maturing Terenure Totty, worry ye not - a brighter future beckons! IKEA is on the way – classy, straightforward and affordable. A bit of substance after bloating yourselves on the pre-dinner breadbasket you were looking at during the Ahern years. Admittedly it’ll be on Dublin’s north side, but at least if you take off your blinkers, you’ll learn to keep it real about what you’re doing and who you are.

The same is true of our leadership. Cowen, is IKEA. Clever, pragmatic, he can stand up to be counted when it matters. Bertie never did that. Not because he was some masterful politician, but because he had absolutely nothing to say for himself.

Consumption has always afflicted Ireland. In the forties, it was the name of a disease of the lungs that ravaged our In the naughties, it was the frenzied purchasing of any old shite we could lay our label-craving hands on.

Times are gonna be tougher, but they'll be more satisfying than we realise, and we’ll be better off for them.

Austria's Life of Lies

2008-05-02T00:46:00.007+01:00

Austria wants to avoid attention at all costs. Austrians want privacy. We know why from the case of Josef Fritzl, who created the bleakest hell for his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years. And when it takes courage to confront the truth about child abuse in our society, I'm not surprised that most of Austria doesn’t have the guts to face up to its most sinister secrets.

The neighbours say they noticed nothing, knew absolutely nothing. How could nobody have noticed this tragedy unfolding: A man kept his daughter locked up in his basement for 24 years, where he raped her on a regular basis, and who fathered seven children by his own flesh and blood.

Even his wife, the 68 year old Rosemarie, believed his tall and terrible tales: They brought up three of the children he had conceived with their daughter, after Fritzl claimed their daughter joined a cult and was unable to take care her kids. Austrian social services, a tragicomic cousin of the Keystone Cops, also swallowed his bizarre claims about their daughter, and let him adopt the children without any real investigation. No alarm bells, no questions, not even a peek at his ID card. Everything went at face value. Attitude soundproofed the screams coming from beneath Fritzl's home.

Like a lot of places in central Europe, Austria claims to have a sense of family and community. Safe, friendly, peaceful, open, civilised. So how could this monster go unnoticed for 24 years? How was this possible? Every report says that nobody saw or noticed anything unusual. Not even a previous conviction for attempted rape, not even a conviction for arson could point to the reality about this outrageously evil man: both had been deleted from his records. Official memory had conveniently lapsed, letting him off the hook.

So the jackal Josef remained a well thought of man. One neighbour said of course he was a good man, his garden was so neat. So was the basement, from the pictures we have all seen. Hell can be a very tidy place.

The same thing happened two years ago, when Natasha Kampusch escaped her decade of imprisonment by a paedophile, David Priklopil. He cheated justice by jumping in front of a train. Noone noticed him before, when he resembled a normal, civilised person. The neighbours didn’t know and didn’t bother to find out more about the unusual man who lived among them.

It’s not unusual for Austria to ignore its darkest truths. But they do it for the convenience and they always have. Austria lied about its enthusiastic collaboration with their countryman, Adolf Hitler, for decades after the war. They ignored their own sins, when they were anything but the Führer’s ‘first victims’, as they cynically characterised themselves.

They knew nothing, which everyone else on the planet knew was rubbish. This, like with the Fritzl and Kampusch cases, can only be said with brazen dishonesty or spectacular self delusion.

I don’t believe for a second that people didn’t notice anything. No-one can be possibly that naive. Official Austria is full of cowards, who abandoned the young of their country. It filters its way down through every level of society. The reflex is to ignore delude, deceive, explain away.

Further soul searching, if they bother to be brave, will reveal much, much more. Maybe redemption might be possible, but don't hold your breath.

Labour Pains

2008-04-22T22:01:00.008+01:00

Bertie Ahern will never have any conviction as a politician unless he gets three to five in Mountjoy. On the bright side, the Labour Party's Kathleen Lynch will give him a letter of recommendation for his parole board. Sure, she’d do it for anyone. And that’s what makes me sick.

If you’ve never heard of her, like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, or the sheriff of Nottingham, you’ll soon hear of her in song and legend. The TD for Cork North Central wrote a letter vouching for the character of constituents of hers, the parents of a convicted rapist. The son, Trevor Casey, was sentenced on Friday to 13 years imprisonment for the rape and sexual assault of the two teenage sisters of his former girlfriend.

Kathleen's brain must have been totally scrambled. On one level, sending a letter to a Judge who is sentencing a rapist of young girls is stupid, ill-conceived, and insulting. On the other hand it's even worse. It's dangerous, meddling and seditious, and it seriously compromises the separation of the legislative and executive powers of the state and it jeopardizes forty years of progress in women’s rights and the rights of victims of sex crimes.

Given her fame as a pop star Women's Libber and darling of the Irish Left, Ivana Bacik’s silence is notable. Her silence, however, is nothing when compared to the deafening screech of nothingness coming from Labour boss, Eamon Gilmore.

Labour is the oldest party in the state. It’s the one not borne out of the arbitrary lines drawn in the civil war. It has an ideology. It’s the party of James Connolly, Jim Larkin, Michael D. Higgins, Mary Robinson, that guy from the Phoenix Park scandal...okay, so they’re not perfect, but at least they could pretend to know right from wrong.

As usual, there was no demand for Kathleen Lynch's resignation. No public example making. No press conference saying that Labour doesn’t tolerate its TDs being dumb shits. The Labour leader couldn't even manage an angry note scrawled on the back of a beer mat from Toner’s Pub. Everybody wanted the issue to go away, just like Bertie wishes Des O'Neill would vanish.

By behaving like all the other hard-necked chancers in Leinster House, Kathleen Lynch, lobbed a grenade at her own party's already wobbly credibility. The Gilmore gang are now in serious danger of a second rate rehash of Ahern and his ten years of Shyster-ism . Right now, too many politicians behave with the moral instincts of a sewer rat. A Bit of straight thinking from them, before it's too late, might just trick us into thinking they stand for something resembling decency.

Besides, this is a clear moral issue. Do those who committed the worst of crimes deserve to be “got off the hook”? Or should the legal system be let do its work so that rapists will get their comeuppance.

Olympia

2008-04-08T17:27:00.013+01:00

The Olympics look as failed as a Ben Johnson dope sample. Fact.

Wrestlemania has more credibility than the Olympics, and unless drugs tests and fatalities are televised there'll be no reason for us to switch off our reruns of CSI. But I've come up with an idea to rescue the Olympics and make us sit up and take notice - let's get the games some much needed credibility and make Hulk Hogan head of the International Olympic Committee.

Desperate times do call for desperate measures. The sheer volume of gaudy glitz and cringe-inducing kitsch that 'Olympics-incorporated' has generated needs the dignity that only a bald fiftysomething in day-glow yellow speedos can give. It's all in the name of humanity's best interests.

The modern Olympic Games are hair-pullingly awful. From the opening ceremony, where athletes dress like low class estate agents to the pointless end ceremony, no-one should watch this rubbish without being sectioned.

It's dire, on and off the athletics track. VIPs attend the opening ceremony in Beijing, the ranks of scumbags and gangsters swell massively. World leaders, with the exception of the Dalai Lama, cozy up to corporate fat cats in the reassuring glow of the Olympic flame. The spectacle leaves a foul taste in the mouth. It's like watching your parents snogging, but with Jimmy Magee providing the commentary.

Past Olympic Games are like a rogues' gallery of disasters in putting mankind's best foot forward. The games of 1920, 1936, 1948, 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, 2000, and 2004 were all charged with chauvinism, racism, stupidity, opportunism, incompetence and dishonesty. Each one revealed our worst characteristics.

So why can't I despise and dismiss the Olympics, and simply take up gardening for the summer? The reason is, the original intention is unmistakably noble: that people stop being nasty to each other once every four years and do something pure and simple to express the goodness we aspire to - to push our limits and become stronger, faster and higher beings.

Sadly, this Olympic 'spirit' is so brazenly pimped out and debased by the organizers and their corporate playmates, that it shatters the dreams French academic Pierre de Coubertin had, when he organized the first modern Olympics in 1896.

Over a century later, how would de Coubertin have reacted when his countrymen attacked the Olympic flame as it passed through Paris on its way to Beijing? There have been protests everywhere the flame has passed through. But when the French go on the offensive, they do it with gusto. They extinguished the Olympic flame twice, despite strong arm tactics from annoyed Chinese and French officials.

The French love big gestures and make them with flair. Eric Cantona and The Sarkozys support my little hunch about our continental cousins. When the shit hit the fan at Crystal Palace, all those years ago, Eric’s ‘Gallic temperament’ was to blame for doing to a yob, what most of us can only dream of, and left a generation of youngsters with injuries caused by trying to copy his trademark kick.

Twelve years on, the Sarkozys visit London, and Madame Sarkozy appeared from her jet, every inch a playful Marlene Dietrich. The fearsome din of drooling Fleet Street paps scrambling for a front row seat at those photo-calls with the Queen, echoed all the way from London to the mangled Mercedes in the Alma Tunnel in Paris. Royalty as tabloid Gold returned revamped and ravishing.

As big and loud as the protests are, they’re hypocritical, snooty, and wrong. The Olympics don't need to be perfect. They just need to happen. If the world wants the Chinese government to get the message about everything we don't like about them, then let the Chinese have their games. Let them have what they wish for.

We'll just sit back and sip a glass of sparkling, vintage 'I told you so'. We'll have a hearty chuckle when the Chinese leaders go purple with injured pride, just like Hitler did when he tried to hijack the Olympics in 1936 to promote his Aryan racism. His plans backfired spectacularly and the puffed up nastiness of the Berlin Games bestowed on us an icon of poetic justice, America’s black sprinter and longjumper, the great Jesse Owens.

The Munich games saw a hostage drama and the tragedy of murdered athletes. The corporate toadying to Coca Cola when Atlanta, Coke's global HQ, got to stage the 1996 Games made many want to drown the International Olympic Committee in their soft drink of choice.

The odds may be stacked well against the Olympics, but it always finds a way to redeem itself. Its good intentions shine through, justifying its miserable existence. And it does this despite the best efforts of the worst kinds of people. Allowing these corrupt, embarrassing, tedious, sometimes despicable games to go ahead, is the correct and only option.

Munich witnessed the swimming phenomenon of Mark Spitz. Atlanta was the scene of the emotional reconciliation with Mohammed Ali and the USA, 26 years after the former Cassius Clay threw his Gold Medal won in Rome in 1960 into the Ohio River, in protest at the vile racism of 1960's America.

The Chinese can spin the news, control the internet and walk out of meetings where their excesses are highlighted. It's no use. Between Beijing's blanket smog and bloody tyranny in Tibet, the Chinese PR train has seriously derailed.

That's how it is. The Hulkster isn't needed just yet, even though it's appealing. I can't live with the Olympics, but we can't live without them. In the meantime, we can go back to CSI, and have some peace from the routine strangeness of the Olympic rigmarole.

Ristorante Italiano - What's Italian for 'shut up, dumbass'?

2008-04-06T10:16:00.007+01:00

I can't adequately express my disdain of lazy commentary, but the world is so often filled with inane, fatuous, trite drivel that ignores the difference between opinion and fact. I read too much of it in the papers every day. So when this absolute dickhead loudly described the Pope in terms of the Nazis, I was well beyond my stupidity quota for the weekend: I felt the most wonderful release when I realised patience with tossers is by no means necessary. Quite the opposite...

I spent the day prancing about town like the boulevardier I wish I was, meeting up for a pint in Neary's with a friend of mine, with whom I had a short story-writing race. We went to my favourite pizzeria, Pizza Stop, which is down a seedy little lane behind HMV on Grafton Street and anticipated an evening comparing stories and talking in lofty terms about our work. How were we to know that the occupants of the table next to us were full of finger-clicking-for-the-waiter's-attention gaucheness? It wasn't as if they had t-shirts to let us know. When their starters came out, one man's man's talk had already intruded our airspace . Then his pasta starter came out as a main course portion. His fingers clicked loudly as he squared up for a fight with a whispy Italian waiter who couldn't stop laughing at the sheer awfulness of this man. Well, there was drama, and 'it's just not good enough' - just short of 'do you know who I am?' No was my silent answer, and my world is certainly better for it.

My friend and I were dumbstruck. We strained to evesdrop, but the place was so small, we kept retreating to our corner with Parmesan in our ears. Their conversation started into the Pope and his predecessor. I could feel my stomach sinking with disappointed expectation. One of the occupants of our neighbouring table was Italian, and our loudmouthed 'Mr. Somebody' was clearly looking to impress him with his witty take on the state of the Papacy. 'We loved the old guy [cue John Paul II impression], but the new guy, we don't like him. He's got SS written all over him'. I knew he was going to say this. I just knew he was going to say something brash, boring and utterly offensive. And what's more, I carry a German bloody passport. 'I don't agree with that', the Italian politely mumbled.

Over at our table, I was incandescent, my friend just looked at me as if waiting to see if I would stick a fork in our neighbour's fat head or cry like a baby with frustration. Unfortunately for the entertainment value of this story, I'm more repressed emotionally than that. Definitely a westbrit, if ever there was one. In our tiny eatery, I got up noisily, banging my cutlery against the plate like my Da would do when I was a kid, before bollocking me out of it for talking back to mum. I asked the manager if there was another table we could sit at, and grabbed our coats before he could say a thing. Their conversation stopped dead in its tracks when we moved down to the other side of the restaurant. Our displeasure had been noted, and I could hear his plaintive 'whaat?'

The current Pope was twelve when the war broke out. He was 18 by the end of it. He is a man of certain conservative views that I don't agree with, even if I do go to church. He was liberal, then got old and with it, very conservative. He was God's Rottweiler for an age and a bit, and then had to play the fisherman once J.P. II's superstar Papacy came to its strange, sad end. And what's more, he's German. In the British and Irish media, that carries a whole load of baggage that makes it too easy for lazy journos and even lazier readers to make assumptions about people.

I wish I had the guts to tell him as such, to reason with him, or simply to tell him to shut up. But, hey, I've better things to do, and our pizzas - the best in Dublin - were getting cold.

Bertie and his rubber duckie

2008-04-04T09:25:00.003+01:00

Of all the things Bertie Ahern has been credited with, healing lepers, translating the bible into Icelandic and discovering a cure for Westlife are only a few of the more believable acts from this most improbable statesman. The timing of his leaving was magnificent and all of his own making; he deftly grabbed the news cycle this week, receiving the plaudits and kudos of his peers. Robert Mugabe is also grateful, because our guy’s stolen the limelight, so the least talented liberator in the history of Africa the chance to shuffle off the political stage himself, maybe making off with a few quid and some diamonds. Who knows, but maybe the French will give him a cosy villa like they did when Mobutu left Zaire with all the diamonds.

Bertie saw the writing on the wall. Going was just about the only option, and as the dogs in the street were noticing change in the air, Cowan had to bite his lip harder and harder, hoping not too many Fianna Fáil councillors from some swamp or another would demand Ahern’s resignation ‘for the good of the party.’

This platitude cracks me up, ‘for the good of the party’. Why would anyone want to do anything for the good of their country, when a bunch of greasy county councillors and Neanderthal developers could be there for consideration in the national pecking order? It had been the same thing when Charlie Haughey had been booted out. The party comes first. What becomes abundantly clear is that for someone like me who watches the West Wing each night (I’m on to season 5), nothing in that series resembles in intention or design or manner how Irish politics is conducted: small time turf wars, low politics which, frankly, is embarrassing for it.

And after ten years of Bertie behaving essentially like Ernie from Sesame Street, to Enda Kenny’s Bert, maybe having a Taoiseach for the first time for, well, at least two years, will be a welcome change. To date, Brian Cowan is the only guy in the running. He’s got a different style to Bertie. Hands on, knows his brief, Gordon Brown without the hubris, and wit way more sex appeal. Things are about to change. As for Bertie, Abraham Lincoln said we will be remembered in spite of ourselves, so there may be hope yet for him.

PC Whirl

2008-04-01T16:24:00.004+01:00

As Ireland revels in having nearly caught up with the 21st century, man's latest developments bring us one step closer to the clinical 'superfuture' we saw in 2001: A Space odyssey, 1984 and Spaceballs: For what the founders of our state had fought, bled and died for was that we could enjoy freedom's bounty in outlet shopping centres with PC World, Harvey Norman, maybe a Reids furniture place, Woodies and of course, the obligatory KFC (only the hi end ones have Cost-lotta Coffee, and the majority of the great unwashed think ristretto is Italian for 'restrainng order' anyway).

I got a laptop last July, which reminded me that hell is the impossibility of reason. I could be one of those guys sitting alone in pubs that have wireless, because, hey, there's a whole bunch of money to be made by someone demanding solitude and nursing a Cappuccino for three hours, and I wanted in on the ground floor. Initially, it worked like a dream. Until I had to go to a conference where I was in charge of the registration. And guess what? It wouldn't detect the cable, couldn't be charged up and hey presto, I had a pretty big, cool looking paperweight, which looked like someone had taken Darth Vader to a scrap yard, crushed him into a cube, before glossing him with the sauce from a Sweet and Sour Chicken.

I brought it into a computer superstore which will remain nameless as PC World. The IT guy (who really looked like one), wouldn't take it to be repaired. It had to be taken to the branch it had been bought in, he mumbled, like Marlon Brando, with half a Breakfast roll between his teeth. That inevitably meant a leisurely jaunt down the M50 in 1st gear.

It was left in the shop in December. By February, I had their phone number off by heart, several times being 'put through' to someone, before the line mysteriously went dead, as if I was being hung up on. Finally they decided it couldn't be fixed, and I should come in and get a replacement. Even this I had to fight for. It took serious negotiation and more rage than I have ever felt to get it, and at least one employee is seeking therapy from the ordeal. I discovered the man I had spoken to had left, and was at the Customer "Service" Desk for several hours, whilst they looked for, and then fondled, my laptop in the most suggestive manner possible. Suggestive, that is, of their not having a breeze as to why a 29 year old ginger guy was rocking back and forth on the floor of a PC World crying, to the strains of a dance remix of the Birdy Song over the PA system.

I got a replacement eventually, but not on the day I described above. Still, it's all worth it for access to the internet and a solitary Cappuccini (that's like, the proper plural, OK?!).

There is, of course, a little postscript. Last week I got a phone call. "Hello Mr. Morgan , you're laptop's been repaired and is ready to be collected. "

The line went dead again.

I can't see clearly now the rain ain't gone...

2008-03-26T09:29:00.006Z

When I was younger, I used to say that we should get a giant tugboat to drag Ireland to the Carribean. Even today, I'd be willing take tropical storms in exchange for good weather, strong Guinness and cricket. And after yet another endless, dark and miserable Winter, it'd better happen soon. Things have become such, that my wife has taken the next evolutionary step towards becoming a creature of hibernation, and my work on finding clothes that can be worn without getting sodden by a renegade gang of rain clouds continues.

Furthermore, my balcony is now a makeshift shipyard, and once I find info on Google about building tugs, then there's no going back! Short story race goes well, and the radio show script stays rooted in reality.

He is an Irishman! He remains an Irish-man!!

2008-03-21T11:10:00.006Z

Easter, it seems, is upon us, and for the life of me I can't find my copy of St. John's Passion by Bach (God knows why - bet he hid it, cos he doesn't like Bach). I have spent the contemplating deciding a few things, a little like Winnie the Pooh after sitting on a log. And like Pooh, my head is full of not very much at the moment.

I went to Kilmainham Gaol on Wednesday, after my depressing encounter with the Royal Hospital, and was enthralled. Why? Because there's nothing sacred in Ireland, and yet places like this loom in the back of our consciousness. The leaders of 1916 were executed here, and many other poor, nameless, unfortunates passed through the old place until it was closed in 1924. What got me though, was the fact that the tour guide, whether by his own eloquence and apparently earnest republicanism, or by my mood that day, swayed me. He managed to bring across something that every person, be they Irish or the New Irish, of which there were many, visiting the place on any particular day should be encouraged to foster: That people sometimes feel a sense of duty which goes beyond self gratification or self preservation.

More telling was the fact that our government's indifference towards our heritage did not stop miraculously at the gates of Kilmainham. Dublin's secular shrine to our violent, tragic, beautiful history has been just as neglected, and would have been demolished in 1960, but for volunteers who fought the good fight and saved the Gaol by the skin of its sad, grey teeth. They felt a sense of duty to do what the government of the day refused to do.

Maybe it's the building, but that's a noble virtue to encourage. So long may it stand!

When you can't see yourself...

2008-03-17T13:36:00.007Z

Certain things remain constant when it comes to St. Patrick's day. The weather will be as predictable as a drunk squaring up for a fight with a barman wanting to avoid serving him. So, we thought, was the date, but it turned out that the church got into a tizzy because a feast day can't be in the same week as Easter. The confusion was remarkable. Paddy Power was taking bets as to when the parade was on. People were stocking up on tinned shamrock, just in case it never came and the fallout would mean the next Paddy's day might be after some kind of Bord Failte/Vatican sponsored Apocalypse: a haphazard, Mad Max-like Paddy's day, with renegade gangs attacking each other with shillelaghs. As it happened, the catastrophe I imagined was averted when I went to ask in the tourist office. I get a very definite "Monday. It's gonna be great", from a guy with an accent as mid-Atlantic as the Azores. I really wanted him to say "Begorrah", just for good measure.

The big day just didn't feel particularly special. Everyone went home for tea, and the city was calm and clean. I didn't feel it particularly the day before either, when I was in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham. This is a place where Dublin normally make sense to me, and I am reasonably at ease with my Irishness. The Museum is housed in the Old Royal Hospital, which is a gorgeous, and a criminally neglected, part of Dublin's underrated heritage. It looks starkly like a French chateau, which is good, because that's what it was styled as.

I walked through the entrance gate and walked around to the front of the Royal Hospital Building, which overlooks the Liffey valley and stands as on of two towering sentinels as you arrive on the train into Heuston Station below. Whereas the Wellington Obelisk, which stands on the other side of the valley is as imposing as it always was, I discovered that Kilmainham, a more elegant, nuanced structure, has been cut off from the rest of the city by a new development of apartments and offices. My heart sank, because this was a new development by and Irish architect and an Irish contractor, and so it wasn't like you could say it came out of the mind of someone who hadn't a breeze about where it was being plonked.

If you can't knock it, hide it. And its a sorry fact that Dublin people never wanted the building to survive. To some it might be a relic of our colonial past. Others probably don't know it exists and don't even care. In the 80's, they wanted to demolish it to make way for a bus depot. Well, that was then, and Ireland hadn't yet discovered the delights of prefabricated KFCs. The Royal Hospital is just otherworldly, and from the ornamental gardens, you could look down river towards the city and feast your eyes on a view that probably hadn't changed much since the 18th century. It would have to take an act of utter tastelessness to cut off the old building from the city. Maybe it's development, but it seems to be predicated on the notion that development comes at the price of beauty, which has its own, ethereal value. And the banks can't touch it.

Alone it stands, and thank God it does, if only you could get chicken twizzlers in the cafe...

A New York State of Mind

2008-03-11T21:44:00.004Z

There’s a scene I really like in King Lear, which is on my mind because it’s bloody windy outside and but for the fact that I have to work indoors, I’d probably be outside in my dressing gown ranting on the moors with the best of them. I don’t remember the scene word for word, but it’s the moment when Lear’s inflated sense of himself causes his fortunes to unravel. His youngest daughter, the apple of his eye, Cordelia, says she loves him as much as she does, no more, no less. Her scheming sisters in the meantime are busy buttering daddy up before doing the Shakespearean equivalent of cutting granddad’s tags and leaving him in a park so they can take his stuff. Cordelia is a real I am what I am kinda gal. To the old man, however, Cordelia’s lack of flowery language somehow doesn’t go down too well: she gets the heave ho, and her sisters get everything else, at least for most of the play. She accepts who she is and it’s for the world to accept that, not the other way around. Enter Eric Spitzer, governor of New York, has a surname that means "pencil sharpener" in German. This is certainly appropriate, given that he has definitely been putting his lead in the wrong shaft, as it were. This week, the governor of New York State admitted having used the services of a call girl ON VALENTINES DAY, before doing something way more important, such as going home to his wife, or something like that. The man was on the political ascent, having taken on corporate misdealing as NY’s Attorney General. His reputation as an Elliot Ness-style corporate corruption buster meant that he had the potential go as far as he liked, perhaps becoming the first bald geeky guy to be in power since Anthony Hopkins in Amistad. And at 47, he's the political equivalent of a foetus.

Twas not to be. Spitzer reminds me of an unctuous, sleazy Lear. Lear rejected truth and Spitzer did so for the same reason - vanity. He had the world at his feet, the potential to go further, and instead ended his career in a spectacular belly-flop of hubris, which could potentially damage Clinton’s already ropey campaign to beat Barack Obama to being the first [insert novelty] president of the USA. Furthermore, whereas financial ill-behaviour can sometimes be brazened out, as evinced here at home, or by John McCain’s recent problems, sex is a different kettle of fish, particularly in the States. Bill Clinton nearly went that way, but got away with it because it was essentially a personal matter and the case against him was partisan. Spitzer, on the other hand, was using prostitutes, and will end up paying for it in every sense.

Commuting with Steve McQueen

2008-03-06T15:39:00.007Z

Waking up in the morning is not simple process. My wife and I have a ritual which begins like a Mexican stand off between reality and our undying desire to be paid for staying in bed. Maybe if we could get on some bizarre clinical experiment for sleeping, could our ambition be fulfilled. Instead, every five minutes another one of about 20,000 alarm clocks strategically hidden around our bedroom goes off until our stubbornness caves in, and we end the beautiful dozing I seem to enjoy more than the actual sleeping. We get up, turn off the other 19,995 clocks and listen to serious radio news about the utter serious nature of seriousness. Eventually I get frantic at 8.10am, when it's clear neither of us wants to be late, but also, we haven't displayed the wherewithal to just leave. Mrs does her makeup, I invent little things that need to be settled, and become more frantic, until finally the collective fear of being late AND GETTING CAUGHT, cause me to grasp Mrs. Morgan's hand and jump off our balcony in the hope we'll land in our car. Given that we don't actually own a cabriolet, this is perhaps foolhardy, but unfortunately needs must.

The thing is, we live in a suburb in the Dublin mountains. Not to be confused with the Alps, it is not very high, and we aren't that far away from things. The problem is, that although the last fifteen years has seen our neighbourhood explode from being a hamlet, which is all it was, to being a regular, bog-standard expanse of suburban tundra. In turn, absolutely nothing has been done about the public transport servicing the area. The two or three busses that do go near us, the 63 and the 44, are so rare, you should do the lottery including those number when you do see one. It's actually easier to drive to the airport on the other side of Dublin, check in, face the humilation of the 'simon says' style of security favoured these days, and fly to London, than to get from our flat to Dublin city centre by public transport.

I'm not just bellyaching for the sake of it, despite appearances. Our daily rituals and panics were played out to the news today that none of the flagship infrastructure projects earmarked for completion this year have met their completion date. In one instance, a project has not even issued a revised completion date. Ministers barely shrug their shoulders, and look sheepish when the issue is brought up. It wouldn't be so bad, but the same newscast mentioned that the Irish economy is likely to lose out on international investment to countries like, Burundi or The Shire or Legoland, because of our pitiful transport infrastructure.

In the meantime, we'll continue our daily adventure to work, a daily homage to the frustration in 'The Great Escape', when Steve McQueen tried to jump barbed-wire on his motor bike to escape the Nazis.

Papa Doc

2008-03-05T09:00:00.004Z

The event of a great statesman's retirement should be massive: tears, flowers, and plenty of blood on the cabinet room floor. More and more long serving political and public figures instead are being put out to pasture in the most banal and, to be frank, not very interesting way. They name a date after what feels like an eternity of barely spoken speculation, and then leave quietly. No fanfare, not even a pants down table dance in the middle of the UN general assembly. No fun. Tony Blair was one example. He was beginning to act like the guest from hell at a (Labour) Party. Politely cajoling the man into taking his tins of beer and kindly pushing off obviously hadn't worked, and everyone was too scared of him to tell him outright to go take a running jump. So he held off, and Gordon brooded even more, like the curious hybrid of Heathcliff and Gordon Banks that he is, until slick Tony handed over the keys to No. 10.

So when it came to the political demise yesterday of Big Ian Paisley, surely this man was going to give us something more exiting. Long serving politicians on these islands don't come bigger than him, so it's no more than you'd expect. He's like the Queen. Always there, he's been around since the days of Churchill, and his presence is somehow an absolute, like rain.

Nope. Not a sausage. For Paisley, the end came a little more low key. He quit his Free Presbyterian Church, all nice and nearly civilized. Then his son, Ian Jr. resigned for what in the Republic seems absolutely mystifying: he had business dealings with a developer. Bertie Ahern must have nearly choked on his Coco Pops: In Northern Ireland, they'll govern with men they'd have gladly seen off the planet twenty years ago, but dodgy land deals are a no-no. And then it was announced yesterday, he was leaving after an investment conference in May, and that's that. the end. No fire, no brimstone, no 'get stuffed ye Papish scum'. Nothing. In fact, he has a place in his heart for all Irish people, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.

Ian could have had a greatest hits tour, gone hell for leather and we'd have had a bit of fun for the next month, instead it seems only Robert Mugabe is willing give us that, and the laughs ain't great there. Chances are, that when Bertie goes, it will be even less satisfying for Political junkies like myself, unless on leaving, his state car is replaced by a Securicor van and some outriders, or a balloon and ruby slippers. Let's see what happens, and try to enjoy the show.

Ireland, and they way we might look at it...

2008-03-04T23:52:00.003Z

Until recently, I found it extremely easy to ignore the fact that people in Ireland might be unhappy, that the lives people live might be flawed in some way. They are. Such is life. But events in south Dublin over the last week have provoked fury from the public and media, and as I write, not one person has answered for what has happened. 1,000 people, including President Mary McAleese, Justice Minister Brian Lenihan and the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin attended a special memorial service for two men who lived in the south Dublin community of Drimnagh and were brutally murdered last week. The pictures went out showing how Ireland was in solidarity with Poland. Of course we care. And ‘Thank God it was an isolated incident’ as Bertie said, in some inspired sound biting.

Only it wasn't isolated. Two men, both from Poland, allegedly refused to buy some youths alcohol from an off license in Drimnagh. Walking home, they were followed by those youths, one of whom had gone home and returned with a screwdriver. The two men were stabbed in the neck and head respectively and died of their injuries early last week. The reasons are unclear. The Polish community, hard working and often reticent, don’t seem to be the focus of a racist attack, despite reports, that the men were verbally abused as they walked home from the off-license. Thank God, it was an isolated incident.

Many are wondering what has become of our society. The turnout at the memorial service says a lot about how people feel about the event. Then again, the behaviour of our young people says even more, and this reflects more accurately how we interact as a society, as opposed to reflecting our aspirations. A visible minority of our young people are out of control, and some might say that violence is now a staple means of social interaction. As people try to come to terms with this incident, the Archbishop of Dublin has called for a community based “summit” to tackle the increase in violent crimes in Ireland. His suggestion is noble. We must debate, discuss and act upon what has the potential to become one of the defining tragedies of the last five years. Sadly, I don’t think it’s that simple, and the Archbishop's response reflects the difficulty we all have in confronting the issue of violence in our society. All the more frightening is the mess of conflicting, misleading stories and an almost total absence of cooperation to date from those young people who allegedly witnessed the tragedy.

And yet we still seek an explanation. Sociologists might tell you that some people do it to relieve their boredom and sense of isolation. Others do it to exercise some power in their lives over others, like kids pulling the legs off unfortunate spiders. Problematic is that these people aren't the ones who take part in the types of dialogue that Archbishop Martin suggested. They don't recognize their role in society, or the existence of society in the first place .

The killings may not have been racist, but also can’t be explained away as being a freak attack. Maggie Thatcher said there’s no such thing as society. True, when people act as if there is no higher sense of justice. To me it’s like believing in ghosts: if you don’t accept the idea in the first place, then it won’t be there when it should be. The next few days will tell us a lot of where we have come to, and where we may be headed.

Turkey Ahern

2008-03-03T18:12:00.008Z

The Sunday papers were absolutely fizzing with stories this weekend about this, that or t’other, and the consensus seems to be that apart from carnage on our roads, a third world public transport system and social turmoil, an inert political class and myriad other problems involving guns, drugs and general mayhem, things could still be worse in Ireland. So when commenting on the state of things on our island, Gerry Adams made headlines by pointing out that Bertie Ahern might be displaying the same aptitude for government as Dustin the Turkey, Ireland's favourite puppet. It’s great to see that he is known in the UK, and that Gerry has an appetite for pop culture in other countries. Either that or he wrote all of his script in the sense that professional footballers all write their own autobiographies. I suspect he probably needed some clarification. No, a party hack explains, Dusin is not the wee bloke from "Rain Man", he's a puppet on children's TV, and the line will absolutely get a laugh.

Gerry's analogy, as populist as it was cringe inducing, works in the sense that both like act as if they were fluffy and a bit of a lark. However, whereas Bertie the Turkey is facing the prospect of being told to 'pluck off' by his party, Dustin the Turkey is very much flavour of the month at the moment in Ireland and even has the blessing of Bob Geldof.

Importantly, our endeavour to win back that most coveted of cultural prizes, the Eurovision song contest, is based on a popular vote, which backed this offering over more traditional acts. Not everyone is happy, though, and the reactions in the media suggest that maybe we chose wrong, and that sending our esteemed bird of cultural commentary to Belgrade might demean the event. After all, Dana is upset because she fears this will be the outcome. I didagree. The choice is inspired, and not without precedent.

The Eurovision song contest has for years been the repository of lame acts, moments of sheer genius and the occasional display of amusing disdain at what is as high-brow as a Butlin’s talent show. How else do you explain the Zero Mostel lookalike who won it last year for Serbia? Or Dana International, the transsexual who I reckon was actually Cher who represented Israel (a European country?) Dustin is just part of that. He’s the kid who plays a rude song at a school concert just to see if he’ll get detention or at least a few giggles from his mates. He won’t get douze pointes for Ireland as his song’s chorus suggests, but he might relieve Terry Wogan of the car crash television he has to endure every year. I hope Terry will be sniggering, knowing Dustin probably shouldn’t but there are worse things in this world than a musical novelty act. Bon chance, Dustin!!

Man of Aran

2008-02-29T12:49:00.004Z

Not only does it rain sideways in the west of Ireland, but as I discovered on my way over to the Tedfest this morning, it feels like a thousand tiny needles smacking your face, as you stand on the deck of the ferry, waiting to cross to the Aran islands from Rosaveel, about an hour from Galway, and a million years from the Celtic Tiger. My brothers and I spent the last our or so making references to any movies to do with being at sea, but Rob being who he is, he couldn't stop help himself and insisted on talking like George Clooney in 'A Perfect Storm'. He even smelled vaguely of cod after a while, which was particularly worrying.

The crossing involved force eight gales, and plenty of green faces. At one stage we nearly lost our youngest brother, Ben, who being hilariously scrawny and no sea dog, was overcome with cabin fever, and briefly confused himself with Noel Coward in 'In Which We Serve': he ran out to the bridge, and hurled abuse at passing German U-boats, until the big one crashed over the port side of the ship. It was close, but we finally dragged him out of the water after much stress and effort. Wasn't a pretty sight though.

All's well that ends well, and the truly hardy ones have made it, such as Pat Mustard the milk float Lothario, and Darren, the avuncular Corkman who has arrived with grey wig and a sparkly blue jacket. Still have no team for the football tomorrow, but we are hoping that some excessive defending could get us all the way in the Craggy World Cup, and perhaps the officials may be open to generous decisions our way. I only hope Ben recovers from his near death experience to play, or I'll be the soft touch the opposition kick up in the air. The next few hours will be crucial...

The best is yet to come...

2008-02-26T00:29:00.007Z

So this is the week. Daddy has been not alive for ten years, and it feels like ten minutes. We miss ya big guy, and the sense of unpredictability that was so abundant when you were here has been notably absent in our lives, since you left us without warning. I'm also pretty sure Pentel have gone bust, given that no-one buys their green pens anymore. I do wonder what you'd make of being a cultural icon, and maybe you'd be faintly embarrassed, as the committee suggested at footie the other day. Either way, we're proud of you, and we're going to let rip for you this week at the Tedfest. And if anyone else is reading this, drink, dance, laugh and plainly smile with all the childlike joy of Winnie the Pooh for a man whose soul and lust for life outran his body when we needed him a bit longer. Thank heavens for small mercies. Thank heavens we had him at all!

In other news, Rob and I are still working on getting famous. Proper famous, not Jade Goody famous. The radio show project, "Late night with Rob and Don" is taking shape. We want sick humour and good music. And I am doing my work on the novel, biography and some damn fine poetry. I'm going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature by the age of 50. Normally you have to be over 80 to win it, but I'm feeling cocky!

Will keep you posted.

...that I may walk through the Valentine of the shadow of...

2008-02-21T17:48:00.004Z

I've had this blog in my head over the last few days. Every waking moment, I've been thinking about it's grace, simplicity. Then, my self doubt creeps in and before you know it, I put off writing something new. Again. For the godknowshowmanyeth time.

Last Thursday was of course the great SAINT Valentine's Day, when all the women should be adored and adorned with all manner of trinkets, and all men should by right be scared out of their wits until the lights go out. My particular experience this year was very pleasant, thank you for wondering, and next year, I hope to have an equally pleasant night out with the Missus.

We went to a restaurant in Howth, the next best thing to the south of France in Ireland, without having to go west Cork, and with a more discreet set of Nouveau Riche than Dalkey, who might loudly talk in restaurants about having once used a urinal not two minutes after Bono. The Bono.

Perhaps having lived on Dublin's south side has made me jaded by all that tomfoolery, but Howth is just beautiful. Leaning towards posh, Howth is nevertheless is like a feisty fisherman's daughter who married well and lost none of her charms. At the end of the pier was Aqua, where we had dinner. Gorgeous, beautiful, smoozey Jazz, and my missus was looking as gorgeous as only she can. I said that I had a pleasant evening. Actually, it was wonderful night - we had a blast, and like all good evenings, some truths emerged about ourselves and the other guests dining.

At all the different tables, couples were peering at each other, leering, even sneering, as the waiters did their damndest to make their night as special as possible. The table behind us had a guy whose shirt had been demonstrably ripped from out his pants in an act of defiance, to the lady, who, it must be said, had made an effort. He let his fingers fish around his mouth, each phase of rummaging provoking winces of disdain and hatred, from someone who probably thought that rugged did not mean the same as feral.

But the real joy was the couple two tables down. They could not have been more than eighteen, shiny faces, scrubbed up and startled to be there. The waiters decanted and served their bottles of Miller and Bulmers. I swear they were happy as clams, and in their presence, it was clear we were all like them, all pretending to be grown up, when in fact, we were all in clothes that maybe we wouldn't like to wear normally, and hoping to God our partners would order soup.

I hope that couple remain as refreshing as they were, and are still having as much fun, seven days on.

Tom Lehrer & Cathal O Searcaigh

2008-02-09T10:46:00.000Z

Ireland has a new craze gripping the public consciousness - it's called 'the great school poetry cull'. Where once line-dancing and incest were national staples, today we, the sohpistimicated, Irish get ourselves into a tizzy about the morality of art.

Recently, TD Tony Gregory called for the lyrics of Tom Lehrer's happy little ditty 'Poisoning pigeons in the park' to be removed from either a textbook. Now, as a would-be writer and (bad) poet, I was rather saddened, since my top five poetic lines includes the wonderful:

'my heart just keeps quickenin' with each drop of strikenin'

Nevertheless, there we go, as cold blooded as Tom, luring unsuspecting poetry books to our bosom, a scissors concealed until it's too late for the hapless creature. Enter Mr. Gregory, as well informed as a dead badger at the bottom of a black sack.

Funny. I had thought lots of people had heard of this song, despite being relatively new (if you are living in 1952). Nevertheless, as enlightened as we are, even we have limits in this society of ours. Poet Cathal O' Searcaigh also got himself into trouble in Nepal, being a little too comfortable with teenage boys than the listeners of RTE's Liveline programme were comfortable with. Imagine Ireland's surprise - a poet in dodgy lifetsyle-choice shock! John Keats to reception please...

Whatever the merits of such hulaballoo, both the case of Lehrer and O'Searcaigh raise to the surface how we in Ireland deal with difference of any sort. Be it a difference of humour or of lifestyle choice, the instinct displayed in public discourse is to remove iconoclasts and their work from the canon of our admissible culture.

Lehrer, for instance, specialises in black humour, which fifty-odd years since it was first performed is still refreshingly dangerous. O'Searaigh writes some of the most extraordinary love poetry today (though I must admit not appreciating him during my Leaving Cert). What both have in common is their outcome. Comedy and poetry, like all artistic endeavour, may entertain. More importantly, however, it should cause you to question your acceptance of the reality as permitted by the mediocrity of consensus.

Worryingly, it seems we cannot accept this for our young people, who mainstream culture would only have exposed to a limited selection of cultural output. Young people are more adventurous than that, no more so than at the untamed frontiers of language.

It would be one more disservice to our society, if we denied them (and the rest of us) the opportunity to explore, debate and hold to account the world we have created for ourselves. This is not possible, if 1950s solutions to unsettling questions are allowed to prevail. Otherwise, we may just all quit and go line-dancing.

Kaliningrad meets Castleknock

2008-01-31T19:14:00.001Z

"A defunct Irish racecourse and the home of Immanuel Kant - History and how to Survive it"

"Bertrand" Ahern, the great make-up wearing grand-dame of Ireland's nest of badly dressed political vipers, has today claimed that he was not in any way involved financially (though maybe fatally) with UK developer Norman Turner after dealings with him in 1994. According to today's Irish Times:

'It emerged last night that a passport issued to Norman Turner, a businessman involved in the Sonas consortium that planned to develop the Phoenix Park racecourse as a casino, was returned via Mr Ahern's office in August 1994. Mr Turner also donated $10,000 to Fianna Fáil via its chief fundraiser Des Richardson in that year.'

It seems that this is perfectly normal and, sure, his ma was from Cork. This in itself would be enough of a reason for him to have dieu et mon droit tattooed to his forehead, let alone his bloody passport. Unsurprisingly, the opposition parties are howling for his head, whilst also arguing with the junior coalition partners, the Greens, in Dail Eireann, like so many drunken hen parties outside a low-rent nightclub. Shame they hadn't discovered the stomach for confrontation ten years ago, when they could have retained government, and perhaps had a better class of clientelism insinuate its way through Leinster House.

What is striking, is less the abovementioned parliamentary row, than the plan that first aroused Bertie's sense of helpfulness to his Manchester based developer friend. (The new one, not the old one. No, the other one. Left a bit, closer.... theeeere, you go...) The reason this so intriguing, is that it highlights a cultural foible we have - In Ireland, we tend to demolish great houses, fine estates, beloved landmarks and areas of natural beauty. In their place appear much needed five star hotels and "championship" golf courses, car parks, shopping centers and when the state gets involved the odd interpretative centre in areas of natural beauty, so we may organize nature. And sell a few postcards. Putting it more bluntly, we "develop" sites for reasons which are hard to fathom, other than the naked pursuit of wealth by builders.

This requires a certain kind of contempt, for one's heritage, the environment, for your countrymen, for your agreed political system, for social values. In Ireland, this is caused by an intrinsic lack of value being placed in the unquantifiable, in things which may be beautiful, but are not valuable in a one dimensional, mercenary way. Stately home are dismissed as belonging solely to the Anglo-Irish world, to host fuddy-duddy classical concerts: They bear no resemblance to "real" people's aspirations, tastes or needs. These are symbols of our colonial repression, and must be taken down a peg, to suit our needs. In adopting this view, members of the media, political class and the construction industry in Ireland vilify what many Irish feel they have no access to, thus denying them treasures they never knew they had.

It would be mischievous of me to suggest that there is an ulterior motive for adopting this stance, but here goes. Many such houses are bought up by our new, bourgeois elite, who have replaced the Anglo-Irish in the last ninety years, as the chinless classes. So Lissadell House, part of the very soul of our independence, could be bought up by lawyers, who maybe have less right to it as a private home, than the entire people, whose freedom was dreamt of there. It's not their fault. But maybe Bertie and the Office of Public Works should start looking sheepish about now.

This story arose in the wake of a news item in some German news outlets. The city of Kaliningrad, the city once known as Koenigsberg, is to rebuild substantial sections of the old city, where the grave of Immanuel Kant is located. The plan includes the intended reconstruction of the old city fortress, demolished in 1968 by the new occupants of the city, as a "symbol of fascism". I can't figure out why, other than the curious and thosew with family histories in the region will travel there to witness a wonderful, curious, macabre, thoroughly unique human event: one-time enemies reconstituting a city, that, like Siamese twins, is a heart linking two countries for as long as they will exist. No perceived insecurity, no post-colonial funk. It may not be 100% magnanimous - it would be a huge boost for the local economy - but things are heading in an interesting direction.

2006-02-09T15:01:00.000Z

Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger's Tor! The story of German Football is a bloody good read. It also raises some points about the nature of its subject matter. First, it is possible to misunderstand the football of a given country if you are not part of, or well informed about, the culture. When you delve deeper, you find that the passion Hesse-Lichtenberger displays is based on a form of blind faith in what you may consider historical fact or Tatsache. The English do not necessarily understand the former point, but will get the latter rings more than a few bells.

In the English game, there is a lack of repect for the culture of German football. It is, like English football, packed with passion and pain and not a little beauty. If only they could see it, though. The stereotypes of Germany that one finds in football, although occasionally amusing, are essentially shorthand for what they feel about Germans as they (mis-) understand them.

Some Germans don't get it either. Take one of the most succesful films to be made in Germany in recent years, Das Wunder von Bern (pictured above). The historical event it depicts is a fascinating series of events that tell us of the complexities, the genius and often roaring inepttiude and lack of completeness that West Germany experienced when it attended the 1954 World Cup. The film of the event is a film of the myth, and therefore lacks an appreciation of the complexities of the original story. It makes no mention of the unfortunate rendition of Deutschland Ueber Alles, the abandoned and jingoistic first verse of the German national anthem, or the wider fall out of the win for German society, the tut-tutting of the media at the euphoria that followed. Clumsily, Germans were beginning to stumble towards asking themselves who they were. This is a lesson, I think, that has yet to be drawn from England's own iconic World Cup victory.

Hesse-Lichtenebrger doesn't make this point, which is a pity. But he does display what the film displays. A tacit understanding of the power of those events, and that only the hardest of football fans could not get a lump in their throat thinking of the significance of this occasion. A power and significance recognised in the current Berlin Republic. For me, its the power of football.

The return of the Ginga Ninja

2006-02-08T19:51:00.000Z

Hello again!

I'm the bald guy on the left, and worried at how I look like William Hague. Still, such is life, and I am left to compare my early appearance with that of a failed Tory leader.

Let me bring you up to speed. My last blog was in 2003. Since then I have made it as a qualified teacher: the zenith of my career was reached this morning when one of my students indicated the city of Mainz on a map of Germany with the corner of his (flying) dictionary. His aim was remarkably true. Sadly, he was not involved in my school's unsuccessful attempt to reach the next stages of the Leinster Junior Cup (Rugby, don't you know...). It seems they were hit by a some sort of gypsy curse: The captain hurt his shoulder, another player chucked the big vom, or so I am told, and most cruelly, they were defeated after leading at half time.

This, however, leads me to my real reason for writing this post. My one true passion, writing, has been rekindled this week. Hurrah! Another attempt to be Nick Hornby, strutting self consciously in Helen Fielding's knickers? Eh, I think not. Life, like literature, doesn't need to be so contrived. My problem with modern popular literature is that it fails to see that coinicdence provides the better scenarios than conscious literary endeavour. The temporary rush of adrelaline in a fourteen year old boy with a book in his hand, an unfortunate fall in a training session and butterflies on an empty stomach indicate that there is absolutely no need for a controlling third party to invent what reality throws up so much more eloquently every day.