Ciaran’s Peculier [sic] Blog

A view of the world from an Irish hole

Month: December, 2009

Featured

Trading Places

I read with undisguised contempt the report that Brendan Smith TD assembled a nice big bill to cover his attendance at World

Keep your hands to yourself Brendan

Trade talks in Geneva, a bill that the Irish tax payer must pick up.

 Now having travelled a bit I know that Geneva can be a dear hole at the best of times, but I’m sure the minister could have found a nice three-star, or even a four-star hotel in which he could have rested his sore arse. But it’s obvious; only the best from the boy from Corlough.

 Also, the tab for travelling expenses. He was staying only a mile and a half from the conference venue, and I think even I, with my limited mobility, could have covered that on foot, even if I had to be linked. But not our minister. Oh no. He had to be “lorried” in a limousine. I would love to be able to use my legs again to walk with the brio and panache of the past, and so I feel very resentful of those people who refuse to use theirs.

 But what’s the story with Mary Coughlan, the minister who was also attending the conference and who was apparently in the same hotel? They travelled by separate limos. Was this a comment by Deputy Smith on perceived personal hygiene problems possessed by Deputy Coughlan? Or was it that minister Coughlan refused to sit with Deputy Smith? Now I can give my word that she would have been perfectly safe with Brendan.

 But then there was the ministerial backing-group, sixteen advisers / hangers-on who couldn’t use Geneva’s trolleybuses and trams but had to go everywhere by people carrier. Their presence was a reflection perhaps on the minister’s own ignorance. His secretary once admitted to me that he knew nothing about agriculture and still less about trade.

 The whole gig cost around 17,000 euro – which would have covered how many blind pensions?

2 comments
Featured

Fuck Off Deputy Gogarty

The Green Party to which Deputy Gogarty belongs, is a really disgusting outfit. I view it as I would a piece of dog shit on the path, something horrible, malodorous, to be avoided at all costs, and which should be put out of one’s memory. So that’s what the Green Party has become: the doggy poo of Irish politics.

 Paul Gogarty’s outburst in the Dail can be looked at in different ways. The Green Party as a whole is like a young girl of spirit and some ideas, who has been lured into prostitution by promises of enjoying the high life. Indeed she has been put up in a luxurious mansion, has been wined and dined, allowed to fraternise with the powerful, as well as enjoying foreign travel and stays in five-star hotels. But all this has come at a price. Not a day goes by without her being fucked up the arse. What’s more her powers of expression has been altered, as she regurgitates the rancid spunk she has been forced to swallow in order to satisfy her master. But the good times may be coming to an end, as the grippers hover menacingly around the mansion. She knows that if her master gets evicted, it’s down to the gutter for her. She’ll have no friends, having wickedly spurned her long-held acquaintances during her time in high society.

 In fact, Deputy Gogarty’s outburst can be seen from another psychological perspective, as stemming from attempted projection to overcome tensions between a perceived passive and active state, which is sometimes to be found amongst victims of abuse. So when Gogarty told a colleague to “Fuck off”, what he was really saying was “I’m tired of being fucked.”

 It’s obvious that the strain’s beginning to show and if the pressure is kept on Gogarty he’ll crack spectacularly. I am expecting other, similarly sensitive Government deputies to expose themselves, or even moon at the opposition, and there remains the outside chance that Mary Hernia might flash her tits – I’m feeling sick already.

 Deputy Gogarty’s restraint towards Deputy Stagg was remarkable though. I expected he might have added dark insinuations about bicycles or Phoenix Park.

 In fact, on the QT, I am able to reveal that it was a younger Paul Gogarty who was the man that came by bicycle on an assignment to meet Deputy Stagg all those years’ ago. In those days the greens went everywhere by bicycle. He has since defended his actions by saying he thought he was meeting a girl called Emma.

Leave a comment
Featured

Flights of fancy

I thought the Silly Season was over, but I suppose when you’re dealing with Fianna Fail supporters and their new-found Fascist friends it’s silly season all year.

 An example is the silly statements nay examples of outright mendacity they come out with, such as that the cowardly cutbacks of this week’s budget were necessary to prevent our national sovereignty, which would have been threatened by international financial institutions if we didn’t bring our public finances into line. This reminds me of the rumours some well-healed Fianna Failers tried to spread on the eve of the 12990 presidential election, that if Mary Reobinson were elected president there would be a flight of capital.

 We are a sovereign state, with a history of democratic government. We are not some Banana republic or narco-state prone to frequent coups. In our state the people are sovereign, and any measure which is contrary to the interest of the people must be spurned. The International financial community can have no say in dictating our state, and given recent developments they would do well to get their own house in order first. We are not like the tenants of some dingy garret who must meekly accept the proscriptions of some slum landlord or gombeen man or risk eviction.

Leave a comment
Featured

Stoned

The Gardai Siochana really should go out on strike if they feel devalued, as claimed by Garda Representative Association P.J. Stoned. But they should stop the bloody sabre rattling and get out there and show for the first time that they are with the people, and not merely the paid security punks of the corrupt elite. As for that shit that Dermot Ahem came out with about it being anti-democratic and unconstitutional, stop the shaggin’ lights Bunny. As Ken Livingstone said if Democracy really changed anything they’d abolish it, and as for the constitution, nobody takes any of that seriously. And then there was the line that striking gardai could be arrested !!! There is only one group in Ireland who have either statutory or common law powers to arrest anyone – the Gardai. Does anyone think they’d arrest each other? They don’t do it for speeding or drunk driving.

 So listen you flat-footed Fascist bastards. Come on and show us that you’re men and not fecking pansies, and that you’re able to stand up to REAL criminals, instead of harassing suspected illegal immigrants and rounding up their children prior to transportation.

 Of course if the Gardai did go on strike that’s when things would really start to kick off. There would have to be a State of Emergency and the suspension of Civil Liberties. Jaysus that would be just the lad for all those Opus Dei cunts in the Department of Justice. There’d be no talk then of Clerical Sexual Abuse of Minors, and anyone showing less than clear deference towards their betters would be interned. I’m fairly sure that among the first to go would be this blog, but they couldn’t touch me. I’d just plead insanity. Now where did I put that packet of razor blades and that bottle of paraffin…

Leave a comment
Featured

Like father, like son

At a recent lavish dinner taoiseach Brian Cowen said that the values of a nation could be seen in how it treated its less fortunate inhabitants. Well, on the basis of yesterday’s budget I would say that the Irish Republic has shown itself to have the values of a pack of hooligans. How can it be that those who are blind must suffer cuts in their miserable benefits, while at the same time being governed by a rigorously-enforced means test which prevents them from earning even the smallest amounts, while their chances of employment are stymied beyond the most menial jobs or training centres.

  A country’s values can also be discerned by examining those groups who are able to influence its government. It is evident that the people who were listened to by the government when framing the budget were bankers, stock brokers, employers’ groups and the well-off. Interestingly another group whose influence was seminal were publicans and those selling the legal but addictive drug of alcohol, those people who, come every Christmas, are immune to the suffering their cause through wide sectors of society. So we have a perverse situation in which increases in duty on alcoholic drinks were nominal, if they were applied at all, while the government has cut back on funding for many children’s projects. So the guy who goes on the tear with his brew will be able to get that bit more, even though his benefit has been cut. However, if he goes home and beats up his wife and terrorises his children, the resources for helping them will be fewer. So, the message is clear this Christmas. If you’re feeing blue just crack open the booze. This may be due to an outmoded notion that it is only the working class who drink, yet the minister for Finance’s own father was living proof – while alive – that members of the profession were equally susceptible to alcohol abuse. Indeed Brian Lenihan Sr demolished his liver single-handedly. Brian og’s partial I believe to the odd drop, especially if someone else is paying, so I suppose it’s a case of something running in the family, like athlete’s foot.

Leave a comment
Featured

A house of lies

The budget debate in the Dail yesterday was riddled with lies and half truths. One of the most egregious of these was that the cost of living is going down. Come on Brian, get a grip! Do you believe that the tens of thousands of people from the Republic doing their shopping in the north every day are motivated by a perverse Brit-loving spirit that wants to give their money to Gordon Brown’s war effort in Afghanistan? Maybe he believes the crap peddled by his advisers that all these cross-border shoppers are on booze-cruises. Yet only last week a report on the Northern economy spoke of how all parts of the retail sector had benefited from Irish shoppers.

 Another fiction is the creation of jobs for unemployed people. The fact is that any decent, well-paying jobs are immediately hovered up by relatives of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael councillors.

 Lenihan told the Dail that his partner in crime Brian Cowen was taking a big pay dip, but this was only in his public salary. The expenses row which rocked Westminster earlier in the year told us how much we knew about the expenses of our parliamentarians and ministers i.e. not much beyond what they wanted to tell us.

 We are told how the country’s in such a pickle, that it must face these tough aka cowardly cutbacks, but yet the egregious abuse of public funds continues unabated. At local level councillors still go to conferences where their presence is decorative at best. They avail of this “Wish-you-were-here” culture thanks to the department of the Environment (headed by Green Party leader John Gormley) and local council executives who thus reward councillors for letting them do as they please and not interfering. What’s more these junkets are compensation for the fact that councillors have less power than a eunuch in a brothel. Those attending these lavish conferences should reflect on the fate of a former county councillor whose political career is facing ruin because of events which occurred in a hotel in which he was staying while attending such a junket.

Leave a comment
Featured

Blythe spirit

Ernest Blythe - Ireland's very own fascist

So the fascists are back in control and without a shot being fired. What’s more there was no March on Rome, not even on the Roma Takeaway in Lucan. People might accuse me of using terms like fascists loosely, but remember this. One of the most infamous occasions in which pensions were cut was in 1930 at the hands of Ernest Blythe. In the middle of the ‘30s he became an active member of the proto-Fascist Army Comrades’ Association, or Blueshirts. So shrill was he in his support for fascism that even the Fine Gael party distanced itself from him on its foundation. He therefore retired into obscurity, unloved and forgotten, remembered solely for his act of barbarism in reducing pensions from the princely sum of 50 shillings per week to 45. Such a fate I hope will befall the present minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan jr.

 This budget is based on lies, one of them being that it’s about correcting the public finances. This is horses’ feathers. It is all about making Ireland into a country where there rich can stay rich and grow richer, sitting at the apex of society, while the poor remain poor or grow even poorer, denies any worthwhile chance of rising out of poverty by any legitimate means, and finding means of social mobility such as education effectively blocked by a culture of nepotism and cute-hoorism. Most of the people in employers’ organisations know little about business. They simply survive on some form of innate instinct for success combined with knowing who to befriend and who to do. Their knowledge of economics owes much to social prejudice. I remember the individual who put down all Switzerland’s success to the fact that it had draconian welfare laws. So the idea that social welfare payments were being cut was music to these people’s ears. They were backed up by a coterie of economists who are a disgrace to the profession, such as Colm McCarthy who always appears to be half cut and speaks like a Dublin criminal’s enforcer, or the economist from a long-established centre of education who pontificated on transport economics, although he lived on campus (and so at the taxpayers’ expense) within crawling distance of his work. And finally there are the fascist mandarins of the Department of Finance, the Sir Humphreys with Irish names. All of these groups found a willing and impressionable tool in Brian Lenihan Jr, who let’s face it, knows sweet FA about economics, but who, as a privileged child of the establishment, knew all about keeping the aspirations of the great unwashed at bay. While many might see education and learning as a means of advancement, Brian Lenihan did not have to worry about working too hard or indeed being too bright. The fact was he was his father’s son and so doors opened for him automatically. I still recall his arrogant, portly frame in Trinity. On several occasions he deigned to sit not far from me, but had I known what he would subsequently do I swear I would have put my hands round his fat neck and throttled him. He would be outraged at any hint that he did not gain his scholarship (entitling him to free tuition and board) on his unrivalled intellect. That may be true, but then why was the candidates’ identities not secret? Why were those who marked the papers not outsiders, but instead the very same people who had marked all of his work throughout the preceding eighteen months of his law course?

 Ernest Blythe retired into a well-deserved ignominy. I would like to end by doing something which probably seems idiotic and futile, and which I know is pointless. I would like to place a really serious and malign curse on Brian Lenihan jr, something that will cause him sooner or later to feel excruciating bodily pain, disfigurement of his limbs, blindness maybe. I know I can’t do this, but with how I feel about Lenihan how I wish I could.

Leave a comment
Featured

Brendan Smith T.D.

The following is a message for Deputy Brendan Smith TD, Minister for Agriculture.

 I have known Brendan for over thirty years and I would consider him a friend. I have even written speeches for him before he was

Ta ra Brendan

 inducted into the salubrious halls of the Government. Sadfly, I have to say I am ashamed of this friendship, as a result of the Budget framed by the same government of which he is a part.

 I am partially-sighted, but I also have a PhD in history, yet for reasons too exgtensive to repeat, I am compelled to subsist on my non-contributory blind pension as my only source of income. In yesterday’s budget, this was cut. I feel this was undeserved, as no doubt the many tens of thousands who have suffered similar losses must feel. At least I feel privileged in being able to stand with the multitrude who have been shat on by this corrupt, incompetent and arrogant administration.

 I also suffer from Multiple Sclerosis, and am dependant on medication to prevent this condition from worsening uncontrollably, yet the Budget has introduced a prescription charge, which I will have to pay for each batch of my medication. This has been introduced by the minister for health, who yearns to live in Boston, to combat abuse of medication. My medication has been prescribed by a leading neurologist. Without it I might very well become completely incapacitated by my MS. I had no hand or part in its prescription. Am I abusing medication simply by wishing to stay alive?

 I have therefore been slapped in the face twice by the government of which Brendan Smith is a member. I think I am entitled to respond in some way.

 It goes without saying that I will NEVER vote for Brendan Smith, or any candidate representing the Fianna Fail party, but furthermore I will NEVER speak to Deputy Smith again; Any communication from him or his office will be ignored. were he to attempt to speak to me at an event I will blank him.

Brendan should not feel too victimised, as I intend to adopt the same policies towards any member of the Dail or Seanad who votes in favour of the Budget, as well as any member of a local government body who belongs to Fianna Fail. This also applies to any member of the Green Party, but members of that shameful brood are thin on the ground.

 I would urge others who feel as I do to adopt this policy, but it is up to them. I am sure that losing my friendship will cause Deputy Smith little loss of sleep.

As a constituent of Brendan’s I expect to receive a Christmas card from him. I believe that the expression of kindly wishes for Christmas and the New Year from a government minister, after what they’ve done, is hypocritical. If I recognise the envelope containing the card, which will no doubt be in a pre-paid Oireachtas envelope), I will ask the postman to take it back and return it unopened to the sender. I would urge others to do the same.

 I still feel that Brendan is deep down a decent man, but as they say, if you lie down with dogs you will rise with fleas.

1 comment
Featured

Clerical sex abuse in Cavan

Recently another case of sexual abuse involving a priest and a young boy has arisen here in Co. Cavan. The details are too sordid to interest me. What is interesting, though, is that the affair has been mentioned in the local rag, the Anglo-Celt. You’d know that the likes of Anselm Lovett Sr. no longer work there. This former chairman of the local Fianna Faill cumann was also a stalwart of the Knights, and was therefore able to ensure that there were no stories which might have caused embarrassment to the local clergy – t that, according to my information, he ever did so

Anselm was of course the father of David Lovett, one-time town clerk in Cavan; a brother of John Lovett of The Copper Kettle, Kilnaleck, a past president of the Irish vintners and keen beekeeper; and an uncle of poor Ann in Granard.

The Catholic Church really has an awful lot to hang its head in shame about in Ireland – not all of it necessarily the fault of its priests.

Leave a comment
Featured

Living in a republic

The Murphy commission report pointed to an inappropriate relationship between the Catholic archdiocese of Dublin and senior

Up the Republic Dermot?

members of the Irish police force. The report should have been more candid. These senior figures in the Gardai were often members of Catholic lay groups such as the Knights of Saint Columbanus, and often owed their positions and promotions to such membership. And when the church wanted something hushed up they could be relied upon to do it,  You had a situation – in some places you still have a situation – where the legal system was infected. The colonisation of areas such as the judiciary and the police force essentially meant that the clergy as well as other members of these lay groups, were beyond the legal pale and could do what they liked. Such a form of infection is invidious and has nothing to do with Christianity.

 As someone who belongs to the Catholic branch of Christianity I am appalled by the actions of some of its bishops in league with well-placed members of the laity, but my horror is not recent. Oh no, I have observed the hypocrisy, the double standards, for years. I have kept silent because to do otherwise would be to invite victimisation, and sadly the victimisation has come anyway.

 I have nothing in common with these people in the Knights or Opus Dei or any of the plethora of Catholic Masonic groups. They have no part in the version of Christianity I subscribe to. In fact, I see them as fifth columnists, people who have infiltrated the Christian religion and who clothe themselves in a selection of its rituals and who pervert its doctrines in order to conceal their own baseness and evil.

 Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern, in presenting the Murphy report, attempted to come over all radical, as a child of Rousseua and Voltaire. Instead of demanding the crushing of infamy he stated that we live in a republic where none are beyond the law. But yet how is it that his colleague Dr Michael Woods made such a nice deal with the religious orders so that they escaped having to pay out too much in redress to their victims. There wasn’t much sign of a republic there. Let us recall during the shameful referendum debates of the 1980s when Archbishop McNamara’s de facto political spokesman was that wonderful politician from the west Padraig Flynn who brought his children up so well, inculcating one of them with the belief that tax evasion was a worthwhile endeavour. Then there was senator Don Lydon who regaled the Irish senate with his homosexual fantasies, not to mention the late Jim Tunny. Former deputy for Dublin North West Michael Barrett who took part in the picket objecting to the screening of the boring Je Vous Salue Mariez, which, because it was denounced by the Vatican, acquired a notoriety it never deserved. I could go on, and on and on, but it would be boring. So, before Dermot Ahern starts trying to fly the flag of enlightened republicanism, he must dwell on how many members of his party, at all levels, are members of right-wing Catholic lay groups whose unspoken policy is to subborn the state to the Catholic church. No wonder Protestant bigots in Northern Ireland are able to snidely remark that Home Rule still means Rome Rule, while forgetting the nefarious influence of their Orange Order.

Leave a comment
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.