Brendan and Jack were having a quiet drink when Brendan asks him.
“If you heard Jack that the world was going to end in fifteen minutes, what would you do?”
“Well in the time left I’d shag everything that moved I suppose. How about you Brendan. What would you do?”
“I’d try to stand perfectly still,” Brendan replies.

One more? Why not. What do a Rubik’s Cube and a prick have in common? The more you play with it the harder it gets.

 Now a bird never flew on one wing. Define egghead: What Mrs Dumpty givers Humpty.

What has four legs and flies?

A dead horse.

….. Sick or what?

Many people in Ireland have longed for an opportunity to express their long-suppressed loyalty to the British Crown. They have watched, almost with baited breaths, at such moments of joy as the silver and golden jubilee and various royal weddings, not to mention those episodes of incredible pathos and heartbreak as the funeral of Princess Diana. However, now with the advent of the visit by Her Majesty to Ireland, Irish people of all creeds will be able to cheer with gusto as they exclaim “God Bless you Queen Elizabeth!”

 For too long our two countries have been divided by antagonisms which have often been mischievously amplified by people in Ireland. The forthcoming royal visit is an opportunity to turn the swords of the past into the ploughshares of the present and the scythes of the future, with which future generations can reap a bountiful harvest of goodwill and renewed dependency on our bigger neighbour.

 Those in Cavan will be especially pleased to hear that their local authority, Cavan County Council, had been working flat out behind the4 scenes to see to it that The Queen visited “The Lakeland County” and that she is given, along with the Duke of Edinburgh, an opportunity to fulfil a long-held ambition.

 It is not generally known but Queen Elizabeth had planned to make a visit to Cavan County Museum during her visit. Both she and Prince Philip were anxious to look at the museum’s unique collection of Gaelic football boots and assorted Cavan GAA memorabilia. A source close to the royal family has stated that each time anyone mentions the memorable victory of Cavan over Kerry in New York’s Polo Grounds her mind goes back to the year 1947 and the royal wedding of that year.

 It has now emerged that her visit to the museum has had to be cancelled because of an old problem in the museum: the lavatories. In spite of having a plumber’s son on staff for a number of years the museum’s toilets have a nasty habit of exploding for no reason and shooting their contents over a wide area.  It was thought this was caused by attempts to flush down diapers, tampons used condoms and certainly the problem seemed to have been resolved by a number of low-key redundancies disguised as budget cuts. Unfortunately the overflowing lavatories have returned with a vengeance, with fateful results.  

 A County Council engineer explained.

 “It would be the very day her Majesty would be comin’ that the hoors would blow up again like yan Icelandic volcano, an’ ya can get the whiff of the shite for miles an’ miles. I wouldn’t be surprised if ya got it up in a ‘plane. An’ when that happens the last thing ya want is t’ have the quain of England cuntin’ around lookin’ to go to the jacks.”

 Some in Cavan had hoped that The Queen, given her interest in Gaelic Games, would have an opportunity to present the Anglo-Celt cup to a successful Cavan team, but this can’t happen now after the Cavan team threw up their arses down in Cork last weekend – four shagging points; Jesus the North Koreans would have done better.

 Anglo Celt and The Beano please copy

Here is a short message for Dr Brendan Scott and his adoring fans, his patron and protector Whacko Jacko Keys and the others who organised talks in association with the forthcoming fleadh in cCvan. It is taken from the lyrics of the inimitable Marshall Bruce Matheers III, aka Eminem:

YOUL’LL BURN IN HELL FOR THIS SHIT

A family of prostitutes were discussing life over breakfast. The daughter had just come in and was asked how she’d done the previous night.
“Not so good. I only got 25 euro for a blow job. It’s the credit crunch I suppose.”
“Twenty five euro for a blow job,” screamed her mother. “In my day I’d consider a fiver for a blow job to be a good night’s work.”
“It was different in my day,” said granny prostitute. “We”d have been glad just to get something warm inside us.”

I’m sure there are many local government employees who know only too well the type of people I’m talking about. After all, when they”re on one of those five-star junkets paid for by the tax payer, away from their wives, girlfriends and partners, it can get pretty lonely, can’t it … but don’t worry, your secrets are safe with me.

A priest is hearing confessions. A young man comes in and says. “Bless me Father for I have sinned. I’ve had sex with Pussy Green two or three times a week for the past two months.”
“Fornication is a serious sin. You must say five Our Fathers and a decade of the Rosary in penance.”
The next in the confessional is a slightly older male with a shaven head.
“Bless me Father. I’ve fucked Pussy Green every day for the past six weeks. Some days I’ve done her twice or three times and she lets me turn her round so I can fuck her up the ar ..”
“…Okay, Okay. I get the message” says the increasingly exasperated priest. “But who is this Pussy Green?”
“She’s a slapper that’s moved onto the estate. You must have seen her at Mass Father…”
“You have sinned gravely against God and against yourself. For your penance says twelve Our Fathers.”
Next day is Sunday and, just before Mass the priest is standing at the altar beside an altar boy, when in strides the most voluptuous long-legged blond wearing an emerald green mini dress and matching high heels. She demurely walks to the front row of the chapel where she sits down in full view of the priest who can hardly take his eyes off her. He bends down to the altar boy and whispers. “Tell me son, is that Pussy Green?”
“No father”, answers the boy. “It’s just the reflection of her dress.”

The Cavan County headshop in Ballyjamesduff may escape the attempts by Justice Minister Dermo Ahern to close them down. You see it doesn’t actually sell legal highs; the only highs available are for those working there and recent members of staff. Anyone else who visits there usually leaves with an unpleasant, nauseous feeling of having been ripped off.

People in Cavan are blissfully unaware that events swirling around their heads interest far more than themselves but are actually the subject of comment far, far away. It has recently been learned that happenings here have been mentioned in the North Korean media. Items to have made their way onto the nation’s news broadcasts have included the recent Hen night festival, the rumoured closure of the Cavan County Headshop in Ballyjamesduff while mention has also been made of the forthcoming fleadh. Check it out.

There are persistent rumours that the secretive Dear Leader Kim Jong-il is planning a rare foreign ttrip to Cavan later in the year to inaugurate a link between Cavan’s Johnston Central Library and the Kim Il-Sung Central Library in Pyongyang. This will include a public lecture in the library on “The Diocese of Kilmore and Korea in the Later Middle Ages”, given by the library’s preferred little darling of a historian, Dr Brendan Scott.

According to RTE news Gardai are investigating a suspected arson attack at an industrial estate in Dublin.

 The arsonist(s) are probably on the run now, fearing apprehension, but I want to give them some words of consolation for the future. You should really get out of the grime of the big city and move to a border county. There your involvement with arson will be initially forgotten, especially if you join Fianna Fail and the Knights of St Columbanus. You will then be able to look back upon your past with pride and speak candidly and unashamedly about it. And what’s more you will even get a job with the local authority.

 Instead of having to keep a low profile to escape the Bill, you will be able to have your mugs emblazoned on a weekly basis in the local paper. When you attend social events camera bulbs will flash as if you were Brittney Spears. If you still have criminal tendencies you will be able to steal with impunity, and because of your newfound friends you will be able to slander decent people, and what’s more be believed.

Rosie, my sister Gill and myself have received an invitation to an event to be held in the Irish Wheelchair Association headquarters at Corlurgan, on May 28^th. This is a play about disabled people and starring disabled people from Co. Cavan. It is a most worthy project and I wish it the greatest success to those taking part.

 There are a number of aspects that trouble me however. First, as far as I can discern, the play has not been written by disabled people, but by an able-bodied dramatist, maybe commissioned by Cavan County Council’s Arts Office. There seems to be the implication here that disabled people’s thoughts are too raw and coarse to be consumed by the general, able-bodied public, and have to be interpreted by someone else. Is it about disabled people’s journeys but in the words of the able-bodied? Apart from those unfortunate enough to suffer from aphasia or any other condition that causes loss of speech, all the disabled people I know (including myself) can speak very well and clearly.

 Bound up with this may be the assumption that disabled people wouldn’t be able to formulate their thoughts intelligently, let alone write a play.

 As I have a prior engagement I won’t be able to attend. This should not be seen as a snub by me towards those taking part in the play, who have my boundless respect and admiration. Unfortunately I feel I know what is going to happen. The event will be turned into a photo opportunity. My good friend Brian Mulligan will be on hand to take the pictures of the disabled who will be lined up for the shot. They will thus appear as nice, well-behaved and non-threatening cripples. This will then appear in the pages of the Anglo-Celt as exhibits in the ego-trips of those able-bodied people who want to appear caring. It might be said that the disabled are therefore being cynically used.  Bridget Boyle will be there of course, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t have her friend Whacko Jacko Keys there. Bridget enjoys the privileged position of being the only disabled person he deigns to communicate with.  Another sure show will be the chairman of the County Council, Winston Bennett, who will play the role of the self-important courthouse jester by wearing a silly chain round his neck. (Now men who wear jewellery are often ridiculed and called names like “trannies”. What’s more the only people I know who are called Winston are from the West Indies.)

 The drama has been assisted by Cavan County Council’s Arts Office. I used to enjoy very close relations with the office’s staff but I seem to have dropped out of their orbit. I cannot understand why the Arts Officer, my dear (or at least I though dear) friend Catriona O’Reilly never told me about this project. No doubt it would have been inappropriate for her to have contacts with me. How could she own up to being the friend of someone who has said such dreadful things about poor Brendan Snott and his neurotic predecessor in the Ballyjamesduff County vomitarium? She could have contacted me by ‘phone while out walking were she afraid that contact me through her office would be overheard.

 I cannot second-guess the play’s contents, but I do hope that it is realistic and not a dire panegyric singing the praises of the Irish Wheelchair Association or telling of Cavan’s disabled community’s gratitude to Cavan County Council for putting them on the housing waiting list – and keeping them there – where they know that any criticism of the council’s policies will earn them backward movement on the said list. Funny thing is that I don’t think there are that many houses being built, but no doubt the council will restart their construction once they get some of the 25 million euro they’re owed by developers.)

 Now I am confined to a wheelchair, although thankfully I can walk for about half a mile each day. The play is called Our Journey, but I don’t feel it’s my journey, as nobody ever contacted me for my input. This is not prompted by churlish resentment. I do believe that my story, which is not superior to anyone else’s, might be of interest. It is certainly of no lesser value, but it seems that some of those behind this project just don’t want to hear it. They may think that it would be too embarrassing and too likely to offend “certain people”. Yet my disabled journey is a joyful story. I see my disabilities as gifts from God; they are challenges which have been given to me and which I see myself as having a duty to overcome as best I can. I know that there would be many who would bristle with discomfort were I to say the unutterable, that I am actually proud of my disabilities and how I continue to deal with them on a daily basis.

 But it seems as if there are some in Cavan who want to ignore me. The great lie is spread that I am angry.  I am portrayed as someone who has never accepted my position as a cripple, one of God’s accursed. My outlook is heretical, because I do not humbly accept my disabilities as the actions of a wrathful God, (and it goes without saying that the people who think this know God well). What is more I refuse to come to terms with the “fact” that no mater how many books I write or languages I learn I can nevcr, never be as good as the laziest and most incompetent able-bodied person.

 I am therefore not worthy of charity, (not that I want it), or kindness. The nun who used to wipe clean the blackboard when she would see me attempting to discern what she had written, and who forbade any of my classmates to give me their notes, was thus justified because I had stood up to her tyranny. I haven’t changed. In the past I have offended the petty local establishment and thumbed my nose at organisations like the knights of St Columbanus. Did I not go to a Protestant school and refuse to kiss Bishop McKiernan’s ring? I must therefore be punished by being airbrushed out of Cavan’s reality like someone who doesn’t exist, never has and never will.

 Let me repeat that I wish the event all the very best luck. At least I was invited. In the past Tess Kennedy of the Irish MS Society, which has close links to the IWA, has invited me to give talks on local history and other subjects to members in St Christopher’s, and I hope that those who attended enjoyed themselves and found the experience as instructive and rewarding as I did. This action stands in marked contrast to that of the National Council for the Blind in Cavan. Now both Tess and Bridget Boyle knew of my skills and abilities, and both of them were well aware of my contributions to the sadly defunct Cavan Echo. They have never been afraid to count me as a friend and indeed an equal.

 No doubt Dr Snott, so long employed by Cavan County Council and taken to their collective heart, thought that he was a real clever boy when he accepted the invitation to speak from the NCBI on a topic that I had worked on for over two decades. The apposite adjective for him is, I believe unprintable even on my blog.

Lately I’ve received lots of emails asking me what’s wrong. Why are so many of my posts taken up with gardening and herbs, to the exclusion of commentary about things in Cavan. The truth is I’ve wanted to devote my energies to pleasant things, to the exclusion of the pea brained bastards of Cavan who leave the pleasant Cavan landscape, at its most beautiful at this time of year, covered with the rodent-like casts of their intellectual banality.

 But unfortunately the foul stench of Cavan’s petty filth invades my nostrils. I learned through a friend of a friend that the Cumann Seannchais Breifne was holding a meeting where the speaker was Micheal Mac Craith OFM from Galway. Now as one of Co. Cavan’s most qualified and experienced historians (this sticks in their craw) I might have expected to have received notification of this event, rather than learning of it third hand. But sadly one of the top honchos in that organisation is an insecure and envious little jerk-off pipsqueak. This meeting was no doubt held in the Ballyjamesduff bomitarium.

 The talk, which I know was excellent, was on the Franciscans, a worthy topic. But it seems too redolent of the days when the C.S.B. was the plaything of the former Bishop of Kilmore, Francis “Frankie goes to Hollywood” McKiernan, when the society’s talks were dominated by discussion of priests and primary teachers. Given that the status of the priesthood has been so badly damaged by the actions of the priesthood’s aberrant members, I am confident that to the general public, the continuing obsession with the clergy must seem inappropriate.

 Rumours abound that the talented Dr Snott is engaged in writing two books. Is one of them a Festchrift (a book of commemorative essays) to the memory of Dr McKiernan? I doubt very much if I will be invited to contribute (my article in Jim Lydon’s Festchrift is one of the most significant of my papers).  Were I to be asked I would have to decline on the grounds that I was barred from so doing by a confidentiality clause aka gagging order imposed upon me in the 1970s. I can’t no how Dr Snott finds the time, with his hectic schedule which includes giving public lectures to the blind and partially-sighted.