But we in the “developed” world, especially Ireland, need not feel too smug about this. There are certain broadband blackspots in Irelanmd, such as the area aroundf Miltown and Baker’s Bridge Co. Cavan. Residents here cannot get a broadband link “for love or money”. Instead they are told to be satisified with dial-up connections, using telephone lines which are antiquated and which carry an annoying beat making them useless for voice communicationn let alone high-speed data. There is the possibility of gaining broadband access by mobile ‘phone, but this is prohibitively expensive, and it would no doubt work out at way above forty times the amount I’m expected to live in by this corrupt government.

 One other costly alternative is to buy broadband access via satellite from a company like ABB Telecom based in Kinnegad. The only problem is that, after getting the money for the service and equipment up front, these are never delivered. I know – I swallowed the saccharine balderdash of their web page last February, and no satellite dish was delivered,. Instead ABB Telecom attempted (unsuccessfuly) to extract a monthly fee from my bank account for a service which wasn’t being delivered. It’s now September and I’m still trying to get my money back. I’ve been left out of pocket forsix months for a service which is not being delivered and which probably was never going to be delivered in the first place.

 In an attempt to provide appropriate courses fitted to people’s needs, a special course is to be offered for senior managers who have problems who lack basic numeracy skills. The problem was highlighted by the recent budget overruns associated with the fleadh, and then by a recent survey which showed that the problem was widespread. amongst senior highly-paid management, and not confined, as had previously been thought, to janitors. The course will start with an introduction to the numbers, followed by simple arithmetic using the fingers. Course participants will then migrate to learning tables. Those who pass the course successfully will then be able to start working with calculators

 It is hoped that this course will be more successful than previous ones which aimed to help senior executives in local government with low literacy and letter writing skills. It transpires that even after completing previous courses many participants were not able to type even simple salutations on keyboards. Instead they were only able to scratch simple words like “cat” and “shit” in chalk or crayon on toilet and lift walls in the County Council offices. What’s more, when presented with a letter they fell back into old behavioural types, preferring to play “Spot the Ball”. Alternatively they would seek to gain the identity of the person who had written to them and who deserved a reply, and spread vile and unsubstantiated rumours about them. It is said that the walls of their offices (which reek of the nauseating odour of Preparation H)are festooned with photocopies of press photographs showing football players looking blankly into space, upon which lines in red and black ink have been drawn.

Joe Dolan

 I met Joe a couple of times in my youth, and I know his brother Ben. While I wasn’t into his music I recognise talent (more than Simon Cowell and weepy Cheryl) and Joe had it in spades. Through his artistry over many decades he brought joy to hundreds of thousands of people. Success breeds success, and everyone knows that among those who caddied for Joe was a young Michael O’Leary who even then was probably dreaming of ruling the skies. 

 I do feel, however, that Joe would be appalled at a bridge being named after him. There was the really sickening display of the official opening, carried out by Noeleen Dempsey, who took the opportunity to remind people that it was fast approaching that time of the year when he’d be off on the piste again. “From Aspen we’ll probably go to some nice Caribbean island, from where I can control Ireland’s transport better than if I was really there, an’ once again there can come blizzards and snow storms and yez will have to be diggin’ yourselves out a ten foot snowdrifts, an’ I won’t give an earwig’s fart”. I suppose the event was also attended by examples of pond life from the local Destiny’s Mercenaries, including Camillus “Rocky” Glinn and Wiggy, while the local blueshirts were no doubt there in force along with the requisite panoply of over-paid, over-fed, bureaucratic filth. Where were all the political puppets when, an indecently short time after Joe’s death, hundreds of thousands of euro was being clawed back in allegedly underpaid tax, to pay Senator Callely’s travel expenses?

 I so recall Joe’s participation in a tribute show hosted by BB Baskin for former taoiseach Albert Reynolds. Joe’s comment about Albert will stay with me forever. “Albert Reynolds is probably the daysentest fella in the racket oops I mean the business.”

 As for the title of this post, I’m sure I heard Joe sing the song./

 For a start, the title “Directo0r General”. It is, to paraphrase The Bard, full of Strength and fury, but it signifies fu7ck all, except that its holder is an over-paid intellectual dwarf who sees himself as occupying a more rarefied air than the race of common humanity, far more precious than the semi human life forms his organisation seeks to help. How many Director Generals are there are on FAS courses? Very few.. Let us excuse the FAS supervisors who generally do sterling work with very little recognition for their toil. The reality of being a member of a FAS scheme is to work hard for the equivalent of the money you’d get from the dole anyway, but yet to suffer the scorn and the ill= natured contempt of the scum, yes, the human rubbish, who believe that they have a right to look down their snot-filled on their fellow human citizens.

I challenge Mr Paul O’Toole. Is it not with these people you most readily identify rather than the people on FAS courses and schemes?

 I recall how, as an employee of Cavan Co. Council, helping to set yup Cavan County Museum, myself and the museum curator were able to count on the help and assistance of the members of a FAS scheme. If it had not been for them there would be no Cavan County Museum. Yet, on the day when the museum was to be opened,, the members of the FAS scheme were initially excluded from the invitation. This was only rectified when the Museum’s curator put his foot down and said that if they weren’t invited he wouldn’t be there either. (And let me add that I wouldn’t have darkened that pantomime of an opening with my presence either had it not been for the presence of the FAS scheme members. That way I had someone to talk to.

 Let 8s not overlook the less than honourable role being played in the FAS pantomime by the Trades Unions. Dominic Egan told me of how he relied on the FAS scheme in the County Museum, but yet he recognised that they were being used by the County Council as a form of cheap labour. (he was a decent guy who wanted to see people paid proper wages for their work, not peanuts.) He also told me that he felt that the Trades Unions would not put up with the way the FAS scheme there had been made into a permanent fixture. That was nearly fourteen years’ ago, and as far as I know the FAS scheme is still a feature of the museum’s existence – and it’s not Dominic Egan’s fault. 

 The Director General hints at a name change, yet let me suggest a name by which his organisation has been viewed by those who have participated in its “training programmes”, as well as member of the general public, as being most apposite. FARCE.  An organisation whose senior echelons are addicted to a five-star lifestyle at public expense, who hypocritically look down upon those they are supposed to help,. Let us also add here that many of those who are permanent employees of FAS, who are entrusted with teaching courses of dubious validity, are often closely related to FAS employees, so isn’t it nice to keep it in the family, and consign others to lifetimes of poverty and destitution –that’s if they’re unwilling to do the decent thing and emigrate and leave Ireland in the grip of the human crabs who’ve always ruled the roost here. .

 Let us recall some of the television advertising – all paid for by you-know-who. It featured the artiste Adele King (any relation of Adge?) better known as Twink telling people to say “FAS”. I suppose it made a change from ringing up her estranged oboist husband and telling him what a rotten faggot he was for impregnating his girl fiend and announcing the pregnancy on St  Valentine’s Day. She wasn’t intoning “You could retrain – it’s never too late”, when she was telling hubby that she was going to dip his oboe in Jay’s Fluid and stick it up his arse, after she’d cut his cock off to  prevent him making any further “bastards” with his “whores”.

 This is the reality under which so many people in Ireland have to suffer, and to be honest it’s getting a bit tiresome being lectured to by that pampered cancerous poseur intellectual  Brian Lenihan Jr. I don’t carte at those who will be outraged by what I’m about to say, but Being Brian Lenihan Sr’s son may have helped you get “Schol” in Trinner, butt could it stop you getting pancreatic cancer?  Illness or disability is nothing to be ashamed of, I think most decent people will agree. It’s no joke for anyone, but why should Brian Lenihan Jr., the Minister for Finance, who is doing the country down with such arrogant aplomb, be any different from a man or  a woman in the street who’s been working hard all their lives and who never had the chance to attend Trinity College, far less become a “scholar” there be any different? So why should such unfortunates have to suffer as a result? Maybe not at Brian Lenihan or any other government minister’s directions, but at the hands of their employees in the Public Service?  You see when I was in Trinity., studying in the library on a Friday night, I thought I was a true scholar. But no! The only ones entitled to sup at the banquet of riches are the members of “The New Class”; not the New Red Class of Milovan Djilas, but the new Green Class, or here in Cavan the New Blue Class. whose fathers are politicians in either national or local government,. Clever and all that I thought I was I somehow missed that.)  You see I could have become a legal practitioner, but I realised, perhaps in time, that I loved justice too much (and myself not enough) to become a lawyer.

 Such an epithet truly belongs to Tom Barron, but given the quiet, self-effacing nature of the man he would have been perhaps the first to reject it as misapplied. His intellect was enormous, allowing him to see far beyond the narrow, artificial constructs imposed on him by pseudo-academia and their mercenary foot soldiers. If I may transcribe Sir Issac Newton. He once wrote that if he had seen  further it was because he had been privileged to stand on the shoulders of giants. Tom Barron surely did stand on giants’ shoulders,; the shoulders of the common people of Knockbride and Bailieborough, for so long despised (even to this day. He was possessed of the perspicacious eyesight of an intellectual giants and there were few giants who could have stood taller.

 As is so often the case in Co. Cavan, there are the detractors, those who are not and never were entitled to tie his shoelaces, who have attempted with their habitual cowardice to besmirch him and his reputation, even though he cannot defend himself from his tomb. I know that I can trust Jonathan to do Thomas Barron’s memory prou.

 It’s amazing what you hear in Cavan, I mean the scurrilous rumours. One relates to why so many of Cavan County Council’s workers, that is, people who get their hands dirty (unlike the pen pushers whose alabaster-skinned hands can never be soiled by manual labour,) have been put on short time. This is because of, you’ve guess it, the fleadh. It seems as if the whole thing went way over budget and the inevitable cuts have to be made where they hurt ordinary people, and not in any way that might impinge upon the publicans and other hangers-on in whose interest the fleadh took place.

 But how did such budgetary overruns occur? Poor or non-existent management I say. I’ve written a bit about management (especially strategic management) and if anyone were to ask me to define the manager’s role, I’d say he or she is like an orchestral conductor in charge of a myriad of differing, sometimes conflicting resources. It’s the manager’s job to ensure that the various resources, human, technical, intellectual and financial (to name but a few) combine effectively and efficiently. It’s hard to single out any one resource as more important, but I think that many would say that finance is pretty big. If you don’t have cash how can you stay in business, pay wages, order supplies? So any manager who allows budgetary haemorrhages on his watch is a pretty poor example of the species. You don’t have to have an MBA to know this – but I’d love to have one nonetheless. (It should be obvious I’m not talking about Cavan County Council here: I mention “intellectual” resources.

 Maybe I’m being too idealistic here. I’m talking about managers in the private sector who have to operate against the buffets of an ever-changing market landscape Budgetary overruns don’t matter if the institution concerned can act with impunity, like so many in the public service. Such managers can (and frequently do) say “Ah sure fuck it, it’s only the public’s money…”(followed by drink-sodden laugh). Such public service managers may hypocritically claim that they are operating within a climate of unprecedented economic pain (Jaysus! That’s a good one! Same again is it?) but in reality these people can act as it likes – because they can – and no one can stop them or question them, least of all our castrated pubic (sic!) representatives – even if they had the ball to , which they haven’t. 

 And the money that was overspent can be made up out of the government’s “reptile fund” ;or failing that, through hospital and school closures, or through unemployed people being bumped off the live register because their faces don’t fit or their welfare officers don’t like them.

 I shouldn’t be asking these questions ( me? A cripple? Now I’m being silly – but I like it). What do I know about management? – a good deal more it seems than some managers in Cavan. We must believe that the fleadh was a success and anyone who doesn’t accept that is obviously a whinger, motivated by begrudgery. The people of Cavan should just accept how great it was and not worry about cutbacks – until they affect them. And if we all wish real hard we’ll get it next year, so that the mayhem can be revisited upon us and certain publicans can rip off their customers. Juvenal must be smiling. It is further proof of how you can attempt to fool people with bread and circuses.

 PS. There is only one reason why I feel in any way positive about the fleadh. It’s got nothing to do with the obese, flatulent – yes – bastards associated with it. It’s just that I happened to spy this girl. I think she was a busker, as she had a fiddle strapped to her back as she walked towards  Cavan town. She was really cute we exchanges smiles and … well, everyone knows my weaknesses for pretty women who play stringed instruments and the way their fingers move down the bridge of their instrument and …. We could have made beautiful music and the fleadh could have run three six five, twenty four , seven …

One of the most egregious examples of the way in which the achievements of Cavan’s disabled have been rubbished came last March. The National Council for the Blind, the largest Irish charity working for the benefits of blind and partially sighted people in the country, wanted to hold a meeting in Cavan’s County Library, run by Cavan County Council. They were encouraged to organise a talk on “local history”. However, they didn’t turn to the partially-sighted holder of a PhD in history in their midst, someone who had years of experience as a writer and lecturer on the subject, (myself) but to the council’s dream-boy Dr Brendan Scott, son of Councillor John Scott of Belturbet. Unfortunately the NCBI’s organiser here in Cavan, Ms Helena McDonald, did not realise how she was being set up, and I didn’t realise what was happening until I received an invitation to the event, featuring the aforementioned Scott as “special guest”. Alas Dr Scott, though holding a doctorate in history, is such a craven example of humanity that he felt it was but one more occasion for him to humiliate me and to repay me for the “trouble” that had existed between me and the museum (though before his time), that he jumped at the occasion to give a talk on Cavan’s “Franciscan abbey” (wherever that was). He accepted this invitation so as to rub in my disability to me and at the same time to say that, even though I had a doctorate and considerable experience as a historian, he stood higher amongst the miserable scum of Cavan Co. Council’s establishment. Years of experience has shown that many of the greatest academics are not people you’d willingly associate with, but I wonder do Dr Scott’s colleagues realise what a craven piece of excrement he is? I’ve never met him but since his appointment to Cavan’s County Museum he has pursued a vendetta against me, something in which he has been aided by many in the county council’s executive, including its highest members.

 Now I had thought of Cavan County Library as a home-away-from-home and its ever-helpful staff as friends. I had enjoyed carrying out research there. Sadly, one of the other users of the library did not feel I belonged there, and complained of my whispering into my hand-held tape-recorder. I do not know the identity of my accuser, but I think I’d be able to pick him out in an identity parade. Libraries can be noisy places, yet I ensure that I do not add to the existing background noise level in any way. It was quite clear that I was a wheelchair user and that I needed to use a low-vision aid in order to read text, but a fellow human being responded to my plight not by seeing whether he could help me in any way, or even ignore me, but by making a complaint that I was causing a disturbance. I can assure my readers that my whispers were less loud than the noise made by him and his troupe of hangers-on, who seemed to think that they owned the library’s research area and to resent the presence of strangers there. This was disturbing, but more disturbing was the fact that the library authorities took these vexatious complaints on board. This was enough for me to be banished from the library to the eyrie of the Genealogical Office that has a rather disturbing view over the County Council car park, and it can only be reached by a rather narrow and awkward lift. I was rather embarrassed when I was told of my fate, for no matter how justified I personally felt it was as if I were a schoolboy who had been caught out picking my nose during Morning Assembly. My non-presence ion the public parts of the library frees the county library of the obviously too distressing visage of a partially sighted library user. How capricious is Father Time. I have in my possession a photograph from the Anglo-Celt from a number of years ago, showing me using a piece of magnification equipment in the main body of the old library. I am obviously an inappropriate fixture of the newer library.

 (Let me add that I do not blame the rank-and-file of the library’s staff for this sea change in my fortunes. I feel that this has come from higher up, and from those who do not like being called “Whacko Jacko”. Let me assure him that this epithet is mild compared to the one I feel he is more entitled to.)

 Now I had thought of Cavan County Library as a home-away-from-home and its ever-helpful staff as friends. I had enjoyed carrying out research there. Sadly, one of the other users of the library did not feel I belonged there, and complained of my whispering into my hand-held tape-recorder. I do not know the identity of my accuser, but I think I’d be able to pick him out in an identity parade. Libraries can be noisy places, yet I ensure that I do not add to the existing background noise level in any way. It was quite clear that I was a wheelchair user and that I needed to use a low-vision aid in order to read text, but a fellow human being responded to my plight not by seeing whether he could help me in any way, or even ignore me, but by making a complaint that I was causing a disturbance. I can assure my readers that my whispers were less loud than the noise made by him and his troupe of hangers-on, who seemed to think that they owned the library’s research area and to resent the presence of strangers there. This was disturbing, but more disturbing was the fact that the library authorities took these vexatious complaints on board. This was enough for me to be banished from the library to the eyrie of the Genealogical Office that has a rather disturbing view over the County Council car park, and it can only be reached by a rather narrow and awkward lift. I was rather embarrassed when I was told of my fate, for no matter how justified I personally felt it was as if I were a schoolboy who had been caught out picking my nose during Morning Assembly. My non-presence ion the public parts of the library frees the county library of the obviously too distressing visage of a partially sighted library user. How capricious is Father Time. I have in my possession a photograph from the Anglo-Celt from a number of years ago, showing me using a piece of magnification equipment in the main body of the old library. I am obviously an inappropriate fixture of the newer library.

 (Let me add that I do not blame the rank-and-file of the library’s staff for this sea change in my fortunes. I feel that this has come from higher up, and from those who do not like being called “Whacko Jacko”. Let me assure him that this epithet is mild compared to the one I feel he is more entitled to.)