Every party has them. If they weren’t members of the party, they’d almost certainly be members of a cult, parroting out phrases about the need “to ascend to the third echelon of the mystical giraffe” as opposed to supporting “a democratic socialist 32 county republic” or ” to roll back the strangehold of the state which is the single greatest challenge facing the Irish people.”
You can then watch their lips actually dry as they stare unblinkly at you, waiting for your response, any response, to permit them to trot out another memorised slogan. Parties are like that, not too sniffy about who they let in with all the entry requirements of a Bangladesh brothel.
Of course, the saddest thing is that one of these guys is far more useful to you than ten fellas who have memorised every episode of “The West Wing” and want to help you with ”Strategy” and “Spin”. You can send him out, safe in the knowledge that he’ll deliver to 500 houses diligently as long as you buy him a Club Orange and a packet of Tayto in the pub later, and listen to him repeat, word for word, your own sentences back to you. Hey, that’s what wins elections. Just don’t let him talk to any voters, for the love of Jesus. If the mindless prattle doesn’t turn them off you, the snot caught in his eyebrow will.
People he was in school with always answer the same way: “He’s a what? A member of parliament? HIM??” It’s his gorgeous teeth you first notice, gleaming at you from his poster. The mammies love him on the doorsteps, and the daughters quite fancy a nibble too. He’s a good looking young man, well disposed to all, by all accounts just lovely.
It’s only when you speak to him do you realise that he knows nothing about politics, and isn’t even that interested. You could hand him an opponents’s speech to read and he wouldn’t know the difference. He just loves being well known, and if it wasn’t Dail Eireann it would be The X Factor or playing Buttons in the Gaiety Panto or a boyband. It’s quite possible that’s what he thinks he’s doing anyway.
And yet, you can’t hold it against him. He’s just getting on best as he can. You have to wonder what it says about Irish politics that there are 8500 people who bother to go to the polling station, and so recognise that voting means something, and yet in the polling booth choose the direction society should go in based on whether their chosen candidate is suitable to be freeze-dried and stored behind glass as the emergency backup member of Westlife?
I am occasionally accused of being biased towards one party or the other, with Fianna Fail being particularly upset that I am agin’ them. Therefore, here’s a list of things about FF that I either admire or feel they deserve thanks for, specifically from their last period in government.
1. The infrastructure. You have to give it to them. From Terminal 2 to the Luas to the motorways to the ITs to the Dublin Port Tunnel. We’re better for it.
2. The minimum wage. Some have valid reason to argue against, but they did it when Labour only talked about it.
3. Civil Partnership. I know, the Greens did this, and never got the credit for it, but in fairness to Fianna Fail, they didn’t play the Rick Santorum card either.
4. Same with immigration, with a few notable exceptions. In short, FF’s anchoring to the centre has done the state some good.
5. The Good Friday Agreement. Admittedly, FF came to the idea of power sharing later than either Garrett or the PDs, but they committed to it.
6. Took us into the Euro, something which we benefitted enormously from.
7. Brought in the Carer’s Allowance, a policy that makes sense.
8. Created the Money Advisory Budgeting Service (MABS).
9. Improved Anglo-Irish relations to their best ever, including creating an environment where the British monarch could visit without going all Dealey Plaza on us.
10. I never thought I would say this, but it isn’t Fianna Fail that finally convinced me of the cynical barefaced self-interested lying nature of most Irish politicians. That would be this government.
Jeff Greenfield is a political reporter for CBS, and his book “Then Everything Changed” paints three What-If scenarios based on real life facts: That JFK was nearly killed in December 1960, before being sworn in as president, that Bobby Kennedy nearly didn’t go through the kitchen in the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, and that Gerald Ford nearly beat Jimmy Carter in 1976. The three stories are not only very informative (Greenfield brings his personal knowledge of US politics and its players to bear) but also quite cheekily written, with asides about what effect these events would have had on other well known individuals.
A great read for the American political junkie. You can get it on the Amazon link here:
They'll look back on the blue flag and golden stars with nostalgia.
One of the things that I have always found interesting about euroscepticism, and not just in Ireland or the UK, is the assumptions it makes. Eurosceptics always seem to assume that the alternative to the EU is some sort of magical reset button, back to a golden age when national sovereignty actually meant that a country could decide its own direction by making decisions for the most part within its own borders.
I can see the romance behind the idea, and it’s a very powerful idea which has caused a lot of bloodshed, certainly from the American Civil War onwards. But it is flawed. Take Britain in 1940. It was a nation of far greater military and economic importance than it is now, a global power in fact. Yet in 1940, even with all the power Britain’s future was not decided by London, but by decisions made in Berlin, Moscow and Washington DC.
The problem for us is that life in the 21st century is almost impossible for a country that does not want to interact with others. The only country I can think of that genuinely attempts it is North Korea.
Now, it is true that a modern European country outside the EU will not be another North Korea. Britain, for example, is a modern and wealthy industrialised economy with global links. But it’s no USA. Or China. Or Russia. Or Japan. Or India. Or Brazil. With the exception of Germany (which only qualifies economically, as opposed to culturally or militarily) there is no European country that is, on its own, going to be a first tier player in the global economy of the 21st century. In effect, by turning our back on European integration, we are handing over the running of the world to the giants, to economic and military superpowers.
It is they who will set the rules, and the rest of us who will follow in their vast wake. That is the world that the Eurosceptics are moving us towards, and let us make sure that they know it, because in 2021 when a Chinese commissar decides what the technical standards will be for new products, he won’t be sending us draft directives for comment the way those nice men and women in Belgium used to. He’ll just tell us.
It’s very fashionable to defend internet piracy. Technically, by posting some of the stuff I do, I suppose I’m doing it too. Whereas SOPA (That’s the Stop Online Piracy Act) seems draconian, there is another issue which is dismissed to one side, but which Bill Maher raises very legitimately here. Isn’t it stealing? I’m no angel myself, I have watched movies and TV stuff online that were posted illegally, but nearly always after attempting and failing to purchase them legally. I spend a lot of money with Amazon and iTunes buying stuff, and you know why? Because this stuff costs money to produce professionally, and people have to get paid for their efforts, and the funny thing about the vast majority of the “everything should be free” advocates is that they don’t do their jobs for free. That’s why I have started posting Amazon links to any commercial stuff I post, to at least give people an opportunity to buy things legitimately, and yes, for me to earn a few euro to pay for the blog.
I said this to someone recently, and they said that iTunes were “ripping people off”. At 99c a track? Seriously? Since when did wanting access to the fruit of other’s labours for free become a human right? Funnily enough, do you ever notice how the great majority of the “everything should be free” crowd rarely ever produce anything creative, like a song or a movie?
I’m not surprised that Jean Dujardin, the lead in “The Artist”, is getting so many plaudits. I first saw him years ago in ”OSS 117:Cairo, nest of spies”, a French comedy based on the James Bond, Matt Helm, Man from UNCLE style movies of the 1960s. It follows the adventures of the Austin Powers/Clouseausque French secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, codename OSS 117, France’s best agent, in uncovering a plot in Cairo in 1959. Jean Dujardin, who plays the agent, is very funny as the shockingly smarmy, thick agent who is completely clueless about the changing world (In talking with a Muslim contact, he tells her that he can’t see this “Islam thing” lasting very long). Some of the set pieces of the movie are very good, in particular a scene where he, a German, Russian and Belgian agent all face off quoting meaningless faux-philosophical sayings at each other. The movie looks great, and the soundtrack is right on the nose. Keep an eye out for a running joke about French President Rene Coty (the forgotten one before De Gaulle).
Another example of how there are some really excellent movies out there not getting the credit they deserve because they are not English language based. I only stumbled across this movie by accident in a DVD shop in Perth, Australia. There’s already been a sequel.
Former Speaker and adulterer Newt Gingrich took time off today from lecturing on family values to announce that he would seek to agree an Adultery Exchange Programme with France if he were elected President of the United States.
“I’m not Mitt Romney. I don’t speak French as well as him, even though I did live in France for a while. But there are areas where I am indeed more French than Mitt Romney. Take marriage vows, for example. Romney is like Obama and Clinton and Carter, still married to the same woman, whereas I’m more of a Domnique Strauss Kahn kind of guy when it comes to the ladies. I’m committed to family values, sure, but for other people, not me. Hey, check out the tail on that fine piece!”
The BBC have shown great savvy by releasing season two of “Sherlock” on DVD literally one week after the season’s dramatic final episode and its “How did he do it?” ending. This is currently my favourite show on TV, not just because of the superb performances by all the cast (Martin Freeman in particular, playing that difficult straightman Ernie Wise role to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Ernie in a touching yet exasperated manner. Andrew Scott’s Jim Moriarty is also great fun too). Not only because of the genuinely “Oh, that’s cool!” moments in the plot, or the humour (Sherlock’s rant about the deerstalker cap is very funny) but because it is very obvious that Moffatt and Gatiss who created the show, are true blue fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation and have managed to recraft without molestation.
It may surprise some of you, but I’m not the most politically correct of people. However, there is one issue where I am quite lefty, and that is on the issue of requiring, by law, that 40% of all seats in the Dail be reserved for men, and 40% for women.
Oh sure, I’ve heard the opposing arguments before. Seats should be filled on merit! It doesn’t matter if 100% of TDs are women, provided they are all good! But why is it that we’ve never had 100% women. Or 75%. or 50%, or even 25%? Opponents of quotas say that it will leave us with poor quality TDs. Why? Is it that we don’t have 83 talented women in the country? Or is it that Fianna Fail or Fine Gael do not have 44 really talented women? As it happens, I’ve tended to find FF and FG women to be, on balance, smarter than FF or FG men, but terrified of showing it. As for the argument that it will make some women TDs feel like second class TDs, we can solve that by having a quota for men too. And by the way, I don’t think the current Dail is in any position to be lecturing people about quality.
Our system is essentially family unfriendly, which means women unfriendly, and that’ll only change when enough women are in the Dail to make the issue matter.
As for the argument that we need to change other things first, like childcare and the culture, my problem with that point is that we have been making it for 30 years and it hasn’t worked, whereas quotas, over night, will. A new Dail elected with a gender quota will have at least 40% of its membership being women, whilst the culture argument could go on for years without actually getting results. That’s where the anti-quota people always fall: they can’t guarantee a better result. Quotas can. Just ask the PSNI. Are there some rubbish Catholic coppers in the North? Probably. Does the PSNI have more cross community support than the RUC? Definitely.
Here’s my final point: where’s the harm in trying quotas? What’s the worst that can happen? We end up with some rubbish female TDs? So what? We already have plenty of rubbish male TDs and no one in the political establishment is trying to get them out.
Every party has them. If they weren’t members of the party, they’d almost certainly be members of a cult, parroting out phrases about the need “to ascend to the third echelon of the mystical giraffe” as opposed to supporting “a democratic socialist 32 county republic” or ” to roll back the strangehold of the state which is the single greatest challenge facing the Irish people.”
I’m not surprised that Jean Dujardin, the lead in “The Artist”, is getting so many plaudits. I first saw him years ago in ”OSS 117:Cairo, nest of spies”, a French comedy based on the James Bond, Matt Helm, Man from UNCLE style movies of the 1960s. It follows the adventures of the Austin Powers/Clouseausque French secret agent Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, codename OSS 117, France’s best agent, in uncovering a plot in Cairo in 1959. Jean Dujardin, who plays the agent, is very funny as the shockingly smarmy, thick agent who is completely clueless about the changing world (In talking with a Muslim contact, he tells her that he can’t see this “Islam thing” lasting very long). Some of the set pieces of the movie are very good, in particular a scene where he, a German, Russian and Belgian agent all face off quoting meaningless faux-philosophical sayings at each other. The movie looks great, and the soundtrack is right on the nose. Keep an eye out for a running joke about French President Rene Coty (the forgotten one before De Gaulle).
