I’ve been asked to repost this little fictional wandering I wrote.
It’s 1943, and Eamonn De Valera is dead in a car crash. Young new Taoiseach Sean Lemass is faced with a choice which could change the destiny of the nation.
It looks like June 2010 will be the next big bunfight between the parties, when the people of Dublin, if John Gormley is to be believed, will be electing a mayor for Dublin. So, who are to be the contenders?
Let’s be honest. As a nation, we don’t trust one another. We constantly believe that some “click” or golden circle somewhere is always getting the better over us. On the flip side, we are always trying to get into the self same circles, whether it is the group who “really” run the local GAA or merely trying to get a builder to do something for us without the VAT that everyone else pays.
“Blaze” tells the (Highly-fictionalised) story of Earl Long (Played by a brilliantly on-form Paul Newman.), Governor of Louisiana in the 1940s, and his affair with a notorious stripper named Blaze Starr. It’s a funny, touching film about a flawed but genuinely compassionate politician who was one of the first southern politicians to stand up for black rights. Keep an eye out for his brilliantly simple response to being put into a mental asylum by his political enemies whilst still governor.
There is talk of an “inquiry” into the banking crisis. Why? What will be the benefit, other than to spend another quarter of a billion, which we haven’t got, on a report? Will it help jail anyone? Did the Beef Tribunal?
It’s the twitchiness you notice first. The same sort of shiftiness you see with a guy meeting Tony Sporano, and wearing an FBI wire. Put him in a room with a half a dozen other Ogra FFers, and watch the glint of fear in his eyes, as they all circle, looking for that chink of weakness that will allow him to drive the dagger into the ribs of his “party colleague”.
Why did he join FF? What does he believe in? He can’t help but blurt out a pre-cooked answer but it means nothing. Ask him what he wants to do in politics, and it’ll be to hold a political job, and “work for his local community/parish”. They’re not bad goals, they’re just not anything worth remembering. And yes, he will be elected a councillor, and then a senator, and then a TD, and then a junior minister and maybe into the cabinet, and serve for 25 years and then retire and die, and his obituary will say that he worked for his local community/parish. But he won’t be a Noel Browne or a Des O’Malley or even a De Valera. He’ll never have an ism named after him. Politically, it’ll be like he never existed, which is grand if you’re appearing in front of a tribunal but not worth much if legacy matters anything to you.
When politicians from other countries meet him, with his glass of tepid water views, they will wonder what is the point of voting for him. He’ll sneer at those people in Sinn Fein and Labour and the Greens who “believe” in things, the eejits, with their “policies” and books, and he avoid’ll ever putting a view to paper for fear it’ll be the wrong heartfelt view to hold by Tuesday lunchtime.
But one thing is certain: In 1916, when people who actually believed in things were shooting out the windows of the GPO, he’d would have been up at Dublin Castle putting in the tender for the contract to replace them. For someone who peppers his speeches with references to “the men of 1916”, the reality is that if it had been left to Ogra, we’d still have a union jack flying over Dublin Castle.
The always excellent Jon Worth makes a very valid point here about the old eurosceptic chestnut of the EU’s unsigned accounts.