An Spailpín Fánach

The Milk is Spilt. Occupying the Bottle Won't Bring It Back.

2012-01-26T09:30:00.000Z

Dublin 2 was fringed with protesters yesterday, heartscalded and weeping as the infamous Anglo Bondholders cashed in their latest dividend, or bag of swag, or whatever the technical name for the thing is.

A group of young people stretched from outside the old Anglo-Irish bank headquarters at the top of Stephen Green’s all the way down to the Spar on Merrion Row. They were a crack detachment of the Occupy Dame Street activists, not dissimilar to Brad Pitt’s recent squad of Nazi killers in Inglorious Basterds. Unfortunately, these protesters didn’t so much look like Hollywood heartthrobs as some slight superannuated Billie Barrie kids hoping for a chorus part in a new production of Oliver! Please sir, can I have some more, indeed.

Around the corner, outside Government buildings, someone had gone to greater effort. Two men were dressed in black suits and bowler hats, a la Laurel and Hardy, but these boys went one step further than Stan and Ollie ever did.

They wore pink piggy snouts, pink piggy facepaint and danced around in a piggy style to music that was hard to distinguish from the saddle of a bike. A knot of guards watched the pig men with wild surmise, while a TV cameraman had to fight hard not to join in the dance himself, clearing looking forward to a cracking lead on the evening news.

When it comes to empty gestures and crying after spilt milk, nobody does it quite like the Irish. The Anglo bondholders are getting paid. They were always going to get paid. Always.

There isn’t a force between hell and Bethlehem that will stop the Anglo bondholders getting paid. If there was, don’t you think the Government, now busy taxing the pound of butter and taxing the ha’penny bun, wouldn’t use it? Why on Earth wouldn’t they? Do you think they need more grief?

The pig men are play-acting. The occupy people will wake up with hangovers in strange beds this morning so for them it wasn’t a total washout, according to how one scores life at that age.

But for the plain people of Ireland, the people who have to write the cheques to finance this nonsense, it’s another dagger through a heart that looks like a pound of mincemeat right now. Now we waste time as well money. Money can come back. Time never will.

Hopping on one foot down O’Connell Street on Saturday at two o’clock as part of the People Not Banks Movement, the Hang the Bankers Movement, the End Capitalism Movement or Whatever You’re Having Yourself Movement won’t change a blessed thing. It’s all for show.

The milk is spilt. It was spilt long ago, and it’s not going back in the bottle. Ireland can no more reverse the bank agreement than it can the Border Commission, the Treaty, the Famine or the Norman Invasion. If we could, we would. We can’t. Get over it.

People are angry about how so much has been lost, and rightly so. But rather than be angry or playing at dressing up, it would behove the Irish nation better to find out what went wrong and to ask ourselves how exactly we can stop it going wrong again.

Next time, how about not believing every sun, moon and local hospital promise politicians make. How about voting for someone because they’re good and not because they live down the road. Or how about voting for someone who will reform the system so that it can never not be held to account again? Wouldn’t that be more productive than acting the maggot on Merrion Row?

Claire Byrne is the Late Late Show's Only Hope

2012-01-23T09:30:00.002Z

RTÉ has a dilemma in regard to the Late Late Show. It is this: the number of people who watch the show seems to exist in inverse proportion to those who actually like it.

If people stopped watching the Late Late, the next step for RTÉ would be obvious and inevitable. But people don’t stop watching. Twelve years since Gay Byrne did his last Late Late Show, the program remains a ratings juggernaut for RTÉ, even though the amount of people who claim to like it is equivalent to the current population of the Great Blasket.

The Late Late is an anachronism. In its glory years of the 1970s and 1980s, there was nothing else. The very presence of people in Ireland talking on television about Irish things was remarkable in and of itself. To think that that the Gay Byrne Late Late was shy about combing the RTÉ canteen is to re-write history. But that wasn’t a problem then, because the very existence of the show was novel and thrilling. Who cared if this was Maureen Potter’s ten millionth appearance? Ireland had taken her place among the nations of the Earth.

That thrill is now long gone. The audience’s sophistication has increased dramatically, meaning that they are less tolerant of the revolving guest list of Pat Shortt, Brendan O’Carroll and someone from Fair City. But they are not so sophisticated as to go watch something else. The nation hasn’t reached that level yet, it seems.

This presents RTÉ with a dilemma. The show must stay on the road because it brings in the money necessary to pay those extraordinary RTÉ salaries, but the standard of show is now so low that it has to be depressing everyone who works in Montrose. It’s time for a change. Tubridy is out of his depth. They need a new host – or hostess.

Miriam O’Callaghan is presented as the Woman Most Likely whenever this discussion comes up, but RTÉ should be a little more daring and give the Late Late Show a 21st Century hostess. Someone who can talk equally well to the Fair City starlets before the break and put the heat on public figures after.

There’s only one choice. It has to be Claire Byrne, and for three reasons.

Firstly, she can do all the frothy stuff, as she does weekly on the Daily Show. Your correspondent has never seen the Daily Show but it’s almost certainly fine, if that’s your bag. Tubridy is fine interviewing the Fair City barmaids too, but it was, famously, a point of contention for Pat Kenny.

But while Tubridy struggles with the grown-up stuff, Byrne is excellent, as she proves daily on the Late Debate on Radio One and used to prove on the Newstalk Breakfast Show. This is the second point in her favour. Claire Byrne understands current affairs. Not only is she is a tenacious interviewer, but she never editorialises. She knows he purpose is to moderate debate, rather than participate in it.

The final reason Claire Byrne would make an excellent hostess for the Late Late Show is less obvious, but vital. She can’t be pushed around.

It’s a small thing, but subtly revealing – the Newstalk Breakfast Show does a paper view every morning. And while your correspondent hasn’t been keeping score, I do have the impression that Ivan Yates always does the broadsheets and Chris Donaghue always does the tabloids. When Claire Byrne co-hosted, they alternated. That says a lot about La Byrne.

If the Late Late Show can be saved, it’s only Claire Byrne that can do it. And if RTÉ send Brendan O’Connor to Mongolia and replace his wretched show with Máirtín Tom Sheáinín’s marvellous Comhrá on TG4, that wouldn’t be a bad day’s work either.

The Army That Didn't Shoot Its Deserters

2012-01-16T09:30:00.001Z

There is a story brewing in the media that the Irish state was somehow negligent in its treatment of deserters from the Irish army during the Second World War. The opposite is the case; the fact that the soldiers did not suffer capital punishment, or do not now have the threat of capital punishment hanging over them, was and is an act of profound clemency.

Being in the army isn’t like another job. The risk of death is part of parcel of soldiering. So how then do ask a man to go and do something that might get him killed?

You can’t have a company of soldiers who hold discussions on what we’ll do next. George Orwell wrote eloquently in Homage to Catalonia how hard it was to run a war with an army which rejected power structures, and would only act after full democratic discussion had been carried out – by which time the Falange were five miles inside the lines and cutting the Republicans to ribbons.

When a soldier is given an order he or she has to snap to it, and think about it after, if it all. This is especially true in wartime, when the risk of death or dismemberment is only a moment away. And one of the ways that armies since Alexander have maintained the discipline necessary to hold the line, to put your duty ahead of the need to secure your own welfare, was to execute you if you didn’t.

Whatever chance you had in battle, you had no chance against a firing squad. Therefore, they went over the top at Ypres and Passchendaele and all those other hellholes. It was the only way they could.

When soldiers deserted the Irish army during the Second World War, or the Emergency if you like, they were liable for a death sentence. The current bleating about them not being given heroes’ welcomes is nonsense. To not shoot the men was an act of profound clemency, taking into account many of the different factors at play. The Government can’t let acts of desertion slide, but to have shot them would have been too much.

The reality of the situation as it was in the Ireland twenty years after Independence is not being taken into account in the current debate. The chief spin is that Ireland was somehow morally bankrupt in not fighting Hitler. Well. Hindsight is twenty-twenty vision, isn’t it?

In 1938 the British did everything in their power to appease Hitler. Time Magazine named Der Fuhrer their Man of the Year. The USA, guardians of liberty, did not declare war on Germany until Germany declared war on the USA first. There are all manner of evils taking place in the world now, in countries run by evil people.

Hands up everyone who thinks its time to send to troops to Zimbabwe, to stop Robert Mugabe slaughtering his people just as Hitler slaughtered the Jews. And hands up everyone who thinks that’s ever going to happen. Wars are always about politics first, morality a distant second.

Besides. Even if Ireland had entered the war, it’s greatest threat to its own sovereignty was from the British, as Churchill made clear in 1945. He remarked that “if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish for ever from this earth.” If Churchill had come to close quarters with Mr de Valera, as he wished to do, would the Irish soldiers have then re-deserted to rejoin their own army, or would they have happily invaded away, secure that they were Morally Right?

De Valera’s famous condolence visit to the German embassy on the death of Hitler is always used as a stick with which to beat him. What is not brought up as often is that De Valera’s sending of the Dublin Fire Brigade to Belfast was a breach of neutrality. It was one of many other breaches. To say that the Government of the day were morally bankrupt in their attitude to Hitler is not true. They provided as much tacit support as they could under the reality of their own time and situation.

The headline in this Irish Times story describes the deserters as the “soldiers who left to fight Hitler.” However, if you read the story, you realise, as you may have suspected all along, that they left for money. They took the King’s shilling, as generations had before them.

We should never forget our history, but we shouldn’t try to rewrite it to suit modern agendas. More luck to the museum in Boyle that commemorates the Devil’s Own Connaught Rangers. The best of people took that shilling, because they had no other choice.

Paddy and Tom Clancy, of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem fame, served with the RAF in India. A man married to your correspondent’s mother’s cousin was in the RAF during the war. Good luck to them all. Starving for a principle is no way to live.

What is problematic is the current campaign to rewrite history and pretend that things happened that didn’t happen at all, or judge historical events out of their context. We were told that it was “too soon” for Martin McGuinness to be President of Ireland seventeen years after the IRA ceasefire. Yet eighteen years was not too soon for Ireland to fight alongside the army that hanged Kevin Barry and burned Cork, in the opinion of this “pardon the deserters” movement.

The “moral argument” that Hitler had to be stopped was not apparent to Neville Chamberlain, the editors of Time magazine or the United States in the 1930s, and none of their cities looked like Cork after the British Army went playing with matches.

De Valera’s sending of the fire brigades to Belfast is a bigger deal than the empty formula of the Herr Hempel visit. To berate the Irish state for its actions during the war is nonsense, and based on spin and second-guessing. As for the deserters, they got their shilling and they didn’t get a bullet when they came back home. They’re ahead of the game.

Won't Someone Put Connacht Out of their Misery?

2012-01-12T09:30:00.002Z

After thirteen straight defeats, and a fourteenth as inevitable on Saturday as another tax increase or cursed referendum, the people involved in Connacht rugby need to ask themselves why do they bloody bother.

It’s hard to love something that doesn’t love you back, and there are no signs of love for Elwood and Connacht right now. Connacht lost in Italy last Saturday, to a team who would be the Gaelic football equivalent of Sligo. You expect to beat them, but every now and again they’re going to hand you your hat.

This Saturday, Connacht have to travel to Toulouse, which is the equivalent of playing Kerry in Tralee in high summer. If Connacht get less of a beating than the Huguenots suffered on Saint Bartholomew’s Day they can consider themselves very lucky. A seventy-point pasting could be on the cards, and the -26 available on the rouge et noir looks a gimme to your correspondent.

It’s one thing to say you should never quit, but that only applies to a fair fight. Connacht aren’t in a fair fight. Connacht have nothing like the funds or the resources that the other provinces have. You won’t fight anyone with your hands tied behind your back. You’ve handed your wooden sword, clapped on the back and told: on you go son. The Romans are thattaway.

Most wretched of all is the patronizing way the Connacht games are covered in the national media. How galling can it be for the players and supporters to be patted on the head and told what brave little meneen they are? Where's the pride listening to that?

If the people involved in Connacht Rugby do want to show some pride, they could realise that the IRFU needs Connacht more than Connacht needs the IRFU. The clubs will continue to play – people who want to play will be able to do so. Players who want to pay professionally will always have that chance. If you want to be paid for playing rugby, there are more towns than Galway in the world.

Ordinary people in Connacht itself support either Munster or Leinster anyway. Munster, because they were the first, a sporting personification of the Spirit of the Celtic Tiger. And Leinster, because even if you haven’t been privately educated, all that yak about “Munster by the grace of God” gets tiresome very quickly.

An Spailpín’s not very trusting nature suspects that the IRFU are content to keep Connacht barefoot, pregnant and tied to the kitchen sink because all four provinces are vital to the IRFU’s marketing of itself professional rugby product. “The four proud provinces of Ireland,” as that dreadful song goes. They want Connacht to exist to add lustre to the other three, but for no other reason. Back to the scullery, Cinders, and damn well know your place.

Well, when what’s left of Connacht come home from Toulouse, maybe it’s time to blow the whistle on the IRFU and start demanding some rights. If the IRFU want Connacht to exist a province, they need to support Connacht rugby.

The whole thing about Connacht as a “development” province is a joke and a nonsense. As soon as any player shows any signs of talent, he scurries away to Munster or Leinster, showing all the loyalty of a rat. Connacht must then make up the numbers with international players. These aren’t great old pros in the autumn of their careers. They’re not so much Dougie Howlett as Doogie Howser.

If the IRFU wants to support Connacht Rugby, let them go ahead and support Connacht Rugby. If they just want to patronize the west, Connacht Rugby should fold it tents and tell the IRFU go hang. Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

The Sporting Year

2011-12-28T09:30:00.006Z

This year, for what must be the first time in the history of the Gaelic Athletic Association, Dublin struck a blow for the little guy.

At the start of the summer the Championship looked like it would be played between The Big Three of Cork, Kerry and Tyrone, with the other counties supplying cannon fodder when required. As Kevin Egan has often pointed out, long shot winners do not generally win All-Irelands. Your correspondent has no figures to hand, but it’s a reasonable guess that Dublin were the longest price All-Ireland winners since Armagh in 2002.

Kerry left the game behind them of course, but Dublin still had to complete their part of the bargain and pick it up. Kerry have left games behind them before, but teams have not had the wherewithal – or the Kevin McMenamins – to take advantage. Sligo come to mind in 2006, as do Limerick in 2004. Good for Dublin, who are deserving champions.

Kerry do not wash linen in public, but it would be wonderful to know how they’re analysing this loss at home. How do they view Jack O’Connor in the Kingdom?

O’Connor has won three All-Irelands but those were won against teams – Cork and Mayo – whom Kerry expect to beat as a matter of course. In a county with so many wins, those will be taken for granted.

Against teams whom Kerry do take seriously, O’Connor’s record is played three, lost three – two against Tyrone, one against Dublin. There’s huge pressure on O’Connor and his aging team to make up for this next year.

From a parochial standpoint, Mayo had a superb season. James Horan was extremely lucky not to get sucker-punched against London but other than that he didn’t put a foot wrong during either League or Championship. Mayo are looking forward to another crack at it in 2012 – county board shenanigans permitting, of course.

In hurling, Kilkenny and Tipperary served another epic All-Ireland Final with Kilkenny proving there’s life in the old cat yet. The only pity was that the hurling Championship did go according to script, and there were no counties able to keep up with the standard set by Kilkenny and Tipperary.

Galway blew up – again, Cork’s civil war continues and the revolutionaries of the ‘nineties now struggle to keep their heads above water. Anthony Daly had another superb year with Dublin but it still seems somehow easier to see Galway beating Kilkenny twice than Dublin. And it’s more or less impossible to see Galway beating Kilkenny just the once.

The Rugby World Cup is struggling as a tournament. The balance is incorrect. There are ten top-flight rugby nations in the world – the Six Nations, the Tri Nations and Argentina. The other ten are making up the numbers – and are quickly put in their place if they dare to point that out, as Samoa’s unfortunate Eliota Sapolu discovered.

This means is that there are three weeks of group games at any Rugby World Cup that whittle ten teams down to eight. That’s not very effective. It also makes for extremely stilted rugby in the knockout stages, when the terror of losing dominates. The balance between the relatively carefree group games and the all-or-nothing knockout games is wrong.

The final itself is proof positive. New Zealand is the greatest rugby nation in the world and nobody with any feeling for the game could begrudge them, but 8-7 is a scoreline from the 1950s, not the 21st Century professional era. The only thing anyone will remember from this tournament is relief for the New Zealanders, and not much else.

Ireland’s win over Australia is bittersweet, looking back. Ireland had never won a quarter-final before the tournament, and they still haven’t. Irish rugby is at an extraordinary crossroads right now. If rugby can transition from the golden generation of BOD, ROG and POC, then it suddenly becomes reasonable to assume that rugby can overtake the GAA in popularity.

On that point – the chaps on Newstalk’s Off the Ball were floating an idea back in November that, if New Zealand could host a World Cup then so could Ireland, using GAA stadia for the games. They never quite explained why the GAA would want to sign its own death warrant by facilitating the tournament though.

Maybe they’re saving it for next year. An Spailpín will be listening closely, as ever – shirts don’t iron themselves, you know, and listening to Off the Ball remains the best way of dealing with the misery. Here’s to 2012.

Happy Christmas Everybody

2011-12-22T09:30:00.001Z

Another Christmas rolls around. Some of us are still here, holding our ground, some have moved on to what I hope is a better station.

In the meantime, thanks for coming to read the blog over the year, even though circumstances mean that I can't post as often as I used to or would like. I still like to hop a ball when I can, and I appreciate everyone who comes along to watch it bounce.

To celebrate the feast, here's Yo-Yo Ma and wonderful Alison Krauss performing The Wexford Carol. Go mbeirfimid go léir beo ag an am seo arís.

Michael O'Hehir and his Legacy

2011-12-14T09:30:00.000Z

John Bowman’s nasty and mean-spirited attacks on Michael O’Hehir in Bowman’s new book are further proof that there is such a thing as a Dublin 4 media elite, and that it exists independently of the vast majority of opinion in the country.

Michael O’Hehir wasn’t just the most loved man in the country. He was the most trusted. For instance; when CIE first introduced signal-controlled level crossings, stop gates where train tracks cross the public road, they needed a public information advertisement to explain to people what the gates meant and how you were supposed to navigate them.

Bear in mind that traffic lights wouldn’t be common at all outside of Dublin and the bigger cities. These level crossings would have been as alien to the majority population as HG Wells’s Martian war machines.

So what the nation saw in the ad breaks before, during and after the Riordans was a Ford Granada rolling up to the junction, stopping, and a small man with combed over dark hair and a Columbo overcoat getting out.

Once the little man started talking the nation immediately recognised the voice and knew it was in safe hands. If Michael O’Hehir said these yokes were ok, then they were ok. Michael O’Hehir was a man you could trust.

Nobody had that level of rapport with the Irish people, either before or after. Plenty of people couldn’t stand Gay Byrne, but it’s impossible to imagine anyone having an objection to Michael O’Hehir. It would be like picking a fight with Santa.

Impossible, until now. According to John Burns’s review of Bowman’s book in the Sunday Times, Bowman criticises O’Hehir under two species. The first is that O’Hehir saw a TV commentary as being the same as a radio commentary, and the second is that O’Hehir played down sendings-off, the better to protect people’s good name and the good name of the Gaelic Athletic Association.

TV commentary is in theory different to radio, yes. The broad stroke is that you need fewer words for TV because people can see the pictures. But a good TV commentary is still better than a bad radio one.

This is certainly the opinion of the people, who for years have muted their TVs in order to listen to Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh on the radio. The distinction didn’t seem to knock as much of a stir out of them as it did out of John Bowman.

What those people are going to do now that Ó Muircheartaigh has retired and RTÉ have decided they don’t need a chief GAA commentator at all, at all is hard to say. Bowman’s own opinion of the current state of RTÉ’s GAA commentaries is unrecorded.

That said, it’s hard to see any of O’Hehir’s current successors being employed by the BBC, as O’Hehir was for Grand National commentaries. The National has a relay of commentators, because it’s so long. O’Hehir’s job was to take over at Beecher’s Brook, a place where the race was often won or lost. A considerable responsibility for a man who didn’t know the difference between TV and radio.

To say nothing of the BBC’s concerns about the integrity of journalism, and any attempts by O’Hehir to protect the good names of the horses, should any of them take it easy around the back straight.

Did any newspapers splash that the Irish rugby team were on the beer with the English that infamous night in Auckland? Why did it take so long for the truth about Trapattoni’s dropping of Andy Reid to come to light? Whom exactly does John Bowman think he’s kidding?

The GAA players of Michael O’Hehir’s era lived in a different world with different rules to those of the modern world and the modern, all-intrusive media. Different Ireland, different rules. If John Bowman wants to have a go at anyone, perhaps he should look a little closer to home.

John Burns reported in his review in the Sunday Times that Bowman lists the producers of Prime Time Investigates. Bowman refrains from having a pop at those worthies for not knowing the difference between radio and TV, or for protecting the good name of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the ordinary working man. More smoked salmon, Marmaduke?

Anyone for Leadership?

2011-12-12T09:30:00.001Z

How craven is the Government’s attitude to the inevitable EU referendum? It’s not quite as craven as the man in the women and children’s lifeboat but goodness gracious, it’s a long step away from the bold Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock in terms of inspiring the nation and giving light in darkness.

It seems clear that the Government will spend from now until the final EU deal is settled praying that God will somehow intervene and save them from having to bring another EU referendum before the people. The Government will not be alone in this; the entire Irish political establishment will be praying every bit as hard.

In a functioning democracy, the referendum would be a matter of course. In a country where there is political talent and will, they could even write a new constitution that would prevent these constant referenda clogging up the path to progress.

But Ireland is not a functioning democracy. It is a state governed by a tiny elite. A tiny elite who have zero interest in leading the people. A tiny elite who have zero interest in explaining what the European Union is and how Ireland has benefited immeasurably from it since 1973.

A tiny elite who prefers treat the sovereign people as mushrooms, explaining the EU only in terms of either a gravy train that hands out free loot (1973-2011) or an oppressor who grind the helpless Irish under a jackboot, in the face of which the sovereign people and their glorious government are equally helpless (2011-present day).

Successive Governments have refused to make it clear to the people just how Ireland integrates in terms of the EU whole, and just how high we are punching above our weight. Instead, the nation is told to eat their sweets and don’t be worrying their little heads.

Ireland has become a sink estate of the EU, living on handouts with not only no interest in bettering its own situation, but with no idea if or how that situation can bettered in the first place.

Which is how the latest mess has come to pass. Now the political elite has to go the electorate and present another referendum to the people. Another referendum that will be impossible to understand, at a moment in time when the people are very far from being receptive.

That was one of the problems with Lisbon. Referenda work best with simple issues that can be clearly expressed. Treaties, or, the Lord save us, “compacts,” can only be properly understood by constitutional lawyers. Joe Citizen hasn’t a chance.

It should never have come to this. The political class should have seen this coming since Maastricht twenty years ago, if not since ascension in 1973. Start as you mean to continue.

But they didn’t see it coming. Not even kinda. The implications of Maastricht didn’t even get a mention in Seán Duignan’s memoir of his time as Government press secretary of the time.

The chief concerns of the Government in June 1992, when Maastricht was passed, was whether they’d have to devalue the punt or what would happen at the Beef Tribunal. The Beef Tribunal!

Maastricht went through the Irish political system painlessly, without raising a single flag. The patient never felt a thing.

John Waters rightly called out Olivia O’Leary when she was doing to post-hoc reasoning on her radio piece for RTÉ’s Drivetime recently. The only people who objected to Maastricht were loopers like the Democratic Left and the late Ray Crotty. Every else just said: “Free loot? Where do I sign?”

When people become adjusted to a continual flow of European wine and honey, you can understand how they might get cranky when that flow is suddenly switched to cod liver oil. And the longer the political elite puts off having a birds and bees conversation with the nation about the nature of the European Union, the harder it’ll be to save the day.

Because the day can still be saved. The Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil officer class understand how Europe works, even if they have been shockingly remiss in bringing the rank and file with them. Labour’s days of opposing Europe are well behind them and besides; a EU referendum would be a good chance for the Minister for Foreign Affairs to show the statesmanship he wittered on about so tiresomely before the election.

The floating joker is Sinn Féin of course. Sinn Féin have been quiet since Friday, as they do their accounting on how the land lies. Good for them.

Sinn Féin have been anti every EU referenda. It will be interesting to see how they could oppose this one – and thus side with David Cameron, leader of the one country in Europe which has been less well served by its leaders about the EU than ourselves.

Kicking Sinn Féin has only recently been replaced by kicking the pope as a Fine Gael favourite pastime. Will even the chance to put Gurry on the hot seat for while tempt the Government to say to hell with it, we’ll have a referendum and live or die by it? Or will they stay hiding under the table, hoping the storm will pass?

So. Farewell then, Socrates of Brazil

2011-12-04T12:51:00.003Z

Today is a sad day for people of a certain age. News that the great Brazilian soccer player Socrates has died from an intestinal infection at the age of 57 reminds everyone who watched the 1982 and 1986 World Cups that we are mortal and we shall die.

It was a different era. There is saturation soccer coverage now – so much so that it’s easy to forget that one of the reasons the World Cup was a big deal previously is because there was nothing else.

In Ireland, what you knew about soccer you read in the papers or saw in highlights or what you saw in those strange midweek European Cup games, where Liverpool or Nottingham Forest would play in Belgrade or Budapest in a stadium ringed by an running track and a phalanx of heavily-armed military with the crowd deep in the shadows.

And then, every four summers, weeks and weeks of the stuff. Because you didn’t know who the players were, you were always ready to believe the hype, that these were colossi who bestrode the very earth, while mortals worshipped at their feet. Or at least, that's how they looked to a child.

Ricky Villas and Ossie Ardilles were the only players from outside the British Isles playing in England, and they both had to go back home to Argentina when the Falklands War broke out. Pre-internet and pre-satellite TV, all you knew were names and reputations – Rummenegge of West Germany, Platini of France, Maradona of Argentina. And everyone who played for Brazil. Every one of them.

Brazil arrived at the 1982 World Cup with too many central midfielders and not enough wide men. In a language that had yet to be invented, Brazil saw that as a feature, not a bug.

Brazil lit up Spain playing in a 4-2-2-2 formation, with Zico and Socrates as the penultimate two. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, nor would again. Brazil were at once fire and ice, rapier and broadsword, and became the most beloved international team since their own 1970 incarnation.

And then they lost. Brazil met Italy, the supreme pragmatists, in Barcelona’s Estadio Sarriá in the final game of their second round group. Brazil needed only a draw to go through. They lost, 3-2. Paolo Rossi scored a hat-trick and Zico would later describe the game as “the day football died.”

That was Zico enjoying the benefit of hindsight. Because four years later Brazil returned to the World Cup, and they lustre still shone just as brightly from the famous yellow jerseys.

Mexico 1986 was the last great World Cup. It was the last World Cup to showcase a man who was undeniably the Greatest Player in the World (don’t forget, Messi has yet to perform on the greatest stage, as Maradona, Cruyff (when he was bothered) and Pele have all done). Not only that, it had a number of teams who could have won it and deserved it just as much as Argentina did. Chiefly Brazil. Of course.

What a magnificent, frightening team Brazil were. Zico was a fitful due to injury, but Socrates was still there, pulling the strings. Unusually tall and gangly for a soccer player, with a distinctive thick black beard, he looked both completely at home and strangely out of place.

Brazil met the European Champions France in the quarter-finals. France weren’t that good, but Brazil ran out of luck that day in Guadalajara, losing to France on penalties.

The game turned on a penalty during the ninety minutes. Socrates had been taking them all during the tournament. He had a bizarre action – one step before striking the ball – but it worked. Keepers had no idea what to make of it.

But Zico had come on as a sub just before the penalty. Zico wore Brazil’s iconic No 10 shirt. Zico had never missed a penalty in his career. Zico had to take the penalty, because he was Zico.

France’s Joel Bats guessed correctly in goal. Zico missed, and the game went to penalties.

Socrates stepped up for the first. Bats was inspired by the earlier save of Zico. Bats saved Socrates’ shot, France won the shootout 4-3, and Brazil were gone. France went onto face Germany in the semi-final, and lost 0-2, to goals by Andy Brehme at the start and Rudi Völler at the finish. Bats was at fault for both of them.

And meanwhile Brazil are gone forever. The world waits for another Brazil to turn on the magic like they did in the 1960s and 1980s but that’s thirty years ago, and counting. The game has moved on. Whether it’s evolved or devolved is a debate for those who still love it. I don’t. Not any more.

All I do know is there once was a man, Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira, whom the world knew simply as Socrates, and he had magic in him. May God grant the eternal reward due him for the joy he brought to millions and millions of people, all over the world.

The Freedom of the Press

2011-11-23T09:30:00.000Z

The Father Kevin Reynolds libel case has opened Pandora’s Box for the Irish media. Things will never be the same again.

People who believe the Government’s request to the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland to investigate how Mission to Prey, the Prime Time Investigates program at the root of the problem, is a knee jerk response are completely mistaken.

The Government have no option but to initiate an inquiry, and it’s entirely possibly as a result of this that the Irish libel laws, which are restrictive in the first place, will become like an iron maiden for press freedom and for the public’s ability to correctly inform itself of what’s going on in the country and in the world.

This will be a disaster for the country, and if it comes to pass it will all be RTÉ’s fault.

Some weeks ago, the Phoenix magazine outlined the efforts made by Father Reynolds to clear his name before the program was broadcast. If even half the details outlined in that Phoenix story are true, this isn’t a case of an accidental libel, like printing a photo of a protest with a libelous placard that the picture desk didn’t spot in time. There were several stages at which RTÉ could have said: hold on, this doesn’t add up. Go back and make sure its true. They didn’t.

What RTÉ did, according the Phoenix, was the equivalent of climbing up on the roof of the house, standing on one leg, drinking a bottle of whiskey, dancing a jig and then being astonished when you fall off the roof and break your bloody neck.

Any step on its own was looking for trouble. To combine one after the other until disaster was categorically guaranteed suggests that RTÉ deserved all they got, and more.

The tragedy is that Ireland has never needed a free press more. One of the reasons that Irish politics is in such a wretched mess is because the journalism and reporting is so bad.

There is more than one reason for this, of course, and some of them are to do with the journalists themselves. Journalists are too easily swayed in Ireland because the country – and particularly the Bermuda triangle bound by Dáil Éireann, the Shelbourne Bar and Doheny and Nesbitt’s – is so very, very small. There is no self-regulation either because jobs are so few and so hard to come by. Nobody will bite a hand on which he or she may later rely for food.

But the other reason standards in Irish journalism are so low is because it’s so very difficult to raise legitimate issues of public interest without involuntarily libeling someone.

The press is permanently muzzled, and that stops them from doing their job, of holding the powerful accountable to the powerless. For instance; wouldn’t it be interesting to know just exactly how planning was granted for the different ghost estates in the country? Who voted yea, who voted nay, and why? But that question never gets asked, because councilors get their lawyers to write letters, and no provincial paper, in these times, could defend a hideously expensive libel case.

People don’t realise that they’re being kept in the dark because they do not trust the press to use their power wisely. You may think a particular politician a bum, a thief and a louse, but every five years you get a cut at him. You do not get a cut at the editor of a major national newspaper, or some wise guy who take a piece of you in print and make you a laughing stock in your community.

One of the editors of a major national newspaper – about to retire, if reports are to be believed – likes to complain loudly about the libel laws. His complaints would be easier to take if it were easier to believe that they arose out of a passion for freedom of speech, rather than freedom of his own speech. His frequent hectoring media performances suggest that he has a very particular view of who should be free to speak, and who should not.

And that won’t wash with people. The press, like Caesar’s wife, has to be above suspicion. People will not write a blank cheque for the Irish media until the Irish media proves itself responsible and worthy of the people’s trust.

The USA has the freest press in the world, and consequently the most responsible. For instance: The Chicago Sun-Times fired a TV critic for inaccurate reporting during the summer. Specifically, she wrote a review of a Glee concert that mentioned a song that was not performed at the concert. A Glee concert is about as trivial a thing as you can imagine, and they still canned her after seventeen years.

A famous writer and four editors of the Detroit Free Press were suspended without pay in 2005 because the writer wrote in a column that two former members of a College basketball team were at a game that they did not actually attend.

The players told the writer they were going but missed their flight or didn’t make it some other way, but really, it doesn’t matter to buggery whether the lads were there or not. The Detroit Free Press didn’t care. They issued the suspension on a matter of principle.

Hard to imagine anyone getting a hour on the naughty step for that sort of carry-on here – eh, readers?

RTÉ have pushed the cause of press freedom back to the Victorian Era, if not further, and the press are the people on whom we’re relying to investigate the Chinese walls between NAMA and the National Pension Reserve Fund, on whom we rely to tell us what our TDs do as we cannot possibly otherwise know, and on whom we rely to tell us what is going on Brussels and how will it shape our lives.

I hope RTÉ didn’t break that bottle of whiskey when they came off the roof that time. I think we could be glad of some anesthetic thinking about this.

Preventing the Future - Irish Politics Crippled by Lack of Vision

2011-11-14T09:30:00.000Z

The spectacular trauma of the economic crash resulted in the current Government receiving the greatest popular mandate since the first Dáil itself. This should have Enda Kenny and his government a tremendous sense of power and purpose.

But the Government doesn’t seem empowered by the mandate, or even intimidated by it. It seems indifferent to it, the strangest reaction of all.

It’s like the coalition is unaware of the state of crisis in the country. Instead of realizing that they have been mandated to set the foundations of Ireland 3.0, the Government seem to think it’s business as usual.

It was Fianna Fáil’s turn, and now it’s our turn. So we’ll go through the same motions, but instead of their lads getting the gravy, it’ll be ours. Any notion of this being the sort of messing that sank the country in the first place seems beyond them.

The cynicism of the education cuts crystalizes the issue. For all their eagerness to use the IMF and the troika as an excuse, the Government is every bit as empowered to govern as any other government since the Treaty. Economic sovereignty has not been removed, contrary to popular belief.

The Government has to pay back the IMF just previous governments had to pay back loans gained in the money markets. The belt might be tighter, but the suit remains the same. It’s not like Michael Noonan is the first Irish Minister for Finance to look at an empty larder.

It’s a matter of supreme indifference to the IMF what the Government cut or don’t cut. All they care about is getting their money back. Because if they did care, the IMF would tell the Government that the proposed education cuts are not the way to go about planning for the future.

The particular cuts in question are the reduction in teacher numbers by two thousand and the ending of free post-graduate courses. Why cut two thousand teachers and post-grad grants? To save money. Are there other ways to save money? Yes, of course there are. So why choose this way? The reason for the cut is a legacy of the last government, but where and how deep is entirely up to the present one.

It could be An Spailpín’s cynical way of looking at the world, but the most obvious reason for making these cuts is because there’s no-one to complain. Two thousand teachers aren’t being laid off. Those teachers don’t exist yet, so nobody is fully sure if this is coming to their particular door.

The Teacher Unions represent current teachers, not projected ones. And while they should be looking to the future of their profession – well, it’s a fault in the Irish psyche that we value self-interest above all else.

It’s the same with post-grad grants. It’s a cut to the future, rather than the present. USI may huff and puff but once they’re marching down O’Connell Street, who’ll be able to tell them apart from Occupy Dame Street, The Irish Anti-War Movement or whatever other spurious organisations that have chosen that particular Saturday to waste the public’s time? Checkmate, sonny.

The Government was mandated to turn the system upside down, but it has no sense of that mandate. It has no sense of how the nation is at a crossroads in our history. It has no sense of that at all.

Tom Garvin published a book called Preventing the Future in 2006, about the myriad failures in Irish economic policy since the foundation of the state. But the subtext of the book is interesting – a tacit understanding that all those disasters are in the past, and that we have now started Ireland 2.0.

The same subtext is in David McWilliams’ Pope’s Children, for all he might try to reimagine it now – the idea that the Irish would never be so poor or so stupid again. The book is subtitled "Ireland's New Elite," after all.

There is no sense of how wrong that assumption proved to be being projected by the current Government. There is no sense of either a realization that the Irish are doomed to be poor or that the Irish are a nation who were on the cusp of something great, hit a bump in the road but is fully capable of rising again.

The current state of the nation is one or other of those alternatives. It cannot be both. And we need to know which it is if we are to progress.

Instead of answering that crucial question, the first six months of the administration have been spent on self-congratulation, optics, pope-bashing, losing a referendum and trying to pin the blame solely on Alan Shatter, now that Fianna Fáil aren’t around any more. It has not been spent in rolling up sleeves, taking stock or doing the vision thing.

The next six weeks will be about furiously shoving the round peg of no new taxes into the square hole of no new cuts. This is because finding jockeys for hobby-horses takes precedence over realizing that this Government has a mandate for change like no administration before.

It’s such a pity that they seem too dumb to realise what an incredible chance this is to change the country for ever. God help us all.

Diaspora v Deoraíocht - Correctly Describing the Irish Emigrant Experience

2011-11-08T09:30:00.000Z

Emigration has been part of the Irish experience since the flight of the Earls at the start of the seventeenth century. But it’s only in the past sixteen years that we’ve described the vast Irish population that lives outside of the island itself as the diaspora.

In fact, we can pinpoint the exact date the Irish emigrant population became a diaspora – it was February 2nd, 1995.

A search of the entire Irish Times newspaper archive returns 2,287 hits for the word “diaspora.” The word appears 518 times between the paper’s first edition on March 29th, 1859 and February 2nd, 1995, an appearance rate that averages out at three times a year. “Diaspora” appears 1,769 times between February 3rd, 1995 and last Saturday, or once every three days. Quite the increase.

February 2nd, 1995, is the key date because that was when President Robinson delivered an address to the joint houses of the Oireachtas called “Cherishing the Irish Diaspora.” It’s clear from the simple but reasonable metric of the Irish Times diaspora hit-count that this address to Tithe an Oireachtais made the Irish emigrant experience synonymous with the word “diaspora.” The pity is that the world does not accurately describe the phenomenon.

There is an element of imposed foreign force to the leave-taking in other cultures that exhibit a diaspora. The Jews were forced from the Holy Land by anyone who showed up for the entirety of their history, and aren’t entirely welcome there now either. The African slaves were taken to America and the West Indies in ships where men had to lay in bunks that were sixteen inches wide and two per cent mortality was allowed for in the bookkeeping.

Emigration is not forced on the Irish. The Roman Empire isn’t billeted in Athlone. There are no slavers waiting in the harbour at Cobh. That does not mean the emigrants want to go – a visit to an airport and a count of red eyes and bitten lips will answer that question. But diaspora is the wrong word to use.

Ireland does not have a diaspora. It has a population in exile. And we have word that describes that condition of Irish exile exactly. The word is “deoraíocht.”

One of the more frequent criticisms of the Irish language is that it uses “makey-uppy” words, with “héileacaptar” and “teileascóp” being two of the more egregious examples. “Deoraíocht” dates back to Old Irish, the language heard by St Patrick during his slavery and his apostolate. There’s nothing makey-uppy about it.

“Deoraíocht” has a strong literary tradition. Pádraig Ó Conaire’s only novel is called “Deoraíocht,” the story of an Irish exile in London. One of the definitive accounts of the life of an Irish navvy in England after the Second World War is Donáll Mac Amhlaigh’s “Dialann Deoraí.”

The title has been translated in some places as diary of an emigrant but that’s not accurate; “Diary of an Exile” is the correct translation of “Dialann Deoraí,” as Valentin Iremonger, Mac Amhlaigh’s official translator, knew. There is a difference between being an emigrant and being an exile.

We can’t blame the waves of emigration from Ireland in the 1950s and 80s and now, or the steady trickle that’s always existed, on the British. Our condition of exile is our own fault. We were promised an Ireland that was Gaelic, united and free.

We’ve failed at every turn in creating a distinct, viable and independent state and people who can’t bear this failure feel they have no option other than exile. They don’t want to go but they want to stay even less.

Diaspora doesn’t describe that duality of not wanting to go and hating to stay. Exile does. The fact the Irish word has “deor,” meaning “tear,” as its route is especially poignant.

Michael D Higgins will be sworn in as the ninth President of Ireland on Friday. Higgins has already done his bit for the language in the founding of Teilifís na Gaeilge, now TG4, during his time as Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht.

There’s a case to be made that the foundation of TG4 is the best thing to happen the language since the Gaelic League was founded by Douglas Hyde, the man who would go on to become the first President of Ireland. Now Hyde’s eighth successor has a chance to do something else for the language, and initiate the use of a particularly Irish word to describe a particularly Irish experience.

Mary Robinson spoke during her own inauguration in 1990 that Irish was an important part of our culture and that she herself planned to learn it: “Tá aistear eile le déanamh anois agam — aistear cultúrtha, leis an saibhreas iontach atá sa teanga Ghaeilge a bhaint amach díom féin.” (“I have another journey to make now – a cultural journey, to find the wonderful richness that is in the Irish language for myself.”)

It would be wonderful if our new President could restore the primacy of Irish to the Irish people and help us on our long journey to finding out just who exactly we are, whether we are at home or overseas. Go n-éirí leis.

George Hook

2011-11-04T09:30:00.000Z

The great language of Yiddish has many beautiful words. “Zaftig” is the word for a beautiful woman who is, in Oscar Hammerstein II’s phrase, broad where a broad should be broad. Isn’t it fantastic? It’s a word that’s inherently delightful to say out loud, just for the joy of saying it.

“Chutzpah” is another one of those words. It means gall, or cheek, or nerve. It was exemplified by a man known to your correspondent in more dissolute days who was getting grief in the Dole Office at Augustine Street, Galway.

He claimed he was skint. The lady behind the hatch doubted the bone fides of his attempts to find work and, God bless her, she mightn’t have been far wrong. She demanded proof from my friend that he’d tried to find work in the next period or else his dole was getting cut.

My friend said he would certainly try to find work, but only if Rialtas na hÉireann, as represented by the Galway dole office, would provide him with stamps necessary to post letters of application in a pre-internet age. He could not buy stamps himself being, as we said at the start, skint.

Getting the dole office to buy your stamps is chutzpah. It’s a fantastic word, and a quality that is 98% galling but 2% a cause for admiration, for having the sheer neck to go for it.

Chutzpah does not even begin to describe two tweets from Mr George Hook last night. They are the first two in this screen shot:

Aren’t they astonishing? “Hook controversial by conviction; Dunphy by opportunism.” Indeed. Quite. Of course.

For those equally traumatised as your correspondent, help is at hand. The Phoenix Magazine printed a story on September 23rd about George and his adventures with Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V in a Rugby World Cup preview piece for the Indo. I’ve taken the liberty of scanning it – just click the image below and it should rise to legible and hilarious detail.

In the States, you get the road for doing that. But we’re currently redefining what we consider journalism here, aren’t we?

David Norris and the Media

2011-11-01T09:30:00.002Z

Failed Presidential candidate David Norris made a slightly petulant remark to Seán O’Rourke on Radio One late on Friday night, about his being “singled out for special treatment” in the media.

Senator Norris is quite correct in noting that he’d received special treatment but, in a coda apposite to his entire campaign, he still doesn’t realise that this special treatment was in his favour. The media did everything in their power to protect him from himself, until the task proved quite impossible in the end.

To give one concrete example: David Norris retired from the Presidential race at the start of August, and returned to it six weeks later, half-way through September. While David Norris was out of the race, he still remained an option in the opinion polls held during those six weeks. Why?

Once Gay Byrne stepped down from the race no pollsters bothered with him anymore, even though he had been a poll-topper, just as Norris had been. Nobody polled about Pat Cox once Foxy Coxy lost the Fine Gael selection convention to Gay Mitchell.

Opinion polls cost money. If Norris had second thoughts after his retirement from the race, it would have cost him serious wedge to commission a private poll to see what his standing was like in the country after the controversy broke. But he didn’t half to, because the pollsters were still including him fee gratis.

At any stage a poll commissioner could have told his or her pollsters to forget Norris; he’s history. But nobody did. The media left the door open for Norris’ return by providing him with tremendously useful polling data without his having to pay for it.

There is no such thing as unbiased news. It doesn’t exist. There is only a question of degree and direction of spin. For instance, if a media body condemns state-sponsored spin, it is good for the cautious citizen to wonder which spin it is they favour instead.

Media law in Ireland is such a mess that the media tends to self-police, which is not something Juvenal, of who guards the guardians fame, would approve. Self-policing manifests in different ways across different media; the Irish Times goes light on court cases involving travellers for instance, while the Sunday World can’t quite get enough of them.

But there are issues of which the media are of one mind, and do what is, in their opinion, their patriotic duty. This is the wearing of the infamous “green jersey.” The coverage of Queen’s Elizabeth’s visit is an example where everybody got with the program and nobody questioned the spin. Or at least, nobody important.

The problem with this “green jersey” stuff is that it’s not the media’s job to put the country first; it’s the media’s job to stress-test the institutions of state to ensure that the citizens know exactly what’s being done, or not done, in their name. A defense council in law has to examine every corner of the prosecution’s case and should always presume the client is innocent. The media should do the opposite, always presuming the Government is up to something and try desperately to find out what that something is.

That’s the theory. In practice, people have their own views and if they see a chance to do the country a favour by presenting their darling in as good a light as possible, that’s what they do.

The Irish media seems to have been of one mind on David Norris for years, before anybody thought of him as a Presidential candidate. John Waters outlined in the Irish Times last June the steps he himself took to save David Norris from himself when Waters was editor of Magill magazine in 2002 and Norris gave his infamous interview to Helen Lucy Burke.

Journalists hate giving interviewees sign-off on interviews. It doesn’t do much for objectivity. But both Waters and Helen Lucy Burke pleaded with Norris to amend what he said. Norris refused. The story went to print but it was never sensationalized, even though the views expressed were sensational, to say the very least.

Nobody else picked up on either because there was an understanding across all media that Norris was a National Treasure and wasn’t to be scrutinized as others are scrutinized. This tremendous regard for Norris lasted all though to September, to the extent of David Norris getting free poll data from a media that would not surrender its darling.

The Helen Lucy Burke interview with Norris wasn’t even a gaffe. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue. It was a carefully thought out philosophy of life. But still its did their best to save the National Treasure.

Eventually they couldn’t, as Norris, whatever he may think, fell because he lives in a world that is utterly different to the rest of the country. Norris’ fall wasn’t to do with letters or disability claims. It was to do with his attitude to the difference between a child and an adult.

Not everybody gets the same benefit of the doubt as Norris enjoyed. The late Brian Lenihan famously dropped a clanger when he said “we all partied” during an interview on Prime Time in November of last year. Did RTÉ do a Waters/Burke and stop the camera to say: “hold on now Brian, that’ll sound awful. We know what you’re trying to say about the excesses of the Celtic Tiger years but that phrase will dump you in the smelly. Why don’t we have another crack at it?”

No, they did not. They just thought gotcha!, ran the piece and Lenihan was monstered over a slip of a tongue while there were much bigger issues in the content of what he had to say.

Senator Norris clearly feels battered by the campaign and he certainly suffered during it. Some of the stuff in The Star was particularly wretched and that is par of the course there of course, may God have mercy on them all. But reality is that the media protected David Norris for as long they possibly could, and he would be well advised to reflect deeply on that before he writes anything hasty in his memoirs.

Five Post-Polling Day Questions

2011-10-29T10:00:00.000+01:00

Michael D Higgins is the President Elect, and the country could have done worse. But it’s been a filthy campaign, and another indictment of a political system that is failing the people. Here are five questions that are worth pondering as we turn back the clocks and move on to the next great political crisis, Budget 2011.

Will We Ever See an Election That Isn’t Decided by Process of Elimination Again?
Baggage allowance is now more important to the Irish electorate than it is to Ryanair. Enda Kenny become Taoiseach by process of elimination – the fact he rose in the polls after refusing to appear on Vincent Browne’s debate is proof of that. And now the Presidential Election has been decided by the same metric. Gallagher supporters realized that the man wasn’t up to the hope so they stepped away and went for the only possibility of stopping him.

And could have been worse. Enda Kenny is a good and honest man. Michael D is a good and honest man, and he also did his bit for the country in founding TG4 and helping keep the language alive for another few years. Michael D deserves the win for that alone.

But it is deeply depressing that leaders are elected for their ability to disgust the electorate the least rather than their ability to inspire the electorate the most. That is very depressing indeed.

Why Did Sinn Féin Choose to Elect Michael D?
Sinn Féin didn’t win the Presidential election, but they certainly decided it. Prior to the Frontline debate, Seán Gallagher was home and hosed. We know this from three sources – the opinions polls coming up to the last weekend of the election, the RTÉ Red C recall poll that showed 28% of voters changed their minds in the final days, and that 70% of that 28% voted for Michael D, and the pattern of postal votes that were mailed before the Frontline debate showed Gallagher the clear winner.

But the Frontline sank him. The question from Martin McGuinness dropped Gallagher to the floor, and some hysterical media coverage in the papers administered the coup de grace.

The question is why – what’s in it for Sinn Féin? Their own high hopes blew up early in the campaign when a combination of wretched hypocrisy and hateful self-interest showed that partition is now as much part of the Irish psyche as porter and giving out about the English (the irony is lost on the people, of course). The Nation sees itself as a twenty-six county entity only, and wants nothing to do with the North. Nothing.

A harsh lesson for Sinn Féin, but they could have stood back and let Higgins and Gallagher duke it out. They didn’t. Martin McGuinness ended Gallagher as a viable entity. He could have stood by, but didn’t.

Why? What’s in it for Sinn Féin? Is it because they wanted to reach out to their fellow revolutionary socialist? Did the very thought of Gallagher appall them and they decided that they while they could not themselves win they could stop a man for winning? Do they think it sets them up better for the next general election, as the sworn enemy of cronyism where-ever they may find it? And will we ever get to the bottom of the ghost tweet? Questions, questions. It would be the nice if the media investigated even some of this but your faithful correspondent shan’t be holding his breath.

What Was David Norris Thinking?
The biggest loser of the whole campaign is undoubtedly David Norris. There wouldn’t even have been an election it weren’t for him – there could have been cross party support for Séamus Heaney, for instance, and the country could have saved itself a lot of money and angst.

Instead, Norris demanded his election and he can rue it for the rest of his days. For the first half of this year there was universal coverage of what a fine President Norris would make. The campaign exposed this view as hopelessly wrong. David Norris is an innocent, and he suffered the fate of all innocents when they leave the protection of their nursery. Slaughter. God love him.

Should Alan Shatter Consider His Position?
The surreptitious referenda campaigns were more serious than the Presidential Election. The President doesn’t actually do anything, of course, but those referenda could have visited untold disaster on the populace.

The Government’s attempt to sneak these complex and important referenda past the people by bundling them with the Presidential Election, like a schoolboy trying to sneak a copy of Nuts magazine into the pages of his Farmer’s Journal, was shameful and disgraceful.

But even more worryingly, Minister for Justice Alan Shatter’s bizarre response to the concerns of eight – eight – former Attorneys General should be addressed. Shatter dismissed the concerns of all eight men, who were appointed by different Governments and are of different political affiliations, as “nonsense,” and nastily suggested that some of the former Attorneys General had other agendae. Shatter did not spell out what those other agendae were or which of the eight held them, because that would have seen the Minister in the High Court in need of an attorney himself.

But it was an astonishing attack by the Minister for Justice on men who have sat at cabinet and have had significant roles in governing the country. What does it say about Shatter’s regard for the role of Attorney General itself?

For the Minister for Justice to disagree with one AG is fair enough, not least if the Minister is a lawyer himself and knows whereof he speaks. But to dismiss eight of them seems rather like a tipping point number, and dismissive of the whole office in the first place. Does Minister Shatter take advice from his own AG? Does he choose that advice a la carte? Will he dismiss eight opinions until he finds a ninth that he agrees with, and then preface his remarks to Dáil Éireann with “The Government, on the advice of the Attorney General…”?

Should the State have an Attorney General in the first place or a yes-man like The Bird O’Donnell? And perhaps more importantly, how can a Minister for Justice continue in his position when he holds so little regard for past holders of the office of Attorney General? It really is quite astonishing.

Should We Look at the Presidential Nomination Process?
Yes. Specifically, we should look at either abolishing the office entirely or having Presidents appointed by the Oireachtas. The country has been through a campaign that has been expensive in money, cheap in practice and mean in spirit. We don’t need to do that again. The fiscal suffering is bad enough without the damage done to our souls by so vicious a fight over so trivial an office. Enough. Let this be the last.

Think the Rain is Bad? What Will We Do When the Snow Returns?

2011-10-25T09:30:00.002+01:00

Yesterday’s flooding in Dublin gives a nervous Spailpín Fánach pause to wonder about what exact plans have been made for the return of the snow.

We all know it’s coming. The ads for shoe ice grips for shoes have been running on the Irish Times home page for weeks. And it’s reasonable to ask just what the local authorities and the great ship of state herself are doing to get ready for another harsh winter in Ireland.

The first really hard snap in January of last year came out of the clear blue sky. The buses being cancelled in Dublin was annoying, but understandable. Who had ever seen it this bad?

The second time, eleven months later in November, was a little more annoying. When the temperatures dropped below freezing and Dublin Bus cancelled its services, for the “greater safety of the population,” we wondered just why they weren’t more prepared this time, and if it’s really acceptable to have a workforce have to make its own way home when the weather gets bad. They had ten months to think about it, after all.

Which means there are now no excuses for a third time. If the local authorities are doing their jobs, they will have plans made for when the ice hits. Because it’s coming, just as surely as God made little green apples.

They’re prepared across the water. The London Times had a report yesterday detailing the provisions that Her Majesty’s Government have taken for the safety of the citizens of the realm. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osbourne, is carrying out an austerity program in Britain not dissimilar to the one here but even though road maintenance budgets have been cut, the British have still upped their salt budget.

The British, like ourselves, have a number of different agencies in charge of different aspects of transportation, but all the British agencies have already done their bit to keep the show on the road. Network Rail has spent £60 million pounds to keep the railway working, including investing in six snow carriages, decked out with ploughs, scrapers and brushes.

Heathrow has spent £34 million to get ready for the snow, an investment that includes the cost of 185 snow clearing vehicles. Gatwick has spent eight million pounds to buy, amongst other things, fourteen snow ploughs and over half a million litres of anti-icing agents.

The British local authorities have a stockpile of 1.4 million tonnes of salt. The highway agency has another quarter of a million, and there’s a Government National Strategic reserve supply of 450,000 tonnes.

Not only that, but the different local authorities realise they are in a different ballgame and so are deciding to salt less roads and send the trucks out in colder conditions in order to make supplies last longer. London’s Lambeth Council salted at one degree Centigrade last year. This year, the trucks don’t go out until it hits zero. It makes a difference, and the salt lasts longer.

Devon County Council has reduced the roads it will salt from 1,600 to 1,520, a five per cent reduction, to conserve supply. They know that climate change is now here, and they are making adjustments.

An Spailpín Fánach looks forward to the announcement from Minister for Transport, Mr Leo Varadkar, TD, and from Minister for Local Government, Mr Phil Hogan, TD, about what the Government’s plans are to prepare for this year’s harsh weather. Or will they just shrug their shoulders and blame Mr Chopra, like they always do?

Deireadh Seachtaine na nGiobal

2011-10-20T09:30:00.000+01:00

Agus cad atá chomh leadránach sa tsaol ná machnamh seanfhir? Níl tada. Bhíodh ár n-óige againn uilig, ach cé go raibh na h-ainmneacha difríochta bíonn na scéalta mar a gcéanna, beag nó mór.

É sin raite, bhraith mé lámh fuair ar mo chroí nuair a chuala mé go bhfuil deireadh tagtha go deo ar Seachtain na nGiobal, Gaillimh. Bhí an deireadh fógraithe le fada ach ag an am céanna, baintear geit nuair a thagann sé.

Scíobhfar roinnt faoi chomh brónach atá an deireadh seo agus go bhfuil an t-airgead bailithe ar son na mbocht níos tábhachtaí na pléaracha na seachtaine. Ná bac leis an seafóid sin. Is dócha go bhfuil croithe roinnt na gníomhaire ar Seachtain na nGiobal san áit ceart ach bíonn coirp na mac léinn ins an t-aon áit amháin - istigh sa mBéar, agus iad ag iarraidh an méid is mó portair a chaitheamh siar mar ab fhéidir leo.

Bliain amháin tháinig cúpla boc chomh fada le Coiste Seachtaine na nGiobal le pléan. Tógfaidís Hiace nó Ford Transit éigin ar iasacht, tabharfaidís cuairt ar gach contae in Éirinn, bailóidís airgead ar son Seachtain na nGiobal agus fillfidh siad ar ais arís. A leithreoir, fuaireadar an veain agus bhailigh siad an t-airgead ach ní dóigh liom gur fhilleadar riamh, agus tá beagnach dhá scór bliain caite anois.

Ba rógairí tofa iad, ar ndóigh, ach bhíodh laochra ann freisin. Bhíodh sé sconna déag taobh thiar Béar an Choláiste nuair a bhíodh an Beár sa gCearnóg Mhór. Ba é an Furstenburg an ceann a bhí sa triú áit ón gclé - níl fíos agam cén fáth ar fhan sin im' aigne, ach fan pé scéal é.

Bhíodh na sé sconna déag sin mar dushlán os comhair cúpla cara an Spailpín 'sna laethanta 'tá imithe. Agus Seachtain na nGiobal amháin, shroicheadar go n-déanfaidís iarracht pionta amháin a ól ó gach uile sconna.

Más mhaith leat sé phionta déag portair a ól, beidh fadhb agat. Is dhá bhuicéad beora iad sé chinn déag. Ach tá an caighdeán i bhfad níos áirde nuair atá meascán óil ann. B'fhéidir gurb é sin an fáth gur fhan an Furstenberg im' aigne. Tháinig sé ró-luath sa rás. Bíonn an Furstenberg searbh sa gcéad áit, agus níor díoladh mórán de ag an am, rud a rinneadh an beoir níos seirbhe arís. Bhíodh sé mar bhualadh ar an gclaí Foinavon in Aintree tar éis an chéad staid.

Ach bhíodh cairde agamsa agus boilg iontu cosuil le umair mhúnlaigh, báil ó Dhia orthu. Theip ar an gcuid is mó ach d'éirigh le beirt laoch pionta a ól ó gach uilig ceann de sconna Beáir an Choláiste san aon lá amháin.

Tógadh fear amháin abhaile, tinn a dhóthain ar ndóigh ach slán beo. Tháinig imní ar an gcomhluadar nuair a tugadh faoi deireadh nach raibh an fear eile ann ach fuaireadh slán ina leaba féin é níos déanaí tar éis seilg sa gcathair. Bíonn siad beirt socraithe agus ag obair go dian anois, agus táim ag súil iarraidh orthu cad a shíleann siad faoin deireadh ré seo. Is aoibheann bheatha an scólaire, ach tagann deireadh air i gcónaí.

We Are Sam Smyth

2011-10-17T09:30:00.001+01:00

The ironic thing about it all, of course, is that Sam Smyth’s show isn’t even that good in the first place. Look at this picture of Smyth and Alastair Campbell – think that’s the picture of a man about to grill Campbell on dodgy goings-on in Whitehall during the Blair years?

It always seemed that Smyth’s guests were drawn from a very small circle, and the show was a sort of dry dinner party held ten hours before its natural time. There was never any danger of real world experience breaking in; it was for people who inhabit that awful Irish Bermuda triangle whose points are the Shelbourne Bar, Paddy Guilbaud’s and Dáil Éireann, and for those elect alone.

But even that has now proven too much. Sam Smyth, a man who does so very little to rattle cages, has found that even a little can finish a man.

It all goes back to 1997 and Smyth’s role in breaking the story that lead to the Moriarty Tribunal. Smyth got a lot of praise for his work as an investigative journalist, but the reality is someone picked up the phone and spilled the beans to start the ball rolling in the first place.

If that phone call hadn’t been made, just how hard would the awarding of the Esat license have been investigated by the Irish media? About as hard as the awarding of the drilling rights to Shell in Rossport, or of planning permission for three hundred house estates outside villages with a population of 150, not counting the idiot.

Maybe Ireland is too small to have a functioning media. Everybody gets to know everybody else very quickly, and it’s hard to be objective about people with whom you socialize. There are so few media outlets, it’s very easy for the powerful to blackball someone and put them out of a job. Investigative journalism of the Woodward and Bernstein school is cripplingly expensive. And of course, like any job, youthful enthusiasm wanes and it becomes easier to go through the motions after time.

The problem is that if Ireland is too small to have a functioning media it is also too small to have an independent government. This cannot be emphasized enough.

It is impossible for the people to make informed decisions about who governs them unless there is a mechanism by which the people can inform themselves about the alternatives. That ability to make informed decisions is now under its greatest threat since independence. What can be done?

The Government talks a lot of hot air about press freedom but the reality is no Government wants a free press. Governments want to control news, so the existence of press barons is in their interest. Once the baron is on board, the rest will follow – vide Blair’s courting of Rupert Murdoch across the Irish sea.

It’s up to the people to demand what the powerful will not give. Right now Smyth is doomed. They’ve put a fork in him, and they’re going to replace his cuddly beltway chats with a PR consultant who likes to talk about motor cars that people up to their snouts in negative equity can’t afford.

But there are still journalists of influence and repute who can challenge for press freedom. Wouldn’t it be great if Matt Cooper and George Hook used their drivetime radio shows tomorrow to explain the importance of a free press to their listenership, and just how vital a free press is to a democracy? Wouldn’t that be so much better than just taking a shilling? An Spailpín is looking forward to seeing people taking stands and putting their money where their mouths are.

I am Sam Smyth. And so are you. Don’t let them keep us in the dark. Don’t let them.

Post Saeculum Aureum: Where to Now for Irish Rugby?

2011-10-10T09:30:00.000+01:00

Ireland’s World Cup was a failure. Anything you read elsewhere, about great memories and wins over Australia and the rest, is all blather.

Look at the picture of Brian O’Driscoll at the post-match press conference. He knows better than anyone just what the loss to Wales means. And it’s better for the nation to digest an unpalatable truth and move on than to remain in permanent denial.

This is the end of the golden generation. They shone their brightest in the twilight of their days, fighting on and on against time’s fell and inevitable hand. The golden generation were already over the hill when they won the Grand Slam two years ago. For them to still appear at the World Cup and to threaten so much is astonishing.

Even the term golden generation is misleading. It’s been O’Driscoll and the supporting cast. He had able subalterns in O’Connell and O’Gara but Ireland without O’Driscoll over the years of his reign were like low-fat milk or decaf coffee. More or less pointless. No emerald comet ever shone so brightly and for so long as O'Driscoll. He gave everything he had, and nobody can give more than that.

The depressing thing about the O’Driscoll era in Irish rugby is that the team didn’t win more. One Championship, a blessed Grand Slam, is not enough return. Celebrating Triple Crowns while Wales, England and France all won multiple Grand Slams was pathetic and betrayed a hopeless lack of ambition.

The wins over understrength and overconfident Australia and exhausted Italy in this World Cup were illusory. They simply papered over cracks. And when aging Ireland met young and hungry Wales there was no contest. Ireland were blown away by a much better team.

Seven countries have had podium finishes in the World Cups so far – New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, England, France, Argentina and Wales. Even Scotland managed to win a quarter-final, once. Ireland never have, and struggle to get out of the group half the time.

This time Ireland topped the group, and still couldn’t progress. The Irish rugby community tends to stiffen with pride at the thought of the successes of Munster and Leinster in the Heineken Cup, and expects that to transfer internationally. Maybe having only two first-rate club sides in our domestic rugby is actually a sign of lean times ahead.

And leaner they’ll get, not least when it makes more financial sense for the provinces to bring in specialist tight head props, openside flankers and stand-off halves from overseas than to suffer the mistakes of up and coming Irish players who must learn their trade.

In theory those young Irish players can learn their trade in Connacht, the “development” province. As such, you’d think all Connacht players should be Irish and under-25, with some leeway for local men to build a support base. Here’s the Connacht rugby squad – how do you think that one’s working out?

Rugby has had ten years in Ireland like it has never enjoyed before. The question facing the IRFU now is do they push on and grow the sport in the country, or settle back to the comfort of the alickadoo community?

The horrified and short-sighted response to former Minister Eamon Ryan’s proposal that Heineken Cup rugby should be free to air suggests that the IRFU are unaware of the need to keep promoting the game. Travelling hordes supporting Munster was always very well when it was novel and money was flush, but that’s not going to happen for a few years. There are dark times ahead, and the IRFU ought to prepare properly for them.

One way to start would be by giving the smug self-satisfaction a rest and publicly bemoaning that the golden generation didn’t win as much as they should have, and if Ireland's greatest ever player wasn't let down by his home union.

What would be very revelatory and cathartic would be if the IRFU came out and said that Ireland could have had Warren Gatland as head coach for the entirety of Brian O’Driscoll’s career, and we shot ourselves in the foot big time there. An Spailpín Fánach shan’t be holding his breath.

Gallagherism - the Magic Door to the Presidency

2011-10-06T09:30:00.000+01:00

There are strange stirrings in the Presidential election. Michael D remains favourite to win it – he’s the old dog for the hard road and he won’t be shooting himself in the foot anytime soon. But the rise of Seán Gallagher, as reported in this morning’s Irish Times, is astonishing.

It tells us a lot about the country, and is further evidence of the distance between the political and media elite and the ordinary people of Ireland, the ordinary people who have to find a way to survive the battering of recent and coming years.

There’s no good reason Gallagher should be challenging. Only Dana has less money. Labour, Sinn Féin and Fine Gael have more troops – sorry Martin – on the ground, and Mary Davis seems to have the most resources among the independents. And yet it’s Gallagher that’s coming out on top. Why?

He’s not postering. His website is, frankly, cook. His only exposure is in the shouting matches that masquerade as debates. How in holy Hell is Gallagher capturing the people’s imaginations?

Lack of baggage is Gallagher’s first moment of separation. People are deciding by process of elimination, and there are stronger reasons to object to Dana, Davis, Mitchell, McGuinness and Norris than they are to object to Gallagher or Michael D.

But it’s still remarkable that Gallagher is getting so much capital with so little exposure and less money. It’s can’t be just because of who he’s not. There has to be something else.

An Spailpín’s theory is that Gallagher is capturing the voters’ imagination because he says that he can create jobs as President.

It’s all very well to talk about visions and representing Ireland and the rest, but people living in the real world would sooner be able to pay the mortgage than listen to a lot of old blather about fairness, equality and respect. The Irish people have a lot of respect for the pound note. Surviving a famine leaves a pragmatic streak in the folk memory.

And this is what’s resonating for Gallagher. The country is falling to pieces. People want work. They want to pay their mortgages and have some sort of standard of life. If Gallagher says he’ll do that as first citizen, why not give him a shot? We can worry about pride at home, respect abroad later. This week we’re minding the job and paying the mortgage, thank you.

Of course, the President of Ireland can’t create jobs. Deputy Flanagan was correct in describing him or her as a person whose job is to cut ribbons. But you can’t say that in the middle of an election. You can’t say the President can’t do a damn thing, but we’re spending all this money on the election and office because we fancy a soft job up in the Park.

Gallagher can’t be attacked on the basis that he can’t do what he’s promising to do because that then means admitting the President doesn’t do a damn thing, really. That sort of admission will only make people who are still furious about what’s happened the country even more annoyed, and that level of fury is at Gas Mark 4 as it is.

Seán Gallagher has found the perfect storm and it could blow him right into the Phoenix Park. And once he’s there, what odds? He can’t create any jobs bar his own. He’ll be solid as a rock for seven years, step down, and lecture happily in America for the rest of his days.

Even though Gallagherism can’t deliver jobs, at least the people will have sent a message to the political elite that jobs are what count. Let’s hope there are ears to hear.

Crossing the Grain Line: To Beer or Not to Beer Before Ireland v Wales

2011-10-03T09:30:00.000+01:00

Faster than light neutrinos booting along the spine of Italy are in the ha’penny place compared to the stress the immutable laws of nature will face in Ireland next weekend.

For the first time since William Webb Ellis picked up the ball and ran with it, the great and manly pastimes of supporting the game of rugby and lorrying buckets of fermented barley, grain and hops are not only disunited; they are at daggers drawn.

Drinking has always been associated with rugby. Among players, the debauchery reached its apotheosis when Colin Smart, loose head prop for Tunbridge Wells and England, downed a bottle of aftershave at the France v England post-match dinner after their Five Nations game in 1982. Smart’s scrum-half, Steve Smith, later remarked that after Smart had his stomach pumped he didn’t look good but he did smell lovely.

It’s a professional era now, of course, and the modern player is fuelled solely by Lucozade Sport and boiled chicken. But for the supporters, the pints are lorried just as they always were. Rugby has always been a social sort of a game.

And that’s at the root of the weekend dilemma. The quarter-final between Ireland and Wales rises before the very dawn itself in the green land or Erin, and as such the question every supporter must ask is: pint like a savage and stay up all the night, or take one for the team and abjure Friday night gargle?

The young and restless will choose the heroes’ part, of course. Eager young men will mount the high stools like John Wayne mounting his horse while getting set to take on the Comanches – grim faced and determined in the awful realisation that men gotta do what men gotta do. By four the nightclubs and late bars will have inquired if they have no homes to go, and disgorged them onto the pavement where they do or do not.

Then they are at their greatest danger. Ladies will be making the glad eye and tempting our heroes with earthly delight. Some young men may be already insensible, and already sleeping the sleep of the just in gutters or bus shelters. And more will be laying siege to the chippers, hoping that a layer of greasy soakage between the pints already swallowed and the warm cans waiting back in the flat can make all the difference.

For greyer heads, the temptation is to wish the children well, and hope that they do not kick the wing mirrors off our cars on their way home. We choose to sit in and have an early night, in order to rise with lark, refreshed.

But reader, danger just as deadly as a night-club Natalie or a car-park coma awaits, even in the safety of the home. While trapped in one’s lair, nervously worrying about the ancient hwyl that has fueled Welsh rugby to deeds of glory through the generations, a fan may be tempted to turn on his or her television. It may be necessary to distract the mind from worrying about slow second phase ball, choke tackles or that awful dream we’ve been having where the Pink Panther recites from Yeats in the accent of Matt Williams.

Through no fault of his own, the innocent may, by a tragically unlucky chain of events and through no fault or his own, be exposed to the Late Late Show. This can only lead to one thing: a level of fury that reduces the television receiver to smithereens as you smash it to bits with the trusty poker.

But as you stand there among the broken glass and plastic, the righteous anger will subside and the grim realisation will drawn: oh bloody hell, how will I watch the game now? Reader, there will be only one choice. Go into the hall, put on your hat and coat, and go out, out into the night. Rugby and revelry have stood shoulder to shoulder, answering Ireland’s call, for too long for you to turn your back on either now.

Civil War Politics is Alive and Well in Ireland

2011-09-26T09:30:00.000+01:00

The Presidential election, which had been so boring but has now sprung into spiteful life, has already proved one thing beyond all doubt: civil war politics is alive, well and thriving in Ireland.

Martin McGuinness’ entry, and his very strong chance of victory, has galvanized a moribund Fine Gael campaign. All week they have queued up to take shots – ho, ho – at McGuinness and all he stands for. While Fianna Fáil’s footsoldiers are much more sanguine about the prospect of President McGuinness. This is the insurmountable difference between the parties; their attitudes to the North, and bloody history of island.

Fianna Fáil have been deathly quiet about McGuinness, even though it is they who are in greater political danger from the rise of Sinn Féin. But even though their existence is threatened by the rise of Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil apparatchiks can’t muster the level of vitriol that blows up like a volcano in every Fine Gael heart at the very thought of a Shinner about the place.

Part of that Fianna Fáil quietude could be a hangover from another exercise in shooting themselves in the foot. Fianna Fáil’s declining to run a candidate in the Presidential election made sense in that the election of the First Ribbon-Cutter (thank you, Deputy Flanagan) is of secondary importance to preparing 2016 General Election candidates in the Local Elections of 2014. But they can never have imagined that Sinn Féin would pull off such a masterstroke as the entry of McGuinness. McGuinness’ candidacy has changed everything.

It is interesting to wonder if Sinn Féin would have run McGuinness if Fianna Fáil had run a candidate – An Spailpín suspects they would have kept their powder dry and not have brought so big a gun to the front. But that’s for the historians to worry about later.

In the present, the Fianna Fáil top brass can only lick yet another wound while knowing that a very big chunk of the fanbase will follow the flag and the republic, standing with Emmet and Wolfe Tone. The fact its someone else beneath the mast is of secondary importance.

While Fine Gael brings the fight to the Shinners, just like always. Fine Gael is the party that bedded the institutions of the state into the fabric of the country during the Dála of the first ten years of independence. As such, Fine Gael tend to defend those institutions with a religious zeal that Fianna Fáil have never been able to muster, despite their greater time in power. This Fine Gael zeal is especially interesting in this time of national crisis, when the institutions of the state have so clearly let us down.

The nasty sectarianism already evidenced in the campaign – that while Martin McGuinness is good enough for Nordies he is utterly out of the question for the good folk of the south – is perhaps another reflection of the reverence in which Fine Gael hold the institutions of the (southern) state. While they view the North as a failed state, Fine Gael hold the southern state to be just fine.

Well, it’s not. It’s really not. The evidence of the crash is that the institutions of the southern state have failed her people, and the fact that the new broom government are using a very old broom indeed for all their promises is something that can only fill the average citizen with despair.

Another reason why McGuinness is so attractive a candidate. The political establishment’s harping on about McGuinness’ past shows they are out of touch with the Irish present, where more and more people are beginning to realise that there may be more than one failed state on the island.

The First Ribbon-Cutter election isn’t that important in itself, but may be the beginning of a national conversation about who we are and who we want to be. The good and decent Unionists of the North were asked to put up with a lot for the sake of what they were assured was progress and a new tomorrow. For the people of the South to say that’s what’s good enough for the North isn’t good enough for the South suggests we have still to learn the lesson of history after all these bloody years. God help us.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier - Why?

2011-09-21T09:30:00.000+01:00

A book isn’t a film and a film isn’t a book. This eternal verité is proved once more by the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy movie currently on general release. It’s beautiful to look it, superbly acted and scrupulously loyal to the original book. It’s just that as a movie, it’s not very good.

If you haven’t read the original John Le Carré book or are unfamiliar with the plot the odds are against you either figuring out what’s going on or why what’s going on matters. In their determination to be loyal to the book the producers of the movie have left out its heart. Gary Oldman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Colin Firth – all of them are wonderful in the movie but they are dancers without a tune, moving to no purpose.

The only art form less subtle than film is opera. You can have subtle moments certainly but movies and opera are both written in great broad strokes. The media demand them.

To adapt a novel, the screenwriter has to boil the boil down to its very bones, and then rebuild a film structure, rather than a novel structure on those bones. You're chasing fools' gold if you try to recreate the novel in the screenplay - they're too different a beast. You have respect the conventions of each genre, and accept that what works in one won't work in the other.

What is Tinker, Tailor about? It’s not about the mole in British intelligence. The mole is incidental. Tinker, Tailor is about a man, George Smiley, who is an abject failure at everything he does bar one thing. He is absolutely gifted at his job.

Smiley has lost his job at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor and the whole narrative is about him getting his old job back. He has to do the only thing he’s good at. Smiley knows nothing else. He has no other fulfillment.

That’s what Tinker, Tailor is about, at its most fundamental. And every time you’re looking at something other than that journey of George Smiley to get his old job back the audience is being lost. The school scenes are some of the (many) joys of the book, but in the film they slow up the action. They have to go. Ricki Tarr has to go.

There are marvellous scenes there. Smiley’s reminiscence about meeting Karla, his Soviet opposite number, is moved to his hotel rather than the motorway café in the book, but it still works very well. The Christmas party motif in the film to reflect the more innocent days of the circus is inspired.

But in their effort to get everything into the film, the essence of the book is lost, and that’s a pity. It’s a noble failure of course, and the movie is certainly worth seeing in a way that so very many movies aren’t. But if you really want to treat yourself the price of two pints will get you the book. That really is a treat.

Lifting in the Lineout - The Rugby World Cup Format is Wrong

2011-09-09T09:30:00.000+01:00

One of the reasons that rugby has adapted so well to professionalism is its willingness to change its laws as the game evolves. And not only that, rugby is willing to try a law for a season and then change it back if it doesn’t work. The administrators are always willing to do what’s best for the game.

Which makes it all the more of a pity that they haven’t tweaked the format of the World Cup. A phony war will be conducted all through the group stages, leaving the stakes impossibly high come the knockout stages where the safety net is suddenly swept away.

There are three divisions in world rugby. In the first division, there are the super powers – New Zealand, South Africa, Australia, England and France. In the second division, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Italy and Argentina. In the third division, there’s everyone else.

Only a first division team can win the World Cup. A second division team can’t win it, but on their day they can stop someone else from winning it. The third division teams, God help them, are cannon fodder, and nothing else.

This means that forty group games will be played at the World Cup in order to reduce the top ten rugby playing nations to eight. That’s not the most efficient way of going about it.

In amateur days, it would be lovely for the USA to play New Zealand – they were all amateurs anyway and, even though the USA would still lose, there wasn’t the same air of businesslike formality about the All-Blacks running in try after try. There was still a place for magic and romance, no matter how thin a sliver.

But that’s all gone now as the professionals go about the expert dismemberment of the amateurs, and then have to trust all to eighty minutes of on-the-day inspiration from the quarters on. The pool games are too little while the playoffs are too much.

What’s the solution? There isn’t one, really. Perhaps the first ten teams in the world should play the World Cup as a league, each with one game against the other, and then some sort of semi-final and final to keep it interesting? It seems the fairest way.

The problem would be that the sheer physicality of modern rugby makes that impossible. Some players might manage the twelve game slate, but at a horrific cost to their health in later life.

And so we’re left with this strange shadow-boxing tournament for the first forty games of the World Cup and then the manic intensity of the final seven (let’s not count the third place play-off – nobody else does). But I suppose it’s the only World Cup we have and it’s better than nothing.

Of the five contenders, your Spailpín wouldn’t begrudge any of them, really. Australia isn’t even vaguely a rugby country but when it comes to the World Cup the Wallabies are unquestioned specialists.

New Zealand and South Africa are the greatest rugby cultures in the world (as would Wales be, if only it had the resources available to the other two) and An Spailpín has a lot of time for Martin Johnson’s heroic refusal to apologise for being English. Love him or hate him, the man’s got style.

And France. Always France. One of the greatest rugby nations, and the only one of the great traditional powers that was never part of the British Empire. That’s part of what makes them so different and so exciting.

But while it would be lovely to see France finally win a World Cup, the New Zealanders’ longing for the title, especially now on home soil, has become so acute that we are now in the peculiar situation of the favorites being the people’s champions too – to see New Zealand frustrated in every tournament is becoming cruel to everybody. (With the possible exception of the Australians, of course. Aussies are like that).

Ireland? Ireland should progress from their group, and then stand a fighting chance against South Africa (if things go according to seed), the Tri-Nations country against which the Irish have the best record. Not getting out of the group would be disappointing, but hardly novel. Losing the quarter-final would be par for the course.

But as the twilight quickly descends on the Golden Generation of O’Gara, O’Connell and O’Driscoll, it would be wonderful if they could win the quarter-final and claim one more page of history before night falls. Because when night does fall, it could last a long, long time.

Ka mate, ka mate...

The Kinda d'État - Ireland's Contribution to Governance

2011-09-07T09:00:00.002+01:00

There’s a great line in the Third Man movie where Orson Welles’ Harry Lime remarks on the different gifts the blood-drenched Italy of the Borgias and the orderly, methodical and godly Swiss brought to civilisation. We are lucky the arch-cynic did not cast his gaze more westerly, to this green isle of Erin.

If he had he would have discovered a nation that, having waited eight hundred years to take her place among the nations of the earth, now chooses to waste everything that so many died for like one of those forty and fifty stone abominations of humanity on reality TV, slowly gorging themselves to death.

Monday night’s history of the Rise and Fall of Fianna Fáil provided the keystone. Not because of the broad picture, which remains both sickeningly familiar and heartbreaking elusive, but because of one small detail. A passing comment that in itself sums up just why, in that phrase of our times, we are where we are.

Suzanne Kelly, daughter of Captain James Kelly, claimed on Monday night that the importation of arms to help the Republic’s nationalist brethren in Northern Ireland was sanctioned at the very highest level. The sanction was withdrawn when the dove faction in cabinet triumphed over the hawk, and the hawks – Blaney, Boland, Haughey – were then left out in cold to wither and die. The doves didn’t count for Charles Haughey’s powers of resilience and recovery of course.

In any other country, in any other democratic state, this would be hold the front page news. Was Ireland closer to war in 1970 over the Northern troubles than the USA was in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Why isn’t it this news? Where are the scholarly studies? Why doesn’t anyone care that Ireland was on the verge of a renewal of war with the old enemy?

Many hypotheses have been proposed in the misery of the past three years as to how the nation has come to this sorry state. Why wasn’t anyone watching the road? But perhaps the real answer is that nobody’s ever been watching the road, ever.

Maybe the truth is that Ireland has always been governed by luck and flaw, as the state lurches from one crisis to another while whatever cabinet is in power hopes to God there isn’t some sort of karmic Garda checkpoint at the next turn in the road.

An Spailpín is still stunned by Ms Kelly’s remarks on Monday, and that we, the nation, are completely at ease with the fact that we don’t definitely know what happened during the Arms Trial. More than two score years later, with nearly all the principles dead, was Ireland on the verge of a coup d’état?

Or was it a Kinda d’État, like every other damned thing that’s happened in this blighted country? Another half-arsed rebellion, like Emmet’s or Dwyer’s or, God help us, the Fenian invasion of Canada in 1870? Or the one that we’ll be celebrating ourselves in five years’ time? How did that one work out, on a scale of one to ten?

Does anybody take Irish governance seriously? If we did, we would damn well know just how close we came to war, bloody and horrible, in the late sixties. But we don’t. There is a cabal which knows, the elite families by whom this republic has been governed since its foundation. But the citizens? They know about as much about how this country is actually governed as a mountain goat knows about the second law of thermodynamics.

And we the citizens aren’t getting any smarter. Public debate on the great issues of the day – debt, secularism, education, sovereignty – is like seeing dancers in a nightclub strobe light. No action connects to the next. Each faction bays to the others across the empty and barren wastes where developed nations share ideas and move together.

But that land of intellectual ferment and growth is fallow ground in Ireland, ground where no faction ever learns anything from the other, from experience or from any damn thing at all, but simply seeks solace from repeating its own shibboleths over and over again, while the country slips slowly beneath the waves.

It’s whiskey in my tea from here on in. I can’t bear much more of this.

Kilkenny Reaffirm Their Majesty

2011-09-05T01:00:00.000+01:00

One of the many great features about hurling as a game isthat the best team almost always win. There’s no way to circumvent the spiritof the game, the way you can pack defenses in soccer or kill the ball in rugbyor upset Pat Spillane in football.

Hurling is like boxing in that there’s no-where to hide. Thegame is about fourteen man-on-man battles and if the majority of your team wintheir individual battles, you win the game. All else is noise.

This is why Kilkenny won their fifth Liam McCarthy Cup in sixyears yesterday. Because man for man they played better than Tipperary on theday.

As a Mayoman, your Spailpín Fánach knows enough abouthurling to know that he knows nothing about hurling, but Kilkenny’s performanceyesterday was breath-taking in its primal magnificence. Forget the many arts ofthe game; the All-Ireland was won in the fiery bellies of the Kilkennymen, whowould broke no failure on the great stage.

The normally impassive Brian Cody was clearly delightedyesterday. How he must have nursed the hurt and disappointment from last yearto bring it to its white hot focus yesterday. Richie Hogan said in thepost-match interview that the team promised themselves they would never feel aslow again as they felt last year, and they did not let themselves down.

Christy O’Connor wrote in the Sunday Times on Sunday morningthat Kilkenny were royally annoyed not only that they lost last year, but thatthey weren’t given credit for winning the year before. They knew that thereputation of this Kilkenny generation, hailed as the best of all time beforethey lost to Tipperary last year, would slide further down history’s scale ifthey lost again to Tipperary.

O’Connor remarked particularly that they really didn’t carefor younger Tipperary players lording it over their neighbours on the banks ofMooncoin, and they stored away that resentment to when it could be of the mostuse.

The first portent was the crowd. Kilkenny, who have beenunder the radar all year while the press lionized different players fromdifferent counties, came out to a much louder roar than Tipperary. The catswere awake, and had been sharpening their claws.

It’s so hard for sportsmen to catch up to the pitch of agame if they are behind at the start. Tipperary were not ready for thechallenge that Kilkenny had to offer and, by the time they showed their ownundoubted class, Kilkenny were already licking the cream from their whiskersand thinking of long winter nights of satisfaction and Smithwicks in Langton’sand likewise hostelries.

It’s all the more credit to Cody and the magnificent team he’screated, the perfect blend of skill and aggression. Shefflin is a genius ofcourse, but when An Spailpín is boring his co-inmates in the nursing home asthe sun sets, it’s Tommy Walsh that will remain the avatar of Brian Cody’sKilkenny.

Walsh isn’t even that big, but he can’t be beaten by high orlow balls. All are sucked into his possession to be redistributed where theywill do the maximum damage to the opposition. In an alley fight between Walshand a hood with a broken bottle, one could only feel sorry and pity for thebottle. The hood, of course, should have known better when he saw thedistinctive red helmet. They are the tough cats that you meet in alleys or onthe playing fields of Erin, and they are not easily beaten. More luck to them.

The Real Reason Hollywood Stars Make the Big Bucks

2011-08-30T09:30:00.001+01:00

Your faithful correspondent has a pet theory about Hollywood actors and their extra-ordinary levels of remuneration. An Spailpín doesn’t think that they pull down the big dollars because of the acting they do for the films’ two hour duration.

They pull down the big money for the acting they do afterwards, in keeping a straight face when promoting a film that they know, as surely as anyone can have knowledge of anything in this crazy, mixed-up world, that the film they’ve just made is a complete and utter pig.

There are two films in An Spailpín’s mind particularly at the moment; One Day, a romantic comedy starring Anne Hathaway and someone else, and Cowboys and Aliens, a science fiction actioner starring Harrison Ford, Daniel Craig and Olivia Wilde.

There are some people who will like these movies, to whom the pictures will speak as works of art. An Spailpín’s brother Mayoman, Willie Joe, got rather a blast out of Cowboys and Aliens. But generally speaking, the movie industry will remember these two films as turkeys.

Everybody knows it. In modern cinema, there are no word of mouth hits anymore. A movie sinks or swims immediately it comes out. It may become a beloved DVD hit a year later, but as far as Hollywood is concerned, if a picture doesn’t open everyone concerned with it has a smell rising from them because of that, a smell that can only be cleared by a bone-fide box office smash.

Anne Hathaway knows that the picture is a bomb by the time the movie is released. Chances are she's known for months. But she’s still got to do her media, as she is the only star connected with One Day. She is the only person with whom interviewers wish to speak. What would Ryan Tubridy do for twenty minutes’ of Hollywood glamour on the Late Late Show this Friday night, instead of the scrapings of the RTÉ canteen, followed by a panel discussion featuring Terry Prone, Eddie Hobbs and Jason Byrne?

So Anne Hathaway does her interviews and smiles her million dollar smile and talks about Yorkshire and how much the book moved her and how hard it is to find good females roles in Hollywood and yes, she loves Kate Middleton and the wedding did remind her of the Princess Diaries and all the while she’s thinking: my God, will I ever have a hit movie to myself? Or will I be on the Hallmark channel for the rest of my days, playing alcoholic mothers who sell their daughters for crates of gin?

Harrison Ford hasn’t had a hit since Air Force One. The last Indiana Jones movie doesn’t count, because nobody can think of it without becoming incredibly sad. Jon Farveau, the director of Cowboys and Aliens, has the consolation of the guaranteed money of the Iron Man franchise (provided nobody has a hundredth-monkey-moment about these interminable Marvel comic movies), while Daniel Craig has the matchless consolation of knowing that, whatever happens to him in his future career he cannot possibly make as bad a call as Clive Owen already has.

While Olivia Wilde thinks: Tron bombed and this bombed. I have three, maybe four more movies left until I’m on the Hallmark channel for the rest of my days, playing drug-addicted mothers who sell their sons for crates of Acapulco Gold, the notorious bad-ass weed. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

But they can never voice that. Instead it’s all about how great it was to work with Harrison Ford, how much she learned from Hugh Laurie on House, and how she really got to explore what her character went through and developed as a person when Zolbat the alien wrapped his scaly tentacle around her milky-white neck, before Daniel Craig chopped it off (the tentacle now, not the neck).

And people say Hollywood actors and actresses are over-paid? Reader, they don’t get paid half enough for keeping a straight face through all this.

Mayo on Top of the World After Nine Point Defeat

2011-08-22T08:30:00.000+01:00

Kerry 1-20
Mayo 1-11

There’s only one way to win a game but it seems like there are a thousand and one ways to lose one. But as the shutter comes down on another Mayo summer, everyone with an interest should realise what a fantastic summer it’s been.

Even at the end. Nine points is a whacking, but it’s also a fair result. Mayo did nothing wrong, really, yesterday. They executed their game plan. The misfortunate thing about it was, so did Kerry.

Kerry found their feet after about twenty minutes and the longer the game went on the easier it became for them. They had an answer for everything Mayo threw at them, and Mayo threw them their all. It’s just that Mayo’s all wasn’t good enough.

Kerry is a great football county and they are currently blessed with exceptional players and an exceptional manager. People talk about weaknesses in the current team; we’ll see just how vulnerable they are come the third Sunday. Kerry will start favourites in An Spailpín’s book.

So where does the defeat leave Mayo? It leaves Mayo on top of the world.

Under the current Championship setup, a good Championship for Mayo is one where Mayo win their quarter-final. Not making a quarter-final is the only bad year for Mayo. Everything that happens besides winning that quarter-final is a bonus. Staying in Division 1 – presuming there still is a Division 1 – is a bonus. Winning Connacht is a bonus.

Mayo achieved their primary goal of winning a quarter-final this year, and the bonus goals of staying in Division 1, winning Connacht and inflicting a terrible, searing defeat on Cork, the All-Ireland Champions. That makes for a hell of a year in the ledger. Any other judgment is nonsense.

And not only that. This year has been marvellous for reminding the supporters of Mayo football – which means everyone in the county – of what matters. That getting beaten early is not in fact better than losing in the Final. That what counts is surviving for as long as you can, with still being alive at five o’clock on the third Sunday the greatest achievement of all.

And this year has been marvellous for reminding the supporters of Mayo football that we are legion, we are proud and we are not junk bond status.

Willie Joe, Mayo football’s Baptist and the man who runs the superlative Mayo GAA Blog, called his people to Bowe’s on Fleet Street on Saturday night. Reader, they came in their droves.

People that had never met before, from the north, south, east and west of the third largest county in Ireland, came together to celebrate the unique colours and heroic feats of Mayo football, looking back through the years and forward into the 21st Century. It was an extraordinary night, and one that will be remembered for years by those that were there.

Because that night spoke about Mayo, who we are and why we are. Mayo people turned up in droves on Saturday night because we’re not fools; we knew the likelihood of a big night in September was unlikely. But we wanted to celebrate the team and the people and the county in the here and now, because it is a team worth celebrating, we are a people worth celebrating and Mayo a county worth celebrating.

Naysayers will sneer about nine point hammerings and poor Mayo and all this other old blather but the fools, the fools, the fools – even last night, as the remains of another Championship returned across the Shannon the undertakers will have heard signs of life from the back of the hearse. Signs of life that will have grown louder and louder as they went deeper and deeper in the West until, returned among the yew trees and the true-hearted boys, in the gloaming and the heather, Mayo football sloughs off the defeat, rises once more from its bier and turn its head towards the FBD League and the 2012 Campaign.

There will always be a Mayo. Now and forever. Up Mayo.

Seventy Summer Minutes

2011-08-17T09:30:00.002+01:00

If a week is a long time in politics, seventy minutes is a long time in the All-Ireland Championship.

Because the Championship is a knockout and not a league competition, it’s a mistake to assess form the way you can assess form a league. In a knockout Championship, there is no form. There really isn’t.

Everybody knows now that Tyrone have got old. But very few knew it before the ball was thrown in on Sunday. Darragh Ó Sé told us in the Irish Times how he knew that Tyrone were shot because Kerry beat Roscommon in a challenge game. He didn’t tell us before the game though, when it might have been some use.

Mayo have been written off all season, but there is no basis for that, other than history and piseoga. To correctly analyse Mayo’s form, to find hints of what was happening, would take deeper study than a national journalist has time for. And he or she could still miss it.

At half-time in the Galway game the signs weren’t good. They weren’t. And then Mayo beat Galway and then Mayo beat Roscommon and by golly, Mayo went and beat Cork. But that’s not a smooth line of progression. That’s a series of evolutionary jumps.

Have Mayo jumped higher than their actual ability, and are now in for a fall? Or have Kerry flattered to deceive, just Tyrone did? Reader, your Spailpín doesn’t know. But I am eager to find out.

There are no teams named at time of writing, but it doesn’t take too much insight to see the battle ground. Midfield and breaks for both teams. Advantage Kerry upfront, advantage Mayo – maybe – in the backs.

There is no reason for Mayo to quake before the green and gold. Footballers are like mayflies – their lives are brief. 2006 is five years ago. It might as well be a lifetime.

There is a theory abroad that Mayo have nothing to lose in this game. It’s certainly true that all the pressure to deliver is on the Kingdom. If Mayo get beat, what harm? It’s been a better summer than any Mayo person could have hoped for when it looked like Tommy Lyons was going to be given the keys to the car back in October.

But Kerry. Kerry can’t lose a semi-final to Mayo. Jack O’Connor, genius that he is, has patched and minded and cajoled and coaxed his team but he has to wonder, as they all have to wonder, if time will claim them just as it claimed Tyrone.

Mayo are young and hungry with nothing to fear. Kerry are old and battle-hardened and have the best forwards in the country, but sometimes it’s Waterloo. It just can’t go on forever.

Does anyone remember Francie Bellew’s last game in Croke Park? Bellew was the full back of his generation. He was feared, which is what you want from someone back there. He was never fast, but he was able to, ahem, compensate.

And then Armagh played Wexford when Mattie Forde was in his pomp. Bellew called on his powers, but they didn’t answer. He was gone, and Forde buried him. It was a sad end, but then, all endings are sad. Very few ride away into the sunset, as Darragh Ó Sé himself did.

Darragh remarked in the Times last week that the presence of young lads in the team made him stay longer than he wanted to, because he wanted to pick up a few more medals and knew the young lads could carry him. Does the fact he has retired now mean his medal appetite is sated? Or is there something else he’d like to tell us next week, when it’s all over?

Seventy minutes isn’t very long, but it’s a short time to grow old in this current wet summer.

A Smiling Public Man: Gay Byrne and the Presidency

2011-08-15T09:30:00.000+01:00

Gay Byrne’s withdrawal from the Presidential race is disappointing. Vincent Browne was correct in his analysis in the Irish Times on Wednesday – although a vulnerable candidate in an election, Byrne would have made a fine President.

It all boils down to what it is the President can do. As remarked last week, all this blather about Presidents for the people and re-inventing the office is just that – blather. The President’s role is clearly defined in the constitution and woe betide any President who veers from that path.

A President simply needs to be a safe pair of hands to oversee the operation of Government. Once a President appears to interfere in the operation of Government, the house comes crashing down – vide Paddy Hillery in 1982, and Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh in 1977, may God be good to them both.

Byrne may believe Romano Prodi to be a “fat slug” – an insult that An Spailpín is baffled by not hearing about during the first Lisbon referendum – but he would be enough of a pro to keep that opinion under his topper for the duration of his Presidency.

Think of all the people Gay Byrne interviewed down the years – An Spailpín is willing to beat that he couldn’t stand half of them. He might think Newbridge silver is junk but as long as they keep sending the cheques he’ll keep rolling his r’s in the ad copy.

Byrne could have been the definition of Yeats’ smiling public man as President. Because there is a want in the Irish psyche to have someone to mind us, and it’s only that strange want in the Irish mind that explains why we suddenly place such store in the office of President.

It seems that the public perception of the President now exists outside of constitution definition – how many people can name the Council of State, for instance? – but in another part of the Irish experience; the insecure, needy part that always needs a reason to feel good about ourselves.

The needy part that always scans the British papers on the Monday after a Six Nations weekend to ensure that we’ve got the pat on the head we feel we deserve. Ninety years on from independence, we still need the nod from the Big House.

And that’s what the President does in the eyes of the people. Makes us feel good about our selves. Marys McAleese and Robinson did just that, the former though her human empathy and diplomatic gifts, the latter through expert spin.

That’s why David Norris was so popular, until it transpired he was the only man in Ireland who had learned nothing from twenty years of child abuse scandals. As a political activist pointed out to your correspondent recently, Norris wasn’t favourite despite his being gay; he was favourite because of it.

Electing a gay President would have been another kick in the teeth for the old order, about whom the modern nation feels such intense betrayal. But in Norris’ absence, Gay Byrne would have been the next best thing. Instead of a radical statement of intent, a return to a lovely old blankie of childhood.

The left wing commentariat are trying to portray Byrne as right wing, but his own description of himself as apolitical is the most accurate. Gay Byrne is a cypher in whom the nation sees what it wants to see. Gay’s great gift as a broadcaster and public figure was his ability to sublimate his own ego to let that happen, and never let actual Gay peep through. He was the smiling public man in excelsis.

And perhaps it’s because of that unwillingness to be seen in full scrutiny that Byrne has stepped down. There was a two part documentary about Byrne some years ago on TV that showed us precisely nothing about that man, which is no doubt exactly how he wanted it. After all these years, why lose it all now? There is no second Gaybo for Russell Murphy to burn.

The People? What Have They Got to Do with It?

2011-08-03T09:30:00.001+01:00

David Norris yesterday remarked in his concession speech that “the presidency of Ireland belongs to the people and not any party or sectional interest.” That single sentence explains exactly why he was unelectable in the first place. The poor man has no idea how this country is governed. None at all.

If Oireachas na hÉireann were compared to the human body, the Presidency would be the appendix. It performs no function but it can, on very rare occasions, go septic and kill you. As nearly happened with poor Cearrbhall Ó Dálaigh.

The Presidency is a left-over office, just as the appendix is a left-over organ. It’s the office that took over from the Governor-Generalship of the Irish Free State, which itself took over from the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland. It doesn’t do anything. It’s an artifact. A relic. A ruin.

The notion that the office does do something is nonsense and propaganda. The Constitutional role of the Presidency hasn’t changed one little bit since Mary Robinson’s election in 1990, irrespective of the beliefs of her church. It’s locked in, nailed down, there in black and white.

The nomination process is proof positive of this. David Norris couldn’t have been more wrong in saying that the presidency belongs to the people and not any party or sectional interest. It is precisely the other way around.

This fact is clearly understood by Mary Davis and Seán Gallagher, the independents who got nominated because they saw what the system is and then worked it to easily secure their own nominations as independent – or quasi-independent – candidates. That’s what people who live in the real world do.

David Norris, for all his fine qualities, does not live in this real world. If Norris has a political antecedent in recent times, it’s George Lee. Another idealist who ignored the real world and got a dirty land when it bit him on the ankle.

The fact that Norris was so popular in the polls shows the distance that exists between Irish political structures and the nation’s understanding of them. Norris’ candidacy was hailed because he was a maverick; a maverick in the Phoenix Park means political crises for breakfast, dinner and tea. It can’t, can’t work.

So how do people have the impression that it could work? Does the nation understand how we’re governed at all?

We the People, the citizens’ assembly, looked at the political process and the best they could come up with was gender quotas – on a not-that-terribly-overwhelming 51-49 majority. Gender quotas. Dear God in Heaven. Would the nation not be much better off looking at the mechanism of government, enhancing what works and stopping what doesn’t? Would that be so hard?

In the meantime, the Presidential race rolls on without David Norris. Paddy Power’s 5/1 about Mary Davis looks very tempting. She got her nomination with ease, seems to have a war chest and most importantly of all, Mary Davis seems the least objectionable of the candidates currently in the field. In Ireland, the people who, in Pearse’s words, are august despite their chains vote for the person whom we despise the least. Put a shot of sodium pentathol in the next pint there Joe. I’m not sure I can take much more of this.

Down Goes O'Leary: How Aidan O'Shea Won the Day for the County Mayo

2011-08-02T09:30:00.000+01:00

When he was learning about the great game of Gaelic football at his father’s knee, a friend of the blog was regularly asked what was the turning point. It was his father’s way of getting the gasúr to think about the game, and to realise that small events can have momentous consequences. Gaelic football’s butterfly effect, if you like.

Not every game has a turning point, of course. But yesterday there was a huge one, when an emperor was dethroned and a foundation stone set for a new world order.

Mayo were offered at 18/1 in running early in the first half of the game on Sunday. Cork had been gifted a sweet start, the last thing Mayo could afford them, and they were humming. Mayo were 1-4 to 0-1 down and in big trouble.

Noel O’Leary, a player whose praises your faithful correspondent will always sing, was in possession under the Cusack Stand around the 45 metre line and was thinking about where to launch it when he got a shock. The sort of shock you get when six feet five of Breaffy bone and muscle comes barreling into you when you’re not expecting it.

Aidan O’Shea, for it was he, put O’Leary on the deck. As tough an hombre as has pulled on a jersey found himself stretched, whacked, done.

O’Shea got a yellow card for the challenge, which may have been harsh, and may not have been. It’s hard to believe O’Leary considered the challenge anything other than fair; God knows he’s delivered plenty of them himself.

But the game was never the same again. O’Shea putting down O’Leary was the turning point.

O’Shea’s challenge on O’Leary was a primal act of defiance. You may beat us but you will not defeat us. We are not here to be bullied. We are not here to make up numbers. We shall fight you ball for ball and if we lose, we lose on our feet, not on our knees.

There’s more to it than that of course. A lot of things happen in a game of Gaelic football. But An Spailpín will believe until the day he’s called that Aidan O’Shea’s challenge on Noel O’Leary changed the All-Ireland quarter-final.

Of course, Cork were hampered by their injuries. No team can lose so many of its front-line players and still perform at its optimum. They were worthy Champions and Conor Counihan was gracious in defeat, which can’t have been easy. This defeat is very, very painful for Cork football and, with the bizarre way the inter-county calendar is currently fixed, it will be a long time until they can assemble again to deal with their pain.

While for Mayo, and perhaps for the entire football base of Connacht, it was a moment of justification. Not least in light of what passes for football analysis currently.

Whatever happens now, Mayo are playing with house money. Kerry are the best team in Ireland, and Jack O’Connor doesn’t miss much on the line. Cork were complacent on Sunday, but Kerry know the breed of the O’Shea boys, and they will be ready. It’s also to be hoped that Darran O’Sullivan can play in three weeks – his presence will make Mayo’s task all the harder, but his talents grace the game, and the game is bigger than any or all of us. Can’t wait.

Project CIG: How Mayo Can Beat Cork on Sunday

2011-07-28T09:30:00.000+01:00

Paddy Power is quoting Mayo as a 9/2 longshot against Cork on Sunday. That means if Mayo were to play Cork eleven times Mayo would win two and Cork would win the other nine. That price is probably a bit mean – it’s hard to see Mayo beating Cork at all, to say nothing of beating them twice.

But Paddy can’t go true price 9/1 or 10/1, because then you realise the difference between bookie odds and true probability. Why, even Pat Spillane himself would take Mayo at 10/1 if he were offered it. Yerra, just in case, like.

And that’s what Mayo must focus on this week. When the back room team sits down to analyse the game against Cork this Sunday they have to realise that not only have Mayo a puncher’s chance, the confluence of events means that one chance in ten may very well have arrived this weekend. For three reasons.

1: Complacency
It’s extremely difficult for any Cork team to take Mayo seriously at the best of times. Why would they? It’s very difficult for Cork to take anyone seriously, other than Tipperary in hurling and Kerry in football, but there’s no way they think anything other than shaking the jersey will be required against Mayo.

Connacht football is a national laughing stock – junk bond status, in Pat Spillane’s nice phrase – and Cork themselves have only to think back to the havoc they wreaked on Mayo in Croke Park in April ’10, fifteen months ago to realise what a stroll in the park it’ll be.

Sure the Mayo manager, whoever he is, probably has to cut the players’ dinners for them of an evening, as they can’t be trusted to work cutlery themselves without stabbing each other or lopping off a digit or a limb. Conor Counihan will rant all he wants but come on. Mayo? All those boys will be thinking about another crack at Kerry, and making up for the Munster Final.

Just like the Mayo players themselves couldn’t take London seriously, and were licking their lips at the prospect of a crack at Galway. Pretty much the same thing.

2: Injuries
Cork are cursed with injuries. There’s a lot of talk in modern Gaelic football about systems and training and thirty man panels and the divil knows what but while An Spailpín pays science due respect I can’t get it out of my head that if you don’t have the players your system won’t save you in the white heat of the Championship.

Cork have more strength in depth than any other team. We saw it in the League final earlier this year, when it seemed like each sub that came on was better than the man who went off. But a lot of that was illusory, as Cork’s growth coincided with Dublin’s falling away.

This Sunday, Goulding is gone. Sheehan is gone. Colm O’Neill is gone. Joe Brolly might be onto something about Canty. That’s a lot of holes.

Cork are still thick with superstars of course – the O’Connors, Paddy Kelly, and An Spailpín’s own favourite, the immortal Noel O’Leary, the pride of Cill na Martra. But Cork will miss Goulding and the rest. Nobody can lose that many first line players without Fate coming to collect at some stage. If Conor Counihan isn’t worried about his injury list, he ought to be.

3: Goals
For years Mayo have used the inside line as a source of third midfielders, or a place to send starting midfielders for a breather because those same starting midfielders were on the tiles the night before and are burning diesel badly.

Not this year. For the first time since the brief career of the unlucky John Casey, Mayo are dangerous inside. None of the three young men along the full-forward line are nationally known. No-one ever heard of Pavarotti either until he started to sing. O’Connor, Freeman and Jason Doherty can do damage if they get ball into them, not least as Cork’s full back line isn’t the rebels’ strongest unit.

The Cork half-backs are, to An Spailpín’s eye, the heart of the team. Kissane, Miskella and O’Leary. Warriors all. Bizarrely, however, the current Mayo half-forwards are an interesting match for them. The Mayo half-forwards have become quite the ground hogs this summer and if they can scrounge a few breaks and deliver it lively inside – rather than ponce off into a corner, soloing thoughtfully, say – well, who knows?

It’s a big ask of course, and the reward for victory over Cork is almost certain butchery at the hands of the Kingdom. But I wouldn’t mind that. I would even accept it as a price worth paying.

Mayo are a very young team and still a few piece short of the puzzle. But a beating from Kerry would help season them, and know what the highest level is like.

And through the winter as the team show their scars and talk about what it’s like to face the best, they could take comfort in the thought of Cork, crying by the Lee all through the winter as the Israelites wept by the rivers of Babylon. The thought of those tears should be reward aplenty, irrespective of what else the Championship has in store. Maigh Eo abú.

The Role of the Pundit

2011-07-27T09:30:00.000+01:00

Willie Joe, the eminence behind the Mayo GAA Blog, opined on Saturday that the opinion of the national GAA pundits doesn’t matter. “Such babble is simply noise, annoying and grating noise to many ears, but just noise nonetheless,” wrote that great and good man.

It is noise, of course. But it shouldn’t be. That’s the point. It shouldn’t be.

There are two types of people to whom punditry – pre and post match analysis of sporting contests, Gaelic football in our particular case – is aimed. The first is the general watcher who doesn’t follow the games and isn’t particularly knowledgeable but is watching because a child or a boyfriend is interested, or a neighbour is playing, or a team has gone deep in the Championship and the whole parish is now talking about nothing else.

The second is the actual fan, who goes to all games at all grades. He or she has maybe played at some level, or coached, or sells the club lotto on Saturday night. But that doesn’t mean that he or she has ever played in Croke Park before 50,000 people and knows what that extraordinary experience is like. He or she has watched Championships unfold year after year and likes to compare one year with another, one team with another, one player with another, one philosophy or experience with another.

In other words, punditry should reach out to everyone who watches the game, irrespective of the level of his or her own knowledge, experience or exposure. Neither of these needs is being met.

Part of it, of course, is because of our national refusal to ever take anything seriously. Sure it’s only a bit of craic. People think it’s a laugh to see Brolly and Pat Spillane getting stuck into each other.

If I want a laugh I’ll read the Program for Government. Football is serious, and due deference should be paid. Deference should be paid for those who don’t live and die by the game but are still interested for all the reasons listed above.

Deference should be paid for those who do live and die by the game and expect it to be analysed by those for whom the game has the same magnitude in their lives.

That’s the problem with the current level of punditry. It’s not that pundits are too harsh on players. It’s that they’re not harsh enough.

Pat Spillane rowed back on his (typically strident) criticism of Donegal in the very first game of the Championship after Donegal won their first Ulster title in nineteen years earlier this month. It’d be easier to respect Spillane if he said he still couldn’t stand it, matteradamn how many Anglo-Celts they win. At least he’d be consistent, instead of running with both hare and hounds. He’ll be back damning them again when – if – they lose again in the Championship, thus making you wonder if he only took a crack because he thought it was a free shot. There’s something kind of rotten about that sort of behaviour.

People think that controversy is better than the mind-numbing and stomach churning smugness of the BBC’s Match of the Day couch. But what’s currently served by RTÉ isn’t controversy. It’s lads acting the jackass. Lads who are just as capable of the BBC’s old pals act when the son of one of the guild is playing. For instance.

And it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a new generation of pundits now, men who call the game as they see it but who don’t rub players noses in it either. Anthony Tohill and Dara Ó Cinnéide on RTÉ, and Peter Canavan on TV3 are superb, to name but three. The sooner they take over from the washed out vaudeville of the current RTÉ front line panel the better off the game and the people will be.

The West Wind - Mayo win the Connacht Final

2011-07-18T08:30:00.004+01:00

Just how bad was the weather at the Connacht Final yesterday? Take a look at this picture of the graveyard end goal ten minutes into the second half.

The net behind the goal is billowing like the sails of the Santa Maria as she sped Columbus to America. And it’s a net – it’s full of holes for the wind to pass through. That’s how windy it was all during the game in Hyde Park yesterday, without respite, and that’s not even mentioning the rain, relentless and unforgiving, arriving in great sheets sweeping in from the west.

But someone had to win and that someone was Mayo. It would be unwise to read too much into the victory, or attempt to analyse a football game where so very little football was played. On a day like yesterday’s, victory is a bar of soap, grasped more by luck than by skill.

Gay Sheerin was harsh in his criticism of Roscommon on MWR afterwards, but that could be because his great heart was breaking, and that’s understandable. It seemed like it was more than a football game to Roscommon, and that’s a heavy burden. Fergal O’Donnell’s best policy may be to focus on the many positives from the game, put it behind them and get ready for the next day. There is no better man to do that than O’Donnell.

He could do worse than borrow a page from Wexford’s book in 1996, and have the squad assemble next weekend to watch Tyrone play Armagh for the right to play Roscommon and go on to Croke Park. Put a blackboard next to the screen and anytime any Roscommon panel member sees a reason why Roscommon can beat Armagh or Tyrone, up he goes and writes it on the board. After seventy minutes, Roscommon will be ready for action again.

As for James Horan, yesterday was vindication. His appointment came about in peculiar circumstances – to the say the least – but a Nestor Cup in your first year as manager of a team that contains youths so callow that they must follow Cúchulainn in smearing their chins with blackberries so the men of Erin will think them men, not boys; well, that’s pretty good.

And of course it’s not over yet. The quarter-final awaits, and whomever Mayo will play will find it hard to take Mayo seriously. That suits Mayo just fine. If Mayo win the quarter-final, there will be another reason to do down Mayo and that will continue until Mayo win an All-Ireland.

Maintaining perspective is one of the hardest things to do in life. This blather about Mayo’s sixty-year wait is just that; blather. John Maughan made football in August commonplace for Mayo support. Before that, there was only silence and the Galway hurlers.

The past twenty years have been the best years to support Mayo since the 1950s, and the county’s inability to give itself credit for those great years is one of the reasons why the final step was never taken. But it is by no means as far away as people would have you believe.

It may happen this year; if you’re good enough you’re old enough, and stranger things have happened in the history of the Association.

It may happen next year; Horan’s is a young team and there are fault lines in it that may be exposed later, even among those who don’t need the blackberried chins to be taken for men.

Or it may take longer than that, in which case; what’s another year, after all? All that matters is that Mayo are playing to the level of their ability and things look bright for the next couple of years. Everyone in Mayo can live with that. Maigh Eo abú.

The Connacht Final. Kind of a Big Deal

2011-07-15T08:30:00.000+01:00

Sunday’s Connacht Final is a big deal and a sideshow all at the same time. Whoever goes home with the Nestor Cup on the front dash of the bus will be licking their chops at the prospect of a trip to Headquarters. Who loses will either run up a white flag or else realise that they can be right back to where the Connacht Champions are in seventy short minutes. But it’s not a given that shoe will drop and it’s fairly certain that nobody will want to take the chance if they can help it.

Fergal O’Donnell cannot be praised enough for all he’s done with Roscommon. To develop minors is a challenge. To integrate those into a shell of a team that’s been destroyed by various events over the past decade is a challenge.

But to do both those things, win a Connacht Final and now be in a position to dominate Connacht and challenge for national honours – because that’s what we’re talking about here – is nothing short of breath-taking. The man can’t be praised enough for what he’s done in his county’s hour of need.

Roscommon can win if they can shut down the O’Sheas, not let Mayo score heartbreaking goals and deliver ball to the boys that can use it – Shine, Kilbride and the rest. If that happens Roscommon return to Croke Park one year wiser from their loss to Cork and, of the teams left in the qualifiers, it’s only Cork they should fear. If they can go one step further, Roscommon are seventy minutes away from the All-Ireland final. That makes for one hell of a summer, and one that doesn’t have to end there either.

Mayo can win by doing the opposite of course – the O’Sheas dominating midfield, starving the Roscommon frontline while serving up the sort of ball that can make the Mayo inside lin the toast of the heather county.

Everything after that is a bonus for Mayo. Winning a quarter-final would be wonderful – and, like Roscommon, Cork are the only team in the qualifiers whom Mayo should fear – but age is against them. It’s a steep learning curve for manager and players. Of course, there is still that voice ag cúl an chinn that whispers: good enough, old enough. It’s no harm to listen to that voice every now again. What use a summer where dreaming is banned?

While the blood will course through the winners’ veins, the losers should allow themselves one night’s sulking, and no more. On Monday, they are only one game away from being in exactly the same position that the Connacht Champions are in, and they must get that truth into their heads quickly.

Everything that went wrong in the Connacht Final can be righted by one game, and then you’ve exactly the same chance as the Connacht Champions. It would not be great to draw the Munster Champions in the quarters, just as it would not be great to draw the Munster losers, but there you go. The odds are on your side either way and, if it’s a matter of a semi-final, Goliath might just wonder for a moment when he sees David marching from the West, thoughtfully swinging his slingshot and eying up the big man.

FOCAL SCOIR: Nobody really knows what’s going to happen over Roscommon Hospital and any protests to do with it at the Connacht Final. The people of Roscommon have clearly been led up the garden path on the matter and are right to be annoyed – more so because of the lies than the closure of the hospital itself, even. Everybody understands the country is broke but being lied to is hard to take. For all that, it would be a crying shame if the game were disrupted or fans were delayed or anything bad were to happen. I hope Mayo and Roscommon and the Galway minors can celebrate the west on Sunday, and it won’t be the last day out for any of us.

Government Honeymoon - Keeled Out and Gasping on a Hospital Trolley Somewhere in Rural Ireland

2011-07-11T08:30:00.002+01:00

Charlie Flanagan, Fine Gael TD for Laois-Offaly, sent this tweet at 8:15 last night: “I can’t accept Labour proposals for Portlaoise hospital. No discussions with staff or trade unions. Not govt policy. Policy on the hoof!”

This could just be kite-flying or shape-throwing of course. But the last week has seen the government lose no small amount of lustre over Roscommon Hospital and if every government TD is going to go overboard over a parish pump issue like so many Jackie Healy-Raes then we’ll all be back in the polling booths within a year.

An Spailpín hasn’t received a review copy of Kevin Rafter’s book about how Enda Kenny became Taoiseach but there was an extract in the Sunday Times yesterday week. It talked about candidate selection and five point plans and the incandescent genius of Mark Mortell, but it did not mention Newstalk and neither did it mention the single most important event of the last campaign, the event that proved that Fine Gael could not be beaten.

Enda Kenny refused to appear on a party leader’s debate with Vincent Browne on TV3 and Fine Gael rose in the polls that weekend. The message was clear; nothing that happens in the next fortnight matters a damn. Fianna Fáil are going to get it good and there’s nothing that can happen to stop that.

The theory that Fine Gael had to fight off a Labour challenge is a bottle of smoke. The Labour challenge may have existed at dinner parties in Ranelagh and Sandymount but on the ground the candidates weren’t there. Rethreads of single issues campaigners or local ward bosses who just want to get elected irrespective of party or ideology – of whom Mae Sexton of Longford is surely the ne plus ultra – were never going to get elected.

But what really gave lie to the notion of competition between Labour and Fine Gael was how quickly Eamon Gilmore put coalition on the agenda, a year or eighteen months after insulting Enda Kenny on the Late Late Show, remarking that Kenny would make a good Taoiseach but a better Tanaiste. The grandees of the Labour Party – Gilmore, Rabbitte, Quinn, Burton – aren’t getting any younger and this was their last chance at power. Simple as that.

So what had been billed as the most pivotal election in Ireland since 1918 quickly became politics as usual. The financial crisis presented the country and Enda Kenny with a unique chance to change the political landscape forever, but Kenny didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see it and settled for more of the same.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost. The media have given Enda Kenny’s Premiership the softest ride in political history, through either a misguided attempt at wearing the green jersey (and any time you hear about this mythical green jersey you may safely bet someone is planning to hang you), guilt at their remarkable coverage of 21st Century Ireland or terror at losing their own jobs as the Irish media industry collapses even more quickly the construction industry.

No matter. Irish politics is stuck on a permanent loop. Enda Kenny, not content with having an election delivered him on a plate, went out and promised the devil and all for votes anyway.

In the coming months Kenny has to keep a lid on spending, keep the EU sweet and the indigenous Unions sweeter, and all the while reform the Irish political system from within, which is a bigger task than doing away with the Seanad or imposing gender quotas as a further block to talent. Oh, and the impeding train wreck that is the Gay Mitchell Presidential candidacy will have to be handled as well. After all that, the booing that Enda will get from the locals at the Connacht Final in Hyde Park might seems as an angels' choir in his memory. God help him, and his poor nation.

We the Citizens: Let's Hope for the Best

2011-07-04T08:30:00.000+01:00

We the Citizens are trying. They have that in their favour. An Spailpín was disappointed but not particularly surprised when the Mr Haversham of Irish journalism attacked We the Citizens from his lonesome eyrie on one of the back pages of the Sunday Independent some weeks ago. Anything that gets the people talking about where the country is going is, by definition, a good thing. Just because it’s not a march on the Winter Palace doesn’t mean it’s pointless.

And it’s thrilling, genuinely thrilling, that We the Citizens have gone as far as they have with their idea, as opposed to the pathetic rubbish we got from Fintan O’Toole and the Democracy Not Just Yet fiasco. Seeing O’Toole and Eamon Dunphy squirm under Elaine Byrne’s clear contempt for their retreat from involvement in the last election on RTÉ’s Eleventh Hour program was one of the highlights of the campaign.

But for all that, there must be something concrete to show for all this, and this is where the worry sets in.

We the Citizens have spent the past month or six weeks holding meetings around the country to gauge the public mood, and then followed these up with a focus group that met last weekend in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham. An Spailpín wasn’t in the Royal Hospital but I did attend the We the Citizens meeting in Blanchardstown.

As such, seeing the results of these meetings and focus groups is instructive and depressing in equal parts. For instance, Doctor Byrne remarked in her Sunday Times piece yesterday that a narrow majority of the focus group was in favour of gender quotas in elections, and this is headline news on the We the Citizens website.

That majority figure is 51%. 51% is technically a majority, but it is a split-down-the-middle number to any reasonably minded person. Or anyone that hadn’t decided how he or she would like the vote to go in the first place.

We the Citizens' vote in favour for the retention of the voting system is another source of concern. Anyone I’ve ever met who’s been involved in politics has told me the hardest fight of all is within the constituency party. Spending that level of energy fighting people whose views you share makes no sense. 74% of the We the Citizens focus group seem to think it’s worthwhile.

The whole shooting match will be debated later tonight on Prime Time, but An Spailpín is nervous. Prime Time hasn’t exactly been Athens in the time of Pericles when it comes to standards of public debate lately.

The house style on Prime Time (and the Frontline too) has been to start with twenty pointless minutes VT of some goon looking over the new Sean O’Casey bridge in Dublin or likewise landmark before turning to the camera and solemnly intoning: “Ireland. Joyce called her the old sow that eats her farrow. In the light of the loss of economic sovereignty, will we now have to actually consume our own children just to survive?” And so on and on and on and on.

Twenty minutes of this, twenty minutes of tu’pence ha’penny opinions from the floor, and then Miriam chairs a head to head between Elaine Byrne and Leo Varadkar. Byrne is bolshy and touchy. Varadkar displays his gift for condescension, which is considerable. Miriam tells them we have to leave it there, but join us next week for the very human story of a Haitian refugee who worked in a Magdalene Laundry in Two Mile Borris and now dreams of a better life as blackjack croupier for Doctor Quirkey.

Please God I’m wrong. This country needs top to bottom reform, and a level of citizenship that is much more in keeping with Kennedy’s famous demand that people ask not what your country can do for you but you for your country. Maybe this will be sparked on Prime Time tonight, and the country will never be the same again. I really hope so.

But my God, I really doubt it. The best hope is still that a Gorbachev will rise in Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil and reform the system that made him or her from within. This will come almost certainly at the cost of his or her own career, but it will be for the greater good of all. I just hope there’s somebody left on the island when that Irish Gorbachev rises.

Canúintí na Gaeilge

2011-06-29T08:30:00.001+01:00

D'fhill Pygmalion chuig ardán Bhleá Cliath le déanaí, agus Risteard Murphy mar an tOllamh Ó hUiginn. Ag tús an dráma, deireann an tUiginneach rud éigin maidir leis an Sásanach atá níos fíoire fós maidir leis an nGael.

Dár leis an Ollamh, ní gá le Sásanach ach a bhéal a oscailt agus tugann sé fáth le duine eile bheith i bhfuath faoi. Sin cumhacht caniúnta. Agus más fíor é maidir le Béarla na Sasanach, nach bhfuil sé seacht n-uair níos fíoire maidir le Gaeilge na nGael?

Ceann de na rudaí is aite dom, agus mise im' dhaltaí Gaeilge, ná nach bhfuil fíos againn cad é an bealach ceart focail a labhairt. Oscail foclóir éigin ar an teanga eile, an Ghéarmainís, an Fhraincís, an Spáinnis, feicfidh tú cónas fuaimeanna na teanga a labhairt go dtí gurbh fhéidir le Géarmánach nó Francach nó Spáinneach tusa a thuiscint. Leagtar sa h-aibítir idirnáisiúnta iad, go dtí gurbh fhéidir comparáid a dhéanamh idir teanga amháin agus teanga eile.

Ach 'sna foclóirí Gaeilge, níl aon eolas fuaime le fáil. Tagann an fáth siar go athbheochán na Gaeilge 'sna 19ú hAois, agus scolairí ag teacht go hÉirinn chun staidéir a dhéanamh ar an teanga seo, Gaeilge. Ná déan dearmad gur tharla seo agus an drochsaol beo láidir fós in aigne na daoine - is dócha go raibh ceangal idir an Gaeilge agus an bás agus an easpa dóchais ag éirí tréan go leor. Murar mhaith leat maireann sa domhan nua seo, caithfidh tú leanúint leis an mBéarla agus an Ghaeilge a fhágail i do dhiaidh, chomh maith leis na fataí dhubha agus na mairbh.

Agus go tobann, tagann na Géarmánaigh seo agus - a Thiarna Dé - Sasánaigh féin níos déanaí ag insint duit gur cheann de na teangacha Eorpacha is sine agus is uaisle í an Ghaeilge, agus fán nóiméad anois a Dhaid go bhfaighfidh mé mo pheann luaidhe agus scríobhfaidh mé síos gach uile focal a titeann as do ghob.

Ar an ndrochuair, tháinig na scolairí seo ag an am céanna go raibh an Gaelic League agus an Cumann Lúchleas Gael faoi lánsheol. Rinneadh bainis idir an dhá ghluaiseacht - bíonn an Gael lag roimh an phlámáis, agus nuair a chualadar an chaint seo faoi teangacha uaisle na hEorapacha, chuaigh díreach isteach inár gcinn í.

Agus sin mar a chailleadh Eochroim. Mar bhí aidhm na scolairí dífríochta go deo idir aidhm luchta an athbheocháin, cén nár thuigeadh faoi déara é.

Nuair a tháinig na scolairí ar an nGaeilge, bhíodar mar Indiana Jones tar éis bualadh isteach ar domhan cailte. Bhí doras acu díreach isteach i domhain soineanta, mar sraidbhaile éigin i mbrionglóid Rousseau. Seo iad na daoine barbatha uaisle ar scríobh Rousseau faoi, agus seo fréisin a teanga féin.

Ach ba choir do lucht na h-athbheocáin gan bacadh leis an scolairí agus a domhain cailte, agus bheith cinnte go mbeidh an Ghaeilge chéanna ann ó cheann ceann na tíre. Ach bhí draoícht na scolairí agus brionglóid an domhan foirfe seo amach ar an mBlaiscéad ró-mhór rompu, agus theip orthu.

Rinneadh iarracht ní h-amháin gach canúint a thógáil slán, ach a litriú agus a graiméar féin a choinneáil. Smaoinigh noiméad cen chaoi a mbeadh an Béarla féin dá scríobhfaí gach focal a ndeireann Cheryl Cole mar a labhraíonn sí, agus conas a léifí a smaointe an lá ina dhiaidh agus tuigfidh tú go soiléir chomh fada a chuadar amú.

Inniu, tá an teanga scapaithe ina canúintí difríochta, greim an fhir báite ag gach ait ar a cheann féin agus an teanga féin ag meadú le gach glúin. Mar a dúirt an tOllamh Ó hUiginn i My Fair Lady, an ceolscannán iontach atá bunaithe ar bundráma Shaw, "Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!" Go bhfoire Dia ar ár teanga bhocht bhriste.

Mayo's Dogs of War - First Class Display from Second Class Citizens

2011-06-27T08:30:00.002+01:00

It’s funny being a second class citizen. As Vincent Vega remarked about Europe, it’s not that like it's totally alien. It’s just the little differences.

If Meath, say, dog out a win on a day so miserable that it could have come right out of one of the more gloomy episodes of Peig Sayers’ life, then Meath are a team with mental strength, team that are never bet, a great bunch of bucks. If Mayo do it, it’s a further indication of the decline of Connacht football.

If Kildare, for instance, shoot nine first half wides then Kildare are a total football team and a credit to Kieran McGeeney and his lovely hair. If Mayo do it, it’s Mayo God help us all over again.

If Tyrone hold an opponent to one point in the second half it’s testimony to how organized and professional an outfit they are. If Mayo do it, it’s because Galway are but a shadow of past glories and hey, Connacht football is only for gimps anyway.

Mayo people, if they are wise, will ignore all this and take a huge amount of positives from the game yesterday in Castlebar. A friend of An Spailpín likes to quote Seán Boylan’s remark that football isn’t won in the head or the heart but in the belly.

Mayo showed some serious fight in the second half to hammer Galway like a nail and they should draw considerable strength from that as they look ahead to the rest of the summer.

Football is in a process of evolution. The conventional midfielder doesn’t exist anymore. There are goalkeepers, full backs and full forwards, and then there is the maelstrom of the middle third where only the strong survive.

In An Spailpín’s ideal world Willie Joe soars for the high ball under the clear blue skies before horsing it inside for Jimmy Burke or Noel Durkin. But in the real world, where you have manky weather and big question marks hanging over you, you fight for your very life.

And that’s exactly what Mayo did against Galway. They didn’t play in the Mayo style. They couldn’t – the TV really didn’t show what it was like to be out there in the teeming rain and into the teeth of a gale. Mayo fought like savages, and they came out on top.

Mayo were Kings of the Dirty Ball yesterday. Inspired by the O’Shea brothers, Mayo fought like junkyard dogs for every ball between the 45 metre lines and that’s why they won.

This is tremendous and heartening news for Mayo. John O’Mahony talked a lot about rebuilding, when he was actually destroying a team that got to two All-Ireland finals in three years, an achievement was never recognized, celebrated or built on for what it was.

The rebuilding has only started under Horan, and it’s on these young men that Horan has brought in that the future of Mayo will be built.

Mayo are a flawed team. I personally can live with that. I’ve seen lots of Mayo teams that were the best team in Ireland in June and long forgotten in September. I prefer this way. There’s plenty for James Horan to work on – he may need to consider buying a bicycle for Robert Hennelly to get up and down the pitch if Hennelly’s going to be taking many more frees, for instance – but yesterday was a heartening win for Mayo.

The country outside Connacht will hold its nose at the prospect of the Connacht Final, and that’s fine. Maybe the media will insist that all Connacht players be belled for the rest of the Championship, and have continuity announcers warn innocents that a particular afternoon’s football may contain scenes of a Connacht nature. And that’s fine too. We all have to live our lives according to our different lights.

Right now, in a lonesome Dublin exile, there is one happy Mayoman after seeing his team show a little bit of bite. It’ll be fun to see if anybody needs a rabies shot this summer after seventy minutes muzzle to muzzle Mayo’s Dogs of War.

FOCAL SCOIR: Big thumbs up to the beautiful and wonderful Vintage Irish Book Covers blog, from which I’ve sourced the photo. Wonderful site. Beautiful books.

There's Nothing a Mayoman Loves More than Losing to Galway

2011-06-22T08:30:00.001+01:00

Mayo is luckier than other counties. Not only do we enjoy natural beauty of mountain, beach and oilfield – conveniently minded for us by our multinational friends in return for a box of beads and one mirror, slightly cracked – but we are also blessed by being able to get beaten by Galway every second year in the Championship.

There’s nothing we in Mayo enjoy more than getting up early on Sunday morning, ating the breakfast that’s been cooking on the hob since last night, into the match gear and then off to Galway or Castlebar to have an apple stuffed in the gob, a skewer shoved where the sun seldom shines and get roasted and served up with mashed potatoes and green beans by P Joyce, J Fallon or M McDonagh as appropriate.

It’s a relationship that the media understand well. They know that there’s only one team in Connacht really. Sligo, Roscommon and Leitrim are grand for holiday homes. Mayo are just depressing, seeing them huffing and puffing and doing their best to almost, nearly, kinda win an All-Ireland, only to find some other way to munson it up before collapsing in crying, wailing heaps on high stools up and down Dorset Street, Dublins 1 and 7.

But Galway. Now there’s a team you can look up to. See, Galway don’t munson it up in Croker. Galway turn up like the aristocrats they are. Pointy shoes and expensive trainers peep out from under their flared jeans, as opposed to the plain black brogues of the unreconstructed bogger.

Galwaymen know how to lay a table and don’t drink their tay from the saucer. They have women like the Seoige sisters on their arms, with their irresistible “is that a copy of the Christian Brothers Irish Grammar in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?” appeal. And when Galway do lose, hey, it’s no biggie. They go racing or ating oysters or watching plays or mime artists or the Lord God knows what. As opposed to sitting there sobbing one minute and being in murderous fury the next at the horrific, scalding injustice of it all.

It’s one of the pleasures of my life to have witnessed Galway’s resurrection in the ‘nineties, from the days when you had about a dozen turning up for training as they worked through the horrors of their 1983 choke-job.

There isn’t a Mayo man or woman whose heart didn’t sing with joy when Galway cancelled Mayo’s summer in May 25th, 1998. Oh happy day, we all said to each other leaving the ground, good old Galway will be able to build on the Maughan revolution to pox an All-Ireland against Carlow or Waterford or Kildare or someplace like that. It was such a weight off our minds.

And that’s why we’re looking forward to Sunday so much. Having seen off the appalling Tommy Lyons vista and dodged a series of bullets in London, nothing could be more wonderful this weekend for Mayo than for Galway, under yet another visiting manager, to magically weave the callow Under 21s and the wily veterans, none wilier than An Seoigeach himself, into yet another team that will storm their way to glory. Boy oh boy. I’m really looking forward to it. I can’t bloody wait.

Champions League Format Me Hat - in Defence of the Irish Summer

2011-06-20T08:30:00.000+01:00

There are three events that mark every Irish summer. They are, in reverse order, the climbing of the Reek, the saving of the hay and the well meaning but hopelessly naïve call for the GAA to scrap the Championship and replace it with a “Champions League” style competition.

Keith Barr and Mick O’Keeffe are the latest men to make this argument. You can read them yourselves, as there’s no need to break down the piece sentence by sentence here.

The reasons the Champions League style format is nonsense are many. Here are the two biggest.

Inter-county competition will always be unequal as long as there are unequal populations in the counties and unequal interest in the GAA within those counties. That is a fact of life. You might beat one of those realities, as Offaly have in their history and please God will do again, but you can’t beat both.

The only way to create an equal playing field is do away with the birth qualification for players, so that counties could pick from the same pool. The cost of that would be soul of the Association itself.

An Spailpín suspects that the single most important thing that drives the GAA is pride of place. A Mayo team that can only be filled by Mayomen is worth one hundred All-Irelands lost. A Championship team of ringers and mercenaries is worth less than nothing.

Pride of place is more important than the game for the majority of people, myself included. Inequality is the price of regional identity. It’s a price worth paying.

The second reason is given to us by Doctor Hannibal Lecter in the Silence of the Lambs. How we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? No. We begin by coveting what we see every day.

A Champions League style format doesn’t present us with things we see every day. It presents us with things we’ve never seen before. It seeks out things to covet, and ignores what we see every day, and think about every day, and look forward to every day.

A Champions League style format on the Barr/O’Keeffe model wipes out over one hundred years of history, and wishes us to pretend that a game between Mayo and Laois will have the same attraction as Mayo v Roscommon or Laois v Offaly.

Well, it doesn’t and it won’t, even though Laois played in Division 2 this year and the Ros Division 4. It might, of course, in the 125 years it’ll take the Champions League format to be as old as the current Championship, but it doesn’t seem sufficiently likely to bet the organisation’s future on it.

We don’t seek out things to covet. We covet what we know. Mayo playing Galway nearly every year isn’t boring. If Mayo playing Galway ever year is boring, then so is Christmas, so are the Galway Races, so is the Rose of Tralee and so is the US Masters. They are all infinite rhapsodies on a central theme. Always the same, always utterly different, every single time.

The Championship needs reform, of course. Even the Eifel Tower gets a soupçon of paint every now and again. An Spailpín’s own reform would be to return the Qualifiers to the Hell from whence they came. Nothing good can come of a system that supports the strong and punishes the weak. Failing that, deny a qualifier place for the current Champions, and see who takes their provincial championship seriously then.

But the chief thing An Spailpín would like to see is a little deeper analysis of what the GAA and the Championship actually are, rather than simplistic comparisons to what happens somewhere else.

Because there is nothing like the GAA Championship, anywhere. It’s doubly unique – a hugely popular amateur association that insists on loyalty of place being more important than exultation of talent.

Irish writers, poets and scientists should be pouring over this thing, and celebrating it for what it is – a unicorn, a magical mythical creature that somehow still exists in a base and materialistic world.

Instead, we get people wanting to burn the horn right off the unicorn to have it look like just another pony, and then wonder in a few years why nobody comes to see it any more.

Carthygate: RTÉ's Strange Relationship with the GAA

2011-06-09T08:30:00.000+01:00

Carthygate is a sideshow, a storm in a teacup, a seven day wonder. But what’s really interesting about the standoff between RTÉ, Brian Carthy and the League of Managers is what it tells us about GAA journalism in this country.

The superficial analysis is that the problem developed when Michaél Ó Muircheartaigh stepped down and Carthy did not step up. But it’s more complex than that. It’s to do with the fact that RTÉ doesn’t seem to fully understand just what this GAA is, and how to properly reflect the Irish people’s love affair with it.

An Spailpín is of the opinion that the issue dates back a good quarter of a century to the 1980s, when Mick Dunne retired and Micheál O’Hehir got sick. Both those men were GAA men to the marrow. They had it in their DNA.

The men who succeeded them were not of the same breed. That isn’t to say they were bad at their jobs or didn’t love their wives and children. It’s only to say when we think of a Gael, a heartland GAA supporter, Mick Dunne and Micheál O’Hehir fit the template so much better.

In a way, RTÉ were spoiled by O’Hehir. There was no learning curve for the station; they had perfection delivered to them from the off. How important was Micheál O’Hehir? People of a certain age may remember he did a series of public safety ads to tell people how to navigate level crossings. And he did that because his was the most trusted voice in Ireland. If Micheál O’Hehir said something, you knew he was telling the truth.

But once O’Hehir was struck down by a stroke, it became clear that nobody ever sat down to decide what a GAA commentator should sound like. They never sat down to determine what makes a great commentator, and what doesn’t. Other sports have international comparators; when it comes to Gaelic Games, we’re on our own.

The giant shadow of Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh has to be addressed as well. RTÉ have been happy to present Ó Muircheartaigh as a National Treasure nurtured by the National Broadcaster, making his first broadcast in 1949 and his last in 2010.

Problem is, that’s only half the story. It’s only in the past twenty years or so that Ó Muircheartaigh became the voice of Gaelic games. While O’Hehir was doing the TV commentary, Ó Muircheartaigh was not doing the radio commentary. That was being done by Liam Campbell.

Liam who? Precisely.

The voice of Gaelic Games was a part time broadcaster until Micheál O’Hehir got sick. Before that, RTÉ were quite content to only call Ó Muircheartaigh in when they needed a dig out.

But now both Micheáls are gone, and the nation is coming to the realisation that the National Broadcaster doesn’t seem to fully get the National Games. This is perhaps why the League of Managers assembled to support Carthy in the first place – he might be a drone but he’s their drone, as opposed to the sort of mind that would put together RTÉ television’s extraordinary Committee Room.

The Committee Room is like a flatpack bed that’s been assembled by someone who’s never actually seen or slept in a bed before. He or she has followed the instructions and the bits are all there but as soon as you jump the mattress is like a board or you're impaled by a rogue spring or there’s some other damn thing wrong with it. The bottom line is that you just can't sleep in it. In the case against RTÉ’s understanding of the GAA, The Committee Room would be Exhibit A.

And then there’s Carthy, the man who won’t go away. It’s reasonable to suspect that part of the reason that League of Managers has assembled to support Carthy because he is a good GAA man. A man after their own hearts.

But the problem is that Carthy isn’t being asked to be a good GAA man; he’s being asked to be a radio sports broadcaster on the single biggest sports competition on the island, bar none.

RTÉ have ignored Gaelic Games for twenty-five years. GAA journalism has survived at the station because of the people’s great love for the games and because of good men like Des Cahill who seem to survive despite RTÉ structures, rather than because of them. But now RTÉ are reaping the whirlwind of their neglect.

Brian Carthy is not a commentator whom An Spailpín enjoys. I can’t expand on that as Carthy is infamously litigious and there isn’t much dough in the blogging to give me a cushion. But if it’s a question of taking sides between Brian Carthy and RTÉ head of sport Ryle Nugent – well, it has to be the fetch and the run and the kick and the point and the score to the man from Roscommon, Brian Carthy. God help me.

How to Watch Doctor Who - A Five Step Program

2011-05-31T08:30:00.000+01:00

The sixth season of the new Doctor Who reaches its midpoint finale on Saturday. It got off to a rocky start with a confusing two-part opener, but my goodness gracious, it’s fairly hit its stride now.

Now in his second year in full command of the series, Steven Moffat has brought the old warhorse to undreamed of glories. Moffat gets Doctor Who, and utilises his considerable powers as a writer and storyteller to make some very thrilling science-fiction television. The current Doctor Who is a lustrous jewel in the BBC’s starry crown.

Only thing is, if you sit down in front of your TV this Saturday night expecting to be blown away, there’s a very good chance you’ll have no idea what all the fuss is about. That’s one of the problems with TV as an art form, you see – if a series has been on air a long time, you have more than a little catching up to do.

And if the series dates back to the 1960s, as Doctor Who does – well, I mean to say. You’d need a time machine, wouldn’t you? There are 776 episodes aired and you may count on it that at least 500 aren’t much cop.

So what, then, is Doctor Who, why is it worth my while to watch and with so many episodes out there, where on earth do I begin?

It’s worth your while to watch because the age at which Doctor Who is best enjoyed, ten, is the age when you’re imagination is at its richest and the world seems full of possibility. The makers of the Star Trek movie understood this absolutely, which is why that movie was such fun, instead of a lot of po-faced sturm und drang. Best leave that to Bergman.

Steven Moffat has returned that childlike glee and wonder to Doctor Who. The BBC run Doctor Who Proms to help introduce kids to classical music, and they are currently running a competition where kids can write their own three minute episode. What’s not to love about that? Take a look at the kids' reaction to the entrance of the monsters at last year's Proms - really, if you're not charmed, you need to see another kind of doctor entirely.

Doctor Who’s origins are the derring-doers of British popular fiction, the Richard Hannays, Bulldog Drummonds and Sherlock Holmeses, mixed with the British scientific know-how that saw the Victorians conquer the world. The Doctor might be a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, but he’s as British as Marmite.

Any further attempt to explain and we turn into Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. If you’re still interested, check out these stand alone episodes from the past six years. If you like them, then perhaps a boxset of Season 3 and, who knows, maybe even some Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee from the 1970s heyday for some hardcore exposure. Enjoy.

Blink. Season 3, Episode 10. The perfect Doctor Who story, on so many levels. Every story about time travel gives rise to paradoxes, and those paradoxes particularly engage Steven Moffat, the writer of Blink. In Blink, not only does Moffat unravel a complex timey-wimey story and ties it all up again in a perfectly formed plot arc, but he does it all with the Doctor himself sidelined, and the action led by Sally Sparrow, played by the wonderful Carey Mulligan, who went on to be Oscar nominated last year. 42 minutes of sublimity. Perfect.

Human Nature/Family of Blood. Season 3, Episodes 8 and 9. A two-parter in which the Doctor becomes human to hide from his enemies. The story is set in Edwardian antebellum England, a civilisation on the eve of its doom, and features a lovely performance by wonderful, heroic and terribly under-rated Martha Jones. In a story marred by some over-writing in the second part, Martha, a medical student having to work as a maid as part of her and the Doctor’s diguise, remarks to her friend that she likes this new teacher, John Smith, because he doesn’t discrimate against Martha because she’s a Londoner. I love that line.

Amy’s Choice. Season 5, Episode 7. Doctor Who is meant to be weird, and very few episodes have been as weird as Amy’s Choice. The Doctor and his companions find the TARDIS, the Doctor’s time machine, invaded by a Dream Lord, who is messing with their heads big style. It’s marvellous, spooky and especially interesting when we find out just who the Dream Lord actually is.

The Girl in the Fireplace. Season 2, Episode 4. The Doctor as hero. Another episode written by Moffat, in which Doctor Who returns to its roots as a program that will help kids with their history. Guest star Sophia Myles makes a very beautiful and suitably tragic Madame de Pompadour.

The Doctor’s Wife. Season 6, Episode 4. A thrilling tour de force, and the best jumping off point into the long backstory of Doctor Who. Guest written by Neil Gaiman. Marvellous. Just marvellous.

The Government's Springboard Initiative: Learning to Mix Cocktails Does Not Count as Reskilling

2011-05-26T08:30:00.001+01:00

The Irish Independent published a supplement yesterday called Springboard. It’s about getting people back to work; Springboard is described in the supplement as “the new initiative aimed at helping those who have lost their jobs to upskill and improve their chances of getting back to work again.”

Upskilling is a very necessary thing, as the skill base of Ireland’s workforce does not match the hiring needs of the market. And as Kathleen Donnelly, the Indo’s Education Editor rightly points out, qualifications are the single best protection against unemployment.

So you can imagine your regular correspondent’s disappointment and horror when a little research revealed the whole Springboard project to be an exercise in lost opportunities, waste, window dressing and despair.

People who want to reskill are encouraged to visit a website called Bluebrick.ie by the Independent supplement. According to its own about us page, “BlueBrick.ie is part of the HEA Strategic Innovation Fund project: Flexible Learning. This project represents 14 institutes of technology including DIT.”

Spidey senses should already be tingling at the clumsy prose in both those sentences. But reader, gentle reader, remove yourself for potential sources of self harm; you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

A cursory search of what’s on offer unearthed a gem, a twenty-four carat gem from DIT: they’re offering a course in Advanced Cocktail Making. Not regular now; sure any eejit could do that. This is advanced cocktail making.

You can’t just walk in off the street and do it. Oh no. “Learners should also have successfully completed the Continuing Professional Development Programme in Cocktail Making TFBS 1021 or equivalent qualification.”

How much does this course in Advanced Cocktail Making cost? Why, it costs €650. And what qualification do you get? (You know, this is my favourite bit. Out of all of this, this is my favourite).

Completion of DIT’s Advanced Cocktail Making course gets you a Certificate in Continuing Professional Development, which scores an eight on the National Framework of Qualifications. The same as an Honours Bachelor Degree or a H Dip. So, reading left to right, we have the guy with the B Comm who’s running a business, every educator in Ireland and Tom Cruise in the 1988 movie Cocktail, all on the same training and skill level.

Is this a freak result, as can happen? So what if a guy who’s working in the hospitality industry – about the only indigenous industry we have – wants to egg his pudding a biteen? What else is an offer at DIT?

I’m so glad you asked. DIT will charge you €670 for a course in Advanced Wine Studies. You have to have taken Wine Studies regular first, of course, before your brain is able for “deepening the knowledge of the matching of food and wine in terms of taste, quality and price.” Again, you can’t just walk in off the street.

To say you couldn’t make it up is a cliché. But my Lord and my God, you couldn’t make this stuff up. And more pertinently, why would you want to? Aren’t things bad enough as they are?

The mission statement for Springboard on page 4 of the supplement says its purpose is to develop employability skills. You can paint An Spailpín blue and call him a smurf if doing courses in Advanced Cocktail Making or Advanced Wine Studies makes anyone more employable in Ireland, 2011.

One hit, one, from a Bluebrick.ie search for German when the EU has never been more important. Carlow IT will charge you €300 to do a course that will get you a Certificate in German that scores a six on the National Framework of Qualifications, one higher than the Leaving Cert.

They’re running course that will give you better German than five intense years of the Leaving Cert? That’s not very easy to believe. Not least as you don’t have to the primer course, as you do in Advanced Cocktail Making or Advanced Wine Studies. For German you can just walk in off the street, because the National Framework of Qualifications presumably judges it an easier skill to pick up than mixing a gimlet or slugging a bottle of Blue Nun.

If a man were a cynic, he'd think the National Framework of Qualifications is a bit of bloody joke.

Do a Bluebrick.ie search for “cloud,” as courses on cloud computing are all over the course lists in the centre pages of the Indo supplement. Nothing.

Go to the IT, Tallaght site, which lists cloud computing courses in the supplement, and do a local search there. Nothing.

Don’t click the Gaeilge link in the Bluebrick.ie top nav. It’ll only make you sad.

Page four of the supplement tells us that “Springboard is a government initiative managed by the HEA on behalf the Department of Education and Skills.” And that part does make sense.

Because one worthless public body on its own couldn’t make as big a balls of something as this. It’s only by combining their resources that they could make a pig’s ear of such monstrosity that it wouldn’t surprise me if it were visible from space or had its own gravity.

Yes we can? Nein, wir können nicht, actually. We really, really can’t. God help the country. Run while you still can.

Well Done The Sunday Game, the Most Important Program in Ireland

2011-05-23T09:30:00.000+01:00

Des Cahill’s Sunday Game goes from strength to strength. Cahill’s tenure in the most important job in Irish television got off to a wonderful start last year when his effortlessly amiable manner put GAA men at ease, as opposed to the Defcon 1 necessary for a chat with Cahill’s immediate predecessor, Pat Spillane.

The standard of analysis on The Sunday Game is so much better than it was too. Rather than ape what’s emerging as the RTÉ Sport house style of forming panels along the Contrarian/Someone with a clue model, Cahill allows his panelists to share what they know from lifetimes in the game. Not all the panelists are great of course, but still. It’s a start.

Last night Cahill rose to another challenge, and he deserves credit for it. Sligo v Leitrim was never likely to be a feature game when Kerry, Cork and Kildare are all playing. The fact that people expect their TV sports presented in a certain way makes it hard on Irish broadcasters too, because the GAA, to its glory, is not a professional sport.

It exists in a different sort of reality and the Irish media hasn’t really come to grips with finding the correct voice for that, a voice that finds the balance between the journalist’s duty to report facts, and common decency’s duty not to hammer a guy who did his best and has to go to work in the morning. It’s very hard to strike a balance between the marquee needs of television and the pride of village needs of the ordinary GAA person.

But last night The Sunday Game came up trumps. They can’t have been expecting the story of the day to happen in Markiewicz Park on Sunday morning but it did and The Sunday Game were able to change their schedules to accommodate it.

Again, it doesn’t seem like much, featuring Leitrim’s triumphant win over Sligo first in the show rather than down the order, but it was something that was beyond the Sunday Game’s newsroom colleagues at six and at nine o’clock.

Is this because RTÉ have upped their game in the light of Newstalk’s challenge on the radio? It’s possible, but it doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that there is a rising standard in the way the games are covered. Each can make the other better by forcing excellence, instead of settling for the mediocrity that comes from monopoly.

Your correspondent was contacted on Twitter during the weekend over some robust criticism of a GAA piece on The Journal on Friday night, since taken down. My friend told me, in not so many words, that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and, as such, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone so medieval in my remarks.

And I take that on board. Few things are as hateful as bullies. But it’s also important to have standards and if we don’t excoriate the mediocre we can never identify the good. So hail, then, The Sunday Game, for not going through the motions and giving Leitrim their due.

GAA isn’t like other sports. There is nothing more local than the GAA and it’s from this local rivalry that the organisation derives its great strength. The GAA doesn’t exist in the same world of glamour as English soccer or European rugby. But for the people of Roscommon and Letrim in the joyous three weeks of anticipation ahead of them, it’s Heaven descended unto the Earth.

The GAA means nothing in the world of Eurovision or X-Factor or Glenda and Rosanna. It exists somewhere else; in shops where people get messages, marts where farmers look and don’t buy, bars that sell pints of special and locals keep money for funeral pints in jars. It’s outside church gates and chip shops and petrol stations and all the places where people meet to talk and ask well; how do you think they’ll do on Sunday? It’s a magical place, really. I think they call it “Ireland.”

Queen Elizabeth's Visit to Ireland: The Father Noel Furlong Connection

2011-05-16T09:30:00.001+01:00

Is anybody else wondering just which tourists the nation hopes to attract as a result of the visit of the Queen of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to this slice of a country this week?

At a guess, people who enjoy visiting cities with deserted streets and heavy police presences will flock to Erin’s green shore as a result of this visit. We've read of rings of steel all week, and there were so many Gardaí in high-vis jackets strolling in pairs around Dublin on Saturday evening that one couldn’t help but wonder if there were that many members of Dublin Metropolitan Police on the trails of Dan Breen and Michael Collins back in the day.

As well as a tourism opportunity for those with taste for cities where cops outnumber people, the other purpose of Elizabeth’s visit was to show that we, the Irish nation, have “moved on.” Well, the ring of steel security has fairly knocked that one on the head.

It’s an extraordinary visit where we, the nation, are not allowed to meet our visitor, and anybody who does meet her will be carefully vetted first. If we had “moved on,” we wouldn’t have to lock down the streets of the capital city for the visit of a little old lady.

The streets of that same capital will be thronged the week after for Barack Obama, and not even the “Irish” Anti-“War” Movement are kicking up about that. People will fly American flags in a way that you cannot imagine them flying Union Jacks, or being let fly them.

That contrasts shows exactly how much we’ve moved on. We haven’t moved on at all, and just because people wish it doesn’t make it so. The world isn’t like that.

So who thought a visit from the British Monarch would be a good idea? An Spailpín wonders if the people who talked about “moving on” were just using it as an excuse, and if Elizabeth’s visit isn’t just Castle Catholics – who haven’t gone away you know – finally getting their wish to turn the clock back to before the Solohead Beg ambush in 1919.

People are certainly entitled to aspire to being ruled by a British monarch again, as in the dear old days, and God knows they’ve been out in numbers lately. But what An Spailpín doesn’t think people are entitled to do is put the city on high alert at a cost of many millions to prove something – our having “moved on” – that patently isn’t so.

We haven’t moved on. Not because of any fault on Elizabeth’s part. Elizabeth has been one of her countries greatest ever sovereigns by any measurement, but because of ourselves, because we’ve made such a shocking balls of running the country without help from Westminster. Everything that’s wrong here is our own damned fault.

An Spailpín hopes nothing bad happens the Queen on her visit here. Anybody who picks on an eighty-five year old woman has something the matter with them. An Spailpín also hopes that nobody gets shot in the North in order for as foul a pack of traitors as Ireland has been cursed with (and we’ve had some doozies down the years) to make headlines for their own fully evil and utterly traitorous purposes.

But chiefly, above all, An Spailpín feels deeply sorry for the ordinary people of Ireland, who are getting another kick in the head from their ruling elite. On Saturday, driving through the town and looking at the security in place to enable an occasion for which citizens didn’t ask, have no interest in, will be inconvenienced by and will then be stiffed with the bill, it struck me that the perfect metaphor for where we are now was in an episode of Father Ted called “Hell.”

The Irish nation is the youth group trapped in a horrible little caravan in a horrible little caravan park. All we want is for the suffering to end but we can’t say so because we don’t know how to escape.

The elite who govern us, the muppets who think we’ve moved on and people shouldn’t be negative when they’re hunched over from debt and worry and too much Morgan Kelly, are represented by Father Noel Furlong, the worst kind of trendy priest, dancing jigs and telling us how happy we are, are you happy, isn’t this great, isn’t this wonderful, aren’t we all having such fun? And outside, the rain continues to pour relentlessly down.

God save the Queen? Let God save Ireland first. The Queen, with the greatest respect to her, can paddle her own canoe.

Mayo Championship Preview 2011

2011-05-11T09:30:00.000+01:00

The fifteenth of August is the day of the fair in the great town of Belmullet, sentinel between the sweet county Mayo and the wild and wasteful ocean. They will talk about football in the bars in Belmullet on the 15th of August, because they must. What else is there?

What determines whether or not James Horan’s first year in charge of Mayo has been a success or a failure will depend on whether or not that football talk in Belmullet is looking back at a quarter-final loss or looking forward to a semi-final. That’s the measuring stick.

So far James Horan has been a complete success since he was appointed manager. Horan has been a success because he was appointed in the first place, showing that the Board put football ahead of money. They may have needed a twitch on the bridle along the way but no harm, no foul.

The second success of James Horan has been a perfect League campaign. Mayo did not get relegated, and Horan looked at as many players in as many positions as he could.

People have chosen to see Mayo’s scutching against Dublin as a sign that Mayo are in trouble. It’s the opposite. Horan never cared about the result. If he did, he wouldn’t have waited until the second half to make his first substitution. Horan had bigger fish to fry.

Horan got the name of Mr Mix-’Em-Up in his team selections. The smallest number of changes he made between one game and the next was six, but he made eleven changes once and ten three times. Horan was determined to look at everybody and give everybody a chance.

What’s particularly fascinating is when you chart out his teams over the League, you see a very clear method to his madness. Changes appeared random, but there are clearly patterns to be seen. (And we have to take a moment to once again salute the great Willie Joe of the Mayo GAA Blog, without whom these stats would have been more or less impossible to track down).

Three players started all the League games – Ger Cafferkey, Kevin McLoughlin and Andy Moran. Only Cafferkey always started in the same position. McLoughlin was either seven or twelve. Andy Moran was 10 once, twice 11, twice 12, and twice 14.

As the games went on, a clear evolution in Horan’s thinking became clearer. He knows whom he wants where. He’s given players chances – Tom Parsons started three games out of seven for Horan before being dropped from the panel.

Horan has problem positions, of course, but who doesn’t? His biggest problem may be where to play Aiden O’Shea – O’Shea’s been most effective at midfield, but that then leaves the question of whom to play at 13. Who takes the frees is another question. Or who goes where in the full back line.

But it’s always been the Mayo way to look at what’s not there rather than what is. It’s a loser mentality that’s held the county back for so long. So let’s treat ourselves for once and see what’s there rather than what isn’t – the thrilling prospect of a summer lit up by the deep and terrible threat that the inside line possesses.

Mayo haven’t had an inside line that’s been feared in years and years. But suddenly Jason Doherty, Horan’s great find of the year, and Alan Freeman, the one thing to come from last year’s disaster in Sligo, have claimed the 15 and 14 jerseys. They’re both young and unseasoned, but that has as many benefits as it has dangers. If Mayo can get ball to those men, they can do damage.

Defence continues to be a work in progress but it does seem that the players are there. Tom Cuniffee, the Feeneys, Cathal Hallinan, Keith Higgins, James Burke, Kevin McLoughlin, Cafferkey – the men are there. It’s just a question of where to slot them.

The shot in the arm that the Under-21 success has provided Galway is a headache that Horan didn’t need, but no matter. Even if Galway do win in June or if there’s a disaster in the Connacht Final, the odds are against Mayo getting a disastrous draw in the qualifiers. Mayo have the men and the manager to make the last eight. After that, it’s all to play for. James Horan has given the people of Mayo reason to hope once more. Maigh Eo abú.

Football 2011 Preview: The Either/Or Championship?

2011-05-10T09:30:00.000+01:00

Will 2011 be the Either/Or Championship? A glance at the odds before the slow fuse is lit this weekend in Ballybofey suggests that the Championship will be won by either Cork or Kerry and everyone else is just making up the numbers.

Cork are 5/2 best price, Kerry threes, Dublin fours, Tyrone eights and then it’s a remarkable 14/1 the field. It’s hard to remember a year when the Championship seemed so striated between haves and have-nots.

Are the oddsmakers wrong? It’s hard to make that case. Cork are clearly the best team in country now, as their victory against Dublin in the League final proved. This current Cork team haven’t an iconic player like Corkery or Tompkins or JBM in his day – although An Spailpín must confess a huge regard for Noel O’Leary, without whose shutting down of Martin Clarke Cork wouldn’t have won last September – but they enjoy a depth of talent that cannot be matched by any other county. Michael Collins’ question of who’ll take his place if they take him away is regularly answered by the men who sit on the bench for the Rebel County.

Kerry are Cork’s biggest threat, for two reasons. Firstly, because they are everybody’s biggest threat, being Kerry, and secondly because they can get under Cork’s skin and into Cork’s heads like no other team can. When doubt whispers in Cork ears at times of crisis, he speaks in a Kerry accent and prefaces his remarks with “yerra.”

Against Kerry’s return is the fact that the team is aging and young players are not coming through. Which doesn’t mean they won’t of course. God only knows what’s springing down from a mountain somewhere down there now, with a kitbag slung over the shoulder and the rich tradition flowing in his veins. It would be a fool of astonishing proportions to underestimate Kerry at any time.

Dublin’s loss against Cork in that League final might be the best thing to happen to them. If it hasn’t killed them it will make them stronger; this is the nature of things. Dublin have some very talented players currently with Bernard Brogan being as good as there is in the country right now, but the mental frailties remain and there are some players who may crumble midst shot and shell in high summer. But again, it’s looking like a thin year and someone has to win it – Dublin have strong reasons to hope.

After that, the deluge. Tyrone are in an impossible position, and we can only hope that they find some sort of resolution in getting on with their lives, playing football and doing what they’ve always done in the light of another tragedy that’s descended on them. God be good to them as they do their best for home and hearth.

Down and Donegal remain as enigmatic as ever. Donegal have Michael Murphy, and they will live and die by him. There are worse men to pin your hopes on. Down aren’t as reliant on Martin Clarke, or at least they shouldn’t be. Maybe if that penny drops, that Clarke can’t do it all on his own, they’ll be stronger. It’s always hard to know how Down will go in any given year. I suspect they seldom know themselves.

Leinster is a province in trouble. Dara Ó Cinnéide wrote some years ago that Meath is the bellweather county for the GAA’s future – a rural county that’s quickly becoming urbanised. Ó Cinnéide thought that if the GAA could capture that urban youth then the Association’s future in 21st Century Ireland is secure. So far, the signs aren’t promising.

It’s hard to know what to make of Kildare and Laois, who have been worse and better than expected so far this year. The sad conclusion is that it’s unlikely either are up to much. Things are grim in Leinster.

In the blessed West, Sligo don’t seem to have got over last year’s Connacht Final while Roscommon have successfully restored their tradition. Leitrim will be hoping the return of Emlyn Mulligan will extend their summer while Galway have seen a winter of discontent made potentially glorious summer by their remarkable and kind of frightening Under-21 All-Ireland Champions. Galway have been saying for years that they don’t have players. They’re waiting in the long grass, just the way they like it.

Mayo? Mayo preview tomorrow.

Can Scotland Succeed Where Ireland Has Failed?

2011-05-09T09:30:00.000+01:00

For the first time since the Duke of Cumberland routed the Jacobites in less than an hour on Culloden’s moor over 300 years ago, Scotland has a chance to take her place among the nations of the Earth once more. The SNP won an against-the-odds majority in the British elections last week and are determined to hold a referendum to see if the Scots want independence. If independence is granted, can the Scots make a better job of it than the Irish have? There are four reasons why she can.

Home Rule
The Scots have a number of advantages going for them. The first is that they are nominally independent as it is. Ireland was directly ruled by Westminster until 1921. We never got a chance to practice governance, and perhaps that’s one of the reasons why we’re so terrible at it. The Scottish Parliament is supersized local council, but still. It’s a start.

National Resources
One of the reasons behind the calls for Scottish independence is that the Scottish economy is fundamentally different from the British. This is not an argument that was made here. There were no economic arguments made here for independence, other than not-very-grounded notion that raising families on nineteen acres of bog and rushes was viable.

The reasons behind Irish independence were cultural and religious, not economic. For an independent Ireland to survive in the 1920s, it was necessary that the people compensate for relative economic penury with their love of their language and the Catholic religion. After ninety years, I think we can mark Plan A down as a bust.

No Civil War
The single worst way to conclude a fight for national independence is by having a civil war immediately afterwards. It clouds the goals that were aimed for in the beginning, and the achievements after independence has been granted. Nobody wins, everybody loses.

Also, it’s possible that the civil war is the direct reason why cronyism is so endemic to Irish public life. Garret Fitzgerald, a statesman whom this blog wishes all the best in his current ill-health, places great store on the statesmanship of the initial governments of the state, unlike what he sees as the corrupt, Mohair-suited governments that followed. An Spailpín suspects this analysis may a little simplistic.

The first aim of first governments was to stabalise the state, which is why they executed those who remained in the IRA in the numbers that they did. Bad things happen in wars. But is the more worrying long-term legacy of that policy of stablisation at all costs the inability of the institutions of state to self-regulate, and to purge themselves of waste, inefficiency and corruption?

The effort to establish the institutions of state has left an incorrect weighing in the balance in our public life. The state and her institutions – such as her banks, for instance – are not questioned when they should be, and when irregularities are discovered, all the machinery of state rolls into action to defend the institution rather than the citizen. There was no need for legal representation at the tribunals if nothing said at a tribunal can be used in a court of law. It was a mistake, born out of this tradition of protecting the state from subversion. That the good name of a public institution or deed is more important than justice being done to a citizen.

It is extremely unlikely that any result in a Scottish referendum will lead to a civil war. For that they should be grateful. Ireland is still reaping a bitter harvest from hers.

A More Subtle and Nuanced Understanding of Sovereignty
A Scottish MP made the point to the great Kirsty Wark on the BBC's Newsnight on Friday night that sovereignty is not a Boolean concept – it not a question of fully on or fully off. If that is the widespread view, it shows a great level of maturity and understanding of the state in the modern, multi-cultural 21st century world.

We are not so lucky. The blather and bleatings we’ve heard here about sovereignty shows that we really don’t understand what is it is to be a sovereign people, ninety years after that sovereignty was granted.

Our current disaster is not an accident. It’s been inevitable and we can only hope and pray that the national debate which currently features interest groups saying cut anything but my cake can rise to a level where we discuss what it is to be sovereign and what we’re willing to do as a people to ensure that sovereignty continues. In the meantime, best of luck to the Scots in the months and years ahead.

The Man from the ECB

2011-05-03T09:30:00.001+01:00

Your country hasn’t any money,
it’s well and truly broke
You thought you had dollars by the barrel
but they’ve all gone up in smoke
I’ve orders here from Brussels,
this thing can never be
So I’m coming for your life,
your money and your wife
Says the man from the ECB

I’m afraid the blade is slashing left and right,
Cutting here now, trimming there now
I’m slashing day and night, at everything in sight
Confiscating now, amalgamating now
I’ll hack and I’ll saw by order of the law
And I won’t even stop for me tea
And if that doesn’t catch it
I’ll come at it with me hatchet
Says the man from the ECB

Maseratis heavy on the diesel
worry people with a pension plan
I’m plagued with beards in SIPTU,
and concerns for the working man
Everyone always has the paw out,
all I hear is me, me, me,
It’s no wonder that you’re busted
when you look at who you trusted
Says the man from the ECB.

I’m afraid the blade is slashing left and right,
Cutting here now, trimming there now
I’m slashing day and night, at everything in sight
Confiscating now, amalgamating now
I’ll hack and I’ll saw by order of the law
And I won’t even stop for me tea
And if that doesn’t catch it
I’ll come at it with me hatchet
Says the man from the ECB

You’re country’s falling all to pieces,
it’ll never stay afloat
While it’s always jobs for the boys here,
and nobody rocks the boat.
You haven’t much of a chance here
when you’re not from the right fam-i-lee
And you can think of how they failed ya
when you’ve moved out to Australia
Says the man from the ECB.

I’m afraid the blade is slashing left and right,
Cutting here now, trimming there now
I’m slashing day and night, at everything in sight
Confiscating now, amalgamating now
I’ll hack and I’ll saw by order of the law
And I won’t even stop for me tea
And if that doesn’t catch it
I’ll come at it with me hatchet
Says the man from the ECB

The Late Late: Guests from Aldi, 24 Carat Diamonds Left at Home

2011-04-26T09:30:00.000+01:00

The galling thing about the Late Late Show’s booking policy isn’t just the pool of dodos from which guests are regularly harvested, painful though that pool is. It’s that the Late Late is remiss in its duty as the cultural flagship of the nation in bringing actual culture to the people, and churns out a lot of old gas from Frances Black, Eamon Holmes and Charles Bird instead.

An Spailpín was reminded of this when buying a CD recently. The CD featured Seán Ó Sé as a guest star of the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, which is a development that An Spailpín thinks worthy of a Late Late special all to itself. Bear with me for a few hundred words, and then decide if this isn’t of greater import to the nation than Ronan Keating or Mary Byrne.

Who is Seán Ó Sé?
Seán Ó Sé is a retired schoolteacher in Cork. But in his spare time he is one of the saviours of Irish traditional music. The economy is buggered, the language has been burning diesel for over a hundred years and survives from sheer spite alone, but one thing we did do right is that we saved the music.

The rising tide of the 1960s US folk scene helped in no small measure of course, t say nothing of the huge archive at the BBC offices in Shepherd’s Bush, but the indigenous impetus to save the music came from Seán Ó Riada and Ceoltóirí Chulann. Ó Riada showed that Irish traditional music was every bit as sophisticated as the great musics of Europe if arranged in a similar style and all of a sudden the nation realised that we didn’t have to hide fiddles under the bed like they were some sign of hopeless boggery. The music took her place among the musics of the world and hasn’t looked back.

Seán Ó Sé was the singer in Seán Ó Riada’s band. Why Ó Sé didn’t move on when Ceoltóirí mutated into the Chieftains after Ó Riada’s early death in 1970 I don’t know, but Ó Sé is still an unquestioned hero of Irish music and culture and should be treated as such even if he never cleared his throat to sing An Poc ar Buile again.

But he’s done even more than that. Recently retired from teaching, Ó Sé is using his retirement to push the boundaries of music even further, and the collaboration with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band is further evidence of that.

And Why’s That?
Because although he loved traditional music, Seán Ó Riada had very clear ideas of what traditional music is and what it isn’t. And Seán Ó Riada particularly despised ceilí bands. He hated them. He said they had “all the musical integrity of a bluebottle buzzing around in a jamjar.” It was a rotten and unfair to thing to say – not least for a man who played the harpsichord himself, hardly the prettiest of instruments.

Ceilí bands had their advocates too, not least the late Ciarán Mac Mathúna, who pointed out that buy playing them at dances ceilí bands saved countless tunes that could have been lost. But there has always been that snobbery associated with ceilí bands, that that are not fully of the tradition.

Crossing No Man’s Land
And that’s what makes the Ó Sé collaboration with the Turloughmore so significant. Ó Sé has crossed no man’s land to join the opposition. In recording a CD with the Turloughmore Ceilí Band, Seán Ó Sé has declared music to be all one, streaming out from the forts of Tuatha de Danann and the other weird peoples that have lived here before us.

If that magic is captured in the nets of the Pipers’ Club or Ceoltas Ceoltóirí Éireann or the hammer men on stage at a hooley while the dancers belt the floor, what matter, what odds? Isn’t it all music all the same, and all particularly Irish, resonant and harmonious with the Irish soul?

That’s what An Spailpín thinks a Late Late Show should be about. The Chieftains and Ó Sé talking about Ó Riada and what he did. Jim McCann and Barney McKenna talking about the folk singers, now the Clancys all roam the other worlds. Planxty and the Bothy Band and Altan to bring it up to date. And then a huge band of the whole damned lot of them, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, giving it socks on the Rocky Road to Dublin.

And what do I get instead? “Ryan Tubridy chats to Charlie Bird about his new documentary series of legendary Antarctic explorer, Tom Crean. Mary McEvoy talks about her new book, Ireland's greatest slimmer gives advice on how to shed the pounds, Ali Hewson and Adi Roche talk about the Chernobyl Children and Jessie J performs her hit single, 'Price Tag'.”

Price Tag, indeed. Go gcuire Seán Ó Sé an dea-chath fós, go gcasa sé a amhráin go binn go bráth, agus go mbronntar an ómós atá tuilte do lá breá éigin gan moil.

Are Lyric FM Presenters Fit for Purpose?

2011-04-21T09:30:00.002+01:00

Marty Whelan is a gentleman. Marty Whelan is self-effacing, witty, personable, and a professional to his fingertips. He’s a gentleman and an example to whole younger generation of broadcasters who are not fit to hand him his pearly hairbrushes before he goes on camera. But my God, Marty Whelan has no business presenting the Breakfast Show on Lyric FM.

When Lyric FM celebrated its tenth birthday two years ago its head honcho told the nation that the great thing about Lyric FM is that they put music first. The most important thing for them when choosing presenters is the music. Everything else comes second.

An Spailpín has no reason to doubt this man. But it does seem a coincidence that, in as small a broadcasting pond as Ireland’s, the persons with sufficient classical music knowledge, appreciation and ability to share that appreciation all happen to be on the RTÉ payroll.

Marty Whelan. Lorcan Murray. Geri Maye. Gay Byrne. Frank McNamara, for God’s sake. After a while, there’s just too many of them for it to be a coincidence.

George Hamilton, in fairness to him, is an exception to this. He witters on during his Saturday show, certainly, but no more so than he does when Aiden McGeady is closing in on goal and the nation holds its breath, wondering how McGeady’s going to screw it up this time.

But behind the bonhomie there’s an astute and very cultured mind who knows what good music is and who can teach you so that you know too. You couldn’t imagine Clive Tyldesley speaking ex tempore on Wagner and the Tristan Chord, for instance.

The ability to teach is the single-most important asset a presenter on Lyric should have. Classical music is not like pop music, no matter how much people may try to pretend it is.

To get it, unless you’re blessed with an innate musical sense, you’re going to have to do your homework and be told what to listen for. Or else have a presenter whose love for the music is so overpowering that he or she can’t help but sweep you away.

Marty Whelan, for all his gifts, just can’t do it. He’s still a wonderful radio presence – An Spailpín has watched his breakfast milk curdle while Frank McNamara is speaking – but Marty Whelan’s particular schtick isn’t suited to classical music. It’s just not.

This You Tube pianoman, one of the anonymous specialists that light up that marvelous website, is the sort of guy that should be presenting classical music on the radio. The love comes through all the time. Leave Marty to take over from Derek Mooney or something. Wouldn’t we all be so much better off?

Support the Philly McGuinness Memorial Park

2011-04-12T09:30:00.000+01:00

This day week is the first anniversary of the death of Philly McGuinness. Philly McGuinness was a 26-year-old engineer from Mohill, County Leitrim, who had his whole life ahead of him when he togged for Mohill in a league match against Melvin Gaels with his brothers on Saturday, April 18th, last year.

There is no more typical vignette of Irish rural life than the men of a football family playing for the parish in a league game. All of the brothers had played for the county; they knew what they were about. There was no reason for this to be any different than any of the other league games Philly had played or had ahead of him.

But it was different. At some stage during the course of the game Philly took a knock, as happens in football. The knock was bad. He hit his head, and everybody knew he was in trouble. Philly McGuinness was rushed to Sligo Hospital and then on to Beaumont in Dublin but he never regained consciousness. He died on April 19th, 2010.

The club hasn’t forgotten him, and doesn’t plan to. The Mohill GAA Grounds have been re-named in his honour and memory, and the club are organizing a draw for this Easter weekend to raise funds for the redevelopment.

Contact details for anyone who wants to buy a ticket are available on the Philly McGuinness Facebook page. Ring the mobile number or drop them a mail and they’ll sort you out. The prizes are worth winning too, with a ten grand total prize fund, two weekend breaks in Lough Rynn and the Landmark Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon, and spot prizes too.

We hear so much chat about the GAA and what it means. Martin Breheny will almost certainly churn out another of his why-oh-why pieces about why the GAA doesn’t market itself better between now and the League Final. Clubs like Mohill don’t need the GAA marketed to them, but we, the nation, need GAA clubs like Mohill possibly more than ever before as we fight for our very survival as a nation.

God have mercy on those whom He has called home before their time. Ar A dheis go raibh anam uasal Philly, sásta saor ó gach buartha an domhain crua seo.

Tipperary North v Dublin South: Who are the Real Eejits?

2011-04-11T09:30:00.002+01:00

Mr Michael Lowry, Teachta Dála, was not wrong when he told Dáil Éireann two weeks ago that the electorate of Tipperary North were every bit as sophisticated as any other electorate in the country. If anything, he was being coy.

The electorate of Tipperary North, and of so many other constituencies, see the electoral system as it is, and not as people would wish it to be. The disjunct between politics as they are in Ireland and politics as some people would like them to be is to be seen in its purest form in the Lowry case. It is the different between the world of what exists in fact and what exist in theory only.

In the real world, what actual censure is on Michael Lowry? None. Some people don’t like him. Some people don’t like An Spailpín Fánach either, and it wasn’t necessary to make millionaires out of senior counsels to find that out. But Michael won’t be seeing jail anytime soon. Lowry has got clean away and, if an election were held in the morning, Lowry would top the poll yet again.

That’s the reality, and that’s the reality that people in Tipperary North are voting on. It’s all very well for the commentariat or the blogosphere or three just men on the high stools in Mulligan’s witter on about democracy and standards in public office, but people who live and work in the real world are very quickly disabused of any romantic notions when they see nature red in tooth and claw. They know what works and what doesn’t, and that all else is just so much chat.

When the people of Tipperary North cast their ballots, they are casting their ballots on the electoral system as they understand it, and not as it’s presented to them on RTÉ. They are fully aware that one TD isn’t worth a chocolate fireplace when it comes to shaping the future of the state. That’s all decided elsewhere, and there is no role for a single TD on his or her own in any of this.

The voters of Dublin South – because the great unspoken assumption of Irish politically commentary is that the voters of Dublin South are the polar opposites of Tipperary North in terms of sophistication and, God between us and all harm, intelligence – may think they were voting for “change” when they voted for Peter Mathews and Shane Ross, but neither of those gentlemen will affect their electorates' lives on whit. A parish pumper, however, can, and the evidence is all around.

Because as well as knowing what a TD can’t do, the electorate also knows what he or she can do. They know that a waiting list for a hospital appointment can be shortened from six months to six days if a TD picks up a telephone. They know that issues over planning can be made go away. They know that their local TD can solve a whole load of problems and he’s only one phone call away.

The people of Tipperary North fully understand that the base role of a TD is to bypass the civil service. Does this then make the civil service redundant? Not at all; soft jobs in the civil service are also perks that can be sorted out by the local man.

This is the Irish system. This is how Ireland is governed. We trade in favours, in power, in leverage, in influence. And if a man like Michael Lowry makes a few pounds out of that himself, sure what harm? If it wasn’t him, wouldn’t it be some other buck? The faces may change, but the dealing goes on forever.

Garret Fitzgerald regularly writes in the Irish Times that the nature of the Irish electoral system is such that it plays to the worst aspects of the Irish character, and he was right. We can be a supremely generous people – the generosity of time and effort that people put into their GAA clubs is proof of that. But we are also a people who nod and wink and sort each other out.

Talk about doing away with Seanad or cutting down the numbers of state cars is a bottle of smoke. It doesn’t make any difference. Political reform means stopping and punishing TDs from trading in favours and influence and harnessing the generosity of spirit that gives the nation the GAA. But until that happens, it’s extremely difficult to blame the people of Tipperary North for voting for a man who can get their children into school and their sick into hospital, or not to wonder just what the electorate of Dublin South thought Shane Ross or Peter Matthews would achieve, exactly. Politics begins at home. Not in the Seanad.

The GAA, and the Need to Honour Constable Ronan Kerr and the PSNI

2011-04-06T09:30:00.003+01:00

An Spailpín was struck by the tremendous dignity of Constable Ronan Kerr’s mother as she spoke to the media in the aftermath of his murder in a car bomb. Let his death not be in vain, she said.

And she was right. Such a grim reminder of the past shouldn’t be filed as just one of those things. An acceptable level of violence, as Reggie Maulding once put it.

So maybe it’s an opportunity for the biggest national organisation on the island to make a gesture, and say we are all Irish people of equal stature, irrespective of code or creed, Catholic, Protestant or Dissenter.

Wouldn’t it be great if the GAA were to organise a challenge match between the PSNI and either a Garda selection or a GAA all-star selection? The Garda team is the obvious comparator, but the Guards will have a better pick and having the PSNI boys hammered won’t make anyone feel better.

So how either a GAA All-Star team of veterans whose age would have drawn some of their sting to give the PSNI a game, or else appoint some GAA players policemen for a day, and let them line out on the PSNI side to even things up a bit?

Whatever. The details don’t really matter. What does matter is if the game were on. And not on some back pitch in Belfast. A full house day in the summer – maybe one of the August Bank Holiday weekend games, a day out for the PSNI with all the trimmings? President, dignitaries, the Artane Band, the works.

The game would show that everyone on the island is a Gael, irrespective of who they are, what they do for a living, where they live or whether they prefer their spuds waxy or floury. It would say that none of that matters. That we have drawn a line under history, and old disputes and old squabbles that aren’t worth any mother’s tears.

That a man or woman who wants to be policemen and maybe buy a house and meet a nice nurse some night in Coppers and set up a house and family and raise their children to be good and honest people should be allowed to do that. It really doesn’t seem like much to ask.

I saw something on Sunday about a visit to Croke Park by Queen Elizabeth of England. I didn’t like it. I would like to see a PSNI team play and made a fuss over in Croke Park first. It would mean that we are able to look after our own affairs on the island, and that we recognize neither border nor boundary between Irish people. The Queen’s visit isn’t necessary. Celebrating our brothers and sisters in the PSNI as the island tries to repair the hurt of centuries is.

God have mercy on Constable Kerr. I hope a PSNI team can play in Croke Park this summer so we can celebrate his life and what he tried to achieve.

Mayo Aren't That Far Away

2011-03-31T09:30:00.000+01:00

There is an air of grimly facing the inevitable about Cork’s trip to Castlebar on Sunday. Cork were sweetly obliging the last time Mayo played them in the League regular season, rolling over to have their tummies tickled by the banks of the Lee. They then turned around in a week to have a loud last laugh by carpet-bombing Mayo in the League Final and setting up the further Mayo humiliations to come.

Cork are now the best football team in the country. There is no disputing that fact. Having finally won that All-Ireland last year, their option now is to win a few more, and claim definitive greatness. If they leave it only at one, you can rest assured their witty neighbours to the north won’t be long reminding them that, yerra, 2010 was a soft one.

And for all that, An Spailpín isn’t despairing about summer prospects for Mayo. If anything, the summer looks rather good.

Of all the bizarre events of that hammering from Dublin last Sunday week at Croke Park, An Spailpín was struck by the fact that James Horan made no substitutions until the second half. How many times will teams go down 4-4 to 0-2 after fifteen minutes in any grade without at least one of the backs getting the curly finger?

So either Horan didn’t notice that Mayo were getting a complete scutching, or else he didn’t care. An Spailpín has no idea, but I’d guess that Horan knew it was happening alright, but whatever was on his mind was more important than two league points against Dublin.

If not, why wouldn’t he have hauled poor Chris Barrett out of there, and sent Ger Cafferkey back? If Mayo have as bad a start as that in the Championship, you can rest assured Horan will do something. But for the League; no. Results aren’t what interest him just yet.

Which doesn’t mean Mayo are playing to lose, of course, or that relegation doesn’t bother them. It’s just a question of relativity, just as we all now realise in the modern world that, while getting a pay cut stinks, it’s still better than losing your job.

Relegation wouldn’t be that bad if, for all his tweaking, Horan can hit on a winning formula in the summer. Connacht isn’t as weak as has been made out, and if Galway can do something against the rising Ross in the Under-21 Connacht Final in Salthill this weekend, that might do their senior team no harm either.

Nor are Mayo necessarily doomed to the trapdoor either. How bothered are Cork about a spin to Castlebar? The League is all about judgement. Cork know from Mayo last year that League wins aren’t worth a damn. It’s only about your last game in the League, and how that sets you up for the summer. Stronger or weaker? Better to suffer now than later.

Issues remain with Mayo, and there are issues with nearly every line of the team. But this Mayo. That will always be the way. It’s too early for weeping by the lovely sweet banks of the Mayo. Wait until the summer, and see what the good God brings.

So. Farewell Then, Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-24T09:30:00.000Z

The late Elizabeth Taylor was the inspiration for what is, to An Spailpín’s mind, one of the great gallant comments about any woman. Richard Burton, the man with whom she would be associated more than any other, wrote in his diary that the first time he saw Taylor he wanted to laugh out loud. It seemed the only correct reaction to her staggering beauty. Wasn’t it a lovely thing to say?

Millions and millions of women wanted to be Liz Taylor. Maybe you should be careful what you wish for. Eight marriages, seven husbands, countless addictions, and all for what? Was Liz Taylor ever happy?

Liz Taylor was a child star. How many child stars have led happy and adjusted adult lives, if such things exist? Shirley Temple, maybe. Deanna Durbin. But both of those shunned the limelight once they grew up. For others, like Taylor, who lived their entire lives in its glare, it’s hard to know if it was every worth their while. Or if they even knew who they were when the light went out. Maybe the limelight itself was Taylor’s worst addiction.

Liz Taylor’s first marriage was to Nicky Hilton, when she was eighteen years old. The marriage lasted a year. Hilton was a drunk who used to beat his child bride. A woman so beautiful that Burton wanted to laugh out loud at the joy of her.

After Hilton, Taylor married a British actor called Michael Wilding, and then Mike Todd, who died in a plane clash. Eddie Fisher left his wife, Debbie Reynolds, to catch the grieving Taylor on the rebound only to get the elbow himself when Taylor hooked up with Richard Burton while they filmed Cleopatra.

Burton and Taylor were second only to John and Yoko as the iconic sixties couple. Mervyn Davies, the former Number 8 for London Welsh, Swansea, Wales and the British Lions remarked in his autobiography how odd it was to return to the London Welsh dressing room and see the most beautiful woman in the world going whiskey for whiskey at the bar with her husband.

Burton loved rugby, and Taylor too, in his way. They divorced, and remarried, and divorced again. Taylor didn’t attend Burton’s funeral in 1984. It would have been unfair on Sally Hay, Burton’s wife. Whom would the world identify as the widow?

Taylor married twice again, for reasons that are difficult to fathom. Or else painfully easy – the most beautiful woman in the world was lonely. Who wants to be Liz Taylor, really?

Her celebrity was greater than her career, although as an actress she had a considerably greater range than her only rival for the most beautiful woman in the world, Marilyn. She wasn’t funny, as Marilyn was, but Taylor could burn up the screen in an instant. Whatever it is, she had it.

Most of her pictures are dated now. She and Burton were directed by Franco Zefferilli in The Taming of the Shrew; twenty years later, the trailer to the film was used in English courses as an example as the crippling weight of the patriarchy. Neither director nor stars nor Shakespeare himself could get past the politburo in those days.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf won Taylor her second Oscar but, while it’s by no means fashionable to say so, it’s a two hour episode of Eastenders, really.

An Spailpín’s dollar for Liz Taylor’s greatest performance must be as Maggie the Cat, the role she was born to play, in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She was opposite Paul Newman, in one of his great roles. After all, it took an actor of stunning ability not to laugh out loud when Liz Taylor came into a room.

The Moriarty Report: The Most Important Irish Political Document Since the Treaty

2011-03-23T09:30:00.001Z

Yesterday’s publication of the Moriarty Tribunal report was a red letter day in the history of state. An Spailpín suspects that its publication will be like Bishop Casey’s flight in 1992; although momentous at the time, history now sees it as even more so; nothing less than the beginning of the end of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

Nothing was ever the same again after Bishop Casey’s fall, and neither shall it be after the publication of Moriarty. Whether the repercussions will be good or bad is up to ourselves; if we react quickly we can still save the country. If not…

What is the Significance of the Moriarty Report?
It is this: the case is now proven that corruption in Irish public life is by no means exclusive to one political party. The very institutions of the state are set up as such that corruption is the path of least resistance and the route to quickest results.

A whisper here, an introduction there. A phone call on a Sunday morning. A round of golf. A day at the races. Great things discussed. We could do wonders, if only. Is that all that’s holding you up? Leave it with me; I’ll see what I can do. We’ll never forget you; we’ll remember you in Paradise. Here’s something for your trouble.

None of the nods and the winks mean much in themselves. Together, they’re red rotten and stink to high Heaven. They mean that merit doesn’t win out, but that the Golden Circle shines brightly and eternally.

Why is This So Bad?
It’s bad because we’re up to our eyes in debt and are currently on our two knees before the rest of Europe giving them the poor mouth about our debt. And we’re giving them the poor mouth while paying our public servants above the European average across the board. These same public servants who are bypassed by sweetheart deals worth billions to vested interests.

Why are we paying the public servants so much again? To do what? What is the point? What results are you getting for all that money that you say you haven’t got? When the Germans ask why we don’t regulate our own affairs and save money that way, how will we reply?

What Can We Do?
We must change the way the country is governed. Changing the way the country is governed is not wishy-washy old blather about doing away with the Seanad, which is like taking off the corner-forward when you’re getting hammered in a game of football. The problems arise long before it gets up to the men inside. If people aren’t talking specifics, and coming out with a lot hot air about “real change now” now, as expertly skewered here, forget them.

An Spailpín would suggest a root and branch reform of local government. Do away with county councils, and use either provincial or super-constituency based regional areas for local government issues. Having the bins collected doesn’t require a meeting of the Jedi high council.

Reform the libel laws, so the press may operate freely. Reform the press ownership laws, so that all are held equally open to account. Punish those who abuse press freedoms; freedom of speech is too precious to let it be abused.

End the multi-seat constituencies, thus lessening the localism and clientelism in Irish politics (politics will always be local, but it need not be outrageously so). Pass new laws where those seeking to peddle political power and favours are prosecuted enthusiastically and punished severely. The only way to clear up a mess is to spare neither brush, bleach nor elbow grease. It’s time to get serious.

What If We Don’t Get Serious?
You’d think the worst case option would be that we would be no worse off, but we would be. The debt is the issue. Not just Irish debt, but the fissures that have opened all across the Eurozone as part of the global financial crisis.

The Euro was a German idea, and the Germans are now beginning to realise that maybe Europe wasn’t ready to be German in how they regulate their money. So, being realists and practical and so very, very German, they will set about seeing how to deal with that. And they will do it without hand-wringing or calling Joe Duffy or wondering why people don’t take to the streets. They’ll just get on with it, and leave sentiment far behind.

A two-tier Europe is the obvious solution. The countries who can be trusted to balance their books move ahead. The countries who are more inclined towards cheating and playing fast ones and being equally mendacious and dumb will get pushed slowly, slowly to the edge. And if they fall off, what harm? The contagion has already been limited, and the positive contribution was slight. The project moves on without them.

Are Our Politicians Capable of Seeing How Bad the Crisis Is?
The TG4 debate was seen as one of the high points of the election. An Spailpín found it depressing, and for this reason: when the leaders debated the Fine Gael proposal about the future of the language as a Leaving Cert subject, the debate was reduced to whether or not landladies in the Gaeltacht would lose income.

This is Irish politics. No vision. No big picture thinking. Irish is an important issue, as it has to do with the national identity and our very claims for being an independent nation in the first place. And instead it’s twisted, like all things are twisted, into an exercise in squeezing out another thirty or forty votes. The politicians dish out this rubbish, the nation laps it up and so the whole rigmarole goes on.

Not any more. Europe is watching, wondering when they’re getting their money back, and if the Irish are actually capable of self-governance at all. The Government, and the Irish political system’s reaction to Moriarty, which makes the craven reality of Irish politics clear, is the biggest decision facing an Irish government since Independence.

It’s up to us to decide if the country will turn a corner and be relied on to act responsibly in our public life, or are we to be feckless and hopeless poor (with a filthy rich elite of 5-8% of country – our own gentry, as Breandán Ó hEithir put it) for ever?

This is our choice. We are still a sovereign people, who still govern ourselves and can decided how we can to be governed. What are we going to do?

Political Reform now. And may God take pity on Ireland.

Beware, Beware the Ross on the Rise

2011-03-14T09:00:00.001Z

Michael Foley of the Sunday Times is one of today’s best GAA journalists, but he was wrong to write a fortnight ago that this year’s Connacht Championship would not be a good one. It may prove one of the all-time greats.

It seems an article of faith in the national media that Connacht is a two horse race, just as Munster is. Foley went a step further, by suggesting that Galway’s current and undeniable decline is a reflection of a fuller provincial malaise.

Michael Foley is wrong. Galway are in decline, certainly, and it’s hard to see how they’ll turn it around by the summer. They’re bunched. But Connacht is bigger than Galway alone.

Leitrim welcome the return of Emlyn Mulligan and with him around they are always a threat if they don’t get scutched at the back. No team has more to prove than Sligo after calving in Connacht Final last year. Mayo aren’t too bad but Roscommon is the team that An Spailpín is keeping a close eye on this year. The primrose and blue have a lean and hungry look, and it’s not just coming from spending too much time at one of Luke Flanagan’s clinics.

The two horse race analogy was never correct in the first place. Roscommon teams are not the strangers to September that analogy would have you believe. Roscommon have not as many Nestor Cups as Mayo or Galway, but they have more provincial football titles than the four Munster counties who aren’t Cork or Kerry combined.

The backdoor works against Roscommon, and it’s possible that their missing decade was due to psychological damage after being the first real victims of the back door. Being managed by Tommy “Tom” Carr didn’t help either, of course.

But that was then and this is now. A veteran St Brigid’s team will face Crossmaglen in the All-Ireland Club Final on St Patrick’s Day, hoping to go one better than the Clann na Gael teams of the early ‘nineties. An unrated Roscommon Under-21 team dogged out a win over a very highly rated Mayo Under-21 team in Castlebar on Saturday. And the Roscommon golden generation that won the minor All-Ireland title in 2006 is being skilfully woven into the senior side by Fergal O’Donnell, who managed them to that win in 2006.

Roscommon are playing Division 4 football now, of course, and can’t afford a slip-up as they fight for promotion. They haven’t slipped so far, and An Spailpín Fánach can’t get it out of his head that winning against Fermanagh and Longford in the League can’t be all bad – not least in comparison to losing against Mayo, Kerry and whoever else shows up as Galway are currently doing.

The national media may not be aware of the sound of drums along the shores of Lough Ree, but Connacht is. Not least in Mayo. People talk about border rivalries in football – Mayo has the greatest border rivalry of all, as the Ballaghderreen club isn’t even on the border. It’s six miles behind enemy lines.

Heart is mentioned in the Roscommon county motto – the constant heart of Ireland. An Spailpín Fánach knows of no prouder county, and can only imagine how O’Donnell and the rest of the Roscommon brains trust are mixing the scalding hurt of the past ten years with the still-bright memories of the great Roscommon teams of the past to make a very potent football potion.

Mayo will not run scared of Roscommon. There are garments being rendered at the prospect of relegation after defeats to Kerry and Armagh currently of course, but there is no life outside the high summer in the GAA now. Mayo have had some good under-age teams too.

But while Mayo will not run scared of Roscommon, they certainly won’t be thinking they only have to show up to beat them. Not least in Ballaghderreen, where the smoking altars to their strange and pagan Roscommon gods, Kee-gahn, J’gerr, Muh-ree and the rest remind the Mayo faithful that Roscommon are on the rise again.

Fine Gael Can’t Image Life Without Their Labour Blankie

2011-03-07T09:00:00.000Z

RTÉ's Eleventh Hour team uploaded a funny montage to You Tube about the number of mentions of change during the election campaign. How sad that the end result of that campaign is civil war politics as usual, with no change at all.

Fine Gael is the biggest party in the state, for the first time in its history. Single party government was easily achievable. Fine Gael could return their own gene pool independents and ideological matches – Lowry, Ross, Donnelly, maybe Ming, strange though it may seem – to the party to bring the number up to eighty-odd and then dare Fianna Fáil to put its money where (what’s left of) its mouth is to support Fine Gael in Government.

Fine Gael could have called Fianna Fáil’s bluff. If Fianna Fáil pulled the rug Fine Gael go to the country with hurt in their faces and right on their side. They could then go the extra yard and return with a working majority. This crack about “stable Government” is a myth. Lemass had minority administrations and got a lot done. You can have the majority of support in the Dáil and still be in a minority yourself. All it needed was the ability to see beyond the obvious and the courage to seize the day.

But Fine Gael didn’t even consider that as an option. Instead, Fine Gael reverted immediately to type, and restored Irish politics to its leaden polarity within a week of the election.

Irish politics has been defined since the 1930s not as Fianna Fáil versus Fine Gael, but as Fianna Fáil versus Not Fianna Fáil. This is what has made coalitions between Fine Gael and Labour in the past, and the disastrous inter party governments of the 1950s – the single fact of the collective parties’ Not Fianna Fáil-ness is greater than each individual parties’ ideologies or beliefs or manifestoes.

Fianna Fáil got more or less one hundred per cent of the blame for the current crisis in the election. Whether or not they deserved it is open to the judgement of history It could be that they were simply unprepared for the calibre of disaster in which they were engulfed, like a seven stone weakling getting into a bar fight with Mike Tyson. They never stood a chance.

The people are outraged, and want a radical change in Irish politics to address the new reality. Instead, they got a warm reunion of former lovers.

The most depressing thing of it all is that the extraordinary cosiness with which the coalition deal was arranged. Ivan Yates and Shane Ross – Fine Gael men both, who should know whereof they speak – both said last week that a deal could be hammered out between the two sides in half an hour, and the rest of the week would then be about divvying up the goodies and optics.

Labour are Fine Gael’s security blanket. Fine Gael have been given an extraordinary and unprecedented mandate to save the country and finally wipe out the Fianna Fáil party that has dominated politics since DeValera choose pragmatism over ideology in 1926. But they don’t realise it. They don’t know that the world have changed, and are dancing the same steps that Liam Cosgrave danced with Brendan Corish and Garret Fitzgerald danced with Michael O’Leary and Dick Spring.

As for Labour, it’s hard to know what they get out of it. They suffer after every coalition they’re in, and they’re always the minority party. For a left-wing party to not even acknowledge the extraordinary swing to the left in Irish politics makes you question if Fianna Fáil really is the most cynical party in Irish politics.

It would be nice to have something on which to pin hopes. The new Government, according to Phil Hogan on This Week, will target jobs, rebuild hope and hit the ground running. How it will target jobs or rebuild hope, or whether just being able to sit up in bed and having a little tea and toast rather than go haring off down the road would be better for shattered Ireland remains a mystery.

The policy document talks a great fight, until to you get to when exactly all this gravy will be poured on the chips. Then you read about committees, a Fianna Fáil special of the last ten years.

The creation of the Ministry of Public Sector Reform seems the only potentially radical proposal. But exactly how radical it is will depend on its true remit – will the department exist to pare the fat and get value for money in the Irish public sector, or will it be the Ministry for Keeping Beards Happy? Is it Public Private Partnership under another name?

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Political reform now.

Níl Tacaíocht Tuillte ag Foireann Chruicéid na hÉireann

2011-03-03T09:00:00.002Z

Is cuimhin leis an Spailpín Fánach sár-fhoireann chruicéid na hIndiacha Thiar 'sna hochtóidí, agus na sár-imreoirí a bhíodh acu. Gordon Greenidge, Desmond Hayes, Viv Richards, Richie Richardson, Jeff Dujon, Curtley Ambrose, Courtney Walsh, agus mo laoch féin, Malcolm Marshall.

Babhálaí gasta ab ea Marshall. Fir laidre go leor ab ea na babhálaithe eile ag na hIndiacha Thiar an tráth sin, ach ní raibh Marshall chomh ard leosan. Ní raibh an sé troigh aige, ach bhí dhá bhua aige a rinne sé níos fearr ná duine dá laghad ó na babhálaithe eile, ina fhoireann féin nó riamh i stáir an chruicéid.

Bhí teicníc thar moladh beirte aige, agus bhí an croí chomh láidir leis nárbh fhéidir leis ach éirigh. Bheadh sé ina aghaidh nádúr ruaig a chur ar Malcolm Marshall.

Bhí an ghriain ag titim ar an sár-fhoireann sin i 1988, agus dlíthe cruicéid á athrú chun coisc a chur ar an bpreabaire, céad cloch ar phaidrín ionsaigh na hIndiacha Thiar. Ach roimh na heagóra dhlí sin, bhi deá-Shamraidh 1988 ag na hIndiacha Thiar i Shasana faoi cheannaireacht Marshall agus Richards agus na laochra eile.

Iarraidh ar Marshall ag deireadh na sraithe cén bhrí a bhí ag bua na hIndiacha Thiar dó féin. "Tá roinnt daoine dár gcuid ag obair anseo i Sasana, i bhfad ón mbaile," arsa Marshall. "Is seoltóirí busanna iad nó tógálaithe nó obróirí ísle dá gcuid sin. Cuireann daoine geanc orthu rompu. Ní bheidh aon gheanc rompu anocht."

Fear cróga bródúil ab ea Malcolm Marshall. Ba Bharbadós é a áit dúchais - ní tír ar bith iad na hIndiacha Thiar, ach bailiuchán tíortha a théann le cheile chun cruicéad a imirt agus atá neamhsleach ó thaobh gach uile rud eile.

Scríobh CLR James leabhar dárbh ainm Beyond a Boundary, ar cheann de na leabhair spóirt is fearr a scríobhadh riamh, ag breathnú ar sin, ceist féiniúlachta na hoileáin éigin 'sna hIndiacha Thiar agus tábhacht an chruicéid dóibh. Ba é Frank Worrell an chéad fear gorm a cheapadh mar chaptaen na hIndiacha Thiar, agus ceapadh é mar chaptaen i 1960. Nach dochreite é? Bhíodh fear bán ina cheannaire orthu riamh roimh sin.

Tá cruicéad na hIndiacha Thiar ag titim as a cheile anois, agus roinnt fáthanna taobh thiar den meath. Ach smaoinigh mé ar na fir chróga uaisle maithe a d'imir leis na hIndiacha Thiar ins na 70í agus 80í nuair a chuala mé faoi bhua foirne na hÉireann i gCorrán Domhanda Cruicéid inné. Fir mhóra cosuil le Marshall agus Michael Holding agus Clive Lloyd agus Patrick Patterson. Bhí cruicéad tábhachtach dóibh, ach bhí an fhéiniúlacht níos tábhachtaí arís.

Tá Gael amháin, Ed Joyce, ag imirt ar son na hÉireann arís anois mar thug sé iarracht ag imirt le Sasana ach ní raibh sé maith go leor dóibh. Tá Gael eile, Eoin Morgan, ag imirt leis na dtrí leon faoi láthair ach ní raibh áit aige ar an bhfoireann san Astráil ag an Nollaig agus seans go mbeidh sé ina Pheadaí arís sula gcrochfaidh suas a bhata. Chuala mé ráfla gur rinne laoch na h-imirthe inne, Kevin O'Brien, iarracht imirt le Sasana ach theip air. Seans go mbeidh seans eile aige tar éis a theaspeántas inné.

Deirtear nach bhfuil an dara rogha ag imreoirí cruicéid na hÉireann. Ní tír chruicéid den scoth í Éire, agus mar sin tá ar na himreoirí is fearr leanúint leis na Sasanaigh.

Ach smaoiním fós ar Malcolm Marshall. An nglacfadh seisean an schilling más Gael é, nó an leanfadh sé mar a bhí sé ar son ghrá cine?

Mo lean, ach ní bheidh a fios againne go deo. Cailleadh Malcolm Marshall ina fhear óg fós i 1999. Bhí bliain is dhá scór d'aois aige, ach threascair an ailse é. Ní raibh ach cúig kilometres is fiche meacháin ag Marshall nuair a fhuair sé bháis. Is dócha gurb ceithre kilometres fiche meacháin an chroí móire aige, a thiomáineadh na hIndiacha Thiar ina na laethanta órga sin. Go dtuga Dia suimhneas síoraí ar a anam cróga uasal.

General Election 2011: Winners and Losers

2011-02-28T09:00:00.001Z

Labour and Fine Gael are the big winners after Friday, but for different reasons. Fianna Fáil are listing in heavy seas, but reports of their death are premature.

The Coquette in Courtship Ritual
Labour are big winners because their vote spiked in the final week after showing a decline in the polls. Why? Niamh Breatnach opined on Morning Ireland on Saturday that Labour got in because people wanted to protect their jobs. There will undoubtedly have been that vote, but also people who genuinely believe that on the one hand, on the other hand government works. Perhaps they also hate to think of a camel that doesn’t have two humps – who knows?

The negotiation between Labour and Fine Gael will take place behind closed doors – open Government, me hat – but what a pity it won’t be on telly. It would make compulsive viewing. Labour are out of the blocks quickly, with Eamon Gilmore telling the News at One yesterday that, even though Labour were the second biggest party and therefore the natural leaders of the opposition, they were prepared to serve in a national government in the national interest.

The implication of this is that while Labour themselves would be much happier with RBB and the boys in opposition, shining hammers and sharpening sickles, they are prepared to suffer ministerial mercs for Ireland. It’s a classic coquette strategy, and it will be interesting to see how Fine Gael respond.

Fine Gael’s Greatest Ever Day
Fine Gael themselves will surely have spent yesterday crushed by the most epic hangovers known to man or beast, and they will have deserved them. This has been Fine Gael’s greatest ever day.

The RTÉ exit poll that saw Fine Gael in the mid-thirties will have given them a sinking a feeling on Saturday morning but election are about seats, not percentages of votes. Garret Fitzgerald’s Fine Gael got seventy seats from 39% of the vote thirty years ago. Enda Kenny’s Fine Gael is in the mid-seventies on 36%.

There are factors behind that, such as superb vote management and the quirk of the system that sees parties with momentum do better in seat terms that strict proportionality would allow. Fianna Fáil benefited from this in 2002. This year, it’s Fine Gael’s turn.

Are Ye Dancin’?
Fine Gael have spoken about stable coalition government this weekend, but this does not necessarily mean that coalition with Labour is inevitable. Labour have already began their courtship by scorning a Fine Gael advance that’s yet to come. Depending on the numbers, it would make perfect sense for Fine Gael to start ringing a few independents and see if they fancy being baptised in the faith. Or rebaptised, as the case may be.

Of the seventeen independents elected so far, both Shane Ross and Michael Lowry are Fine Gael genepool. Luke Flanagan will listen to whoever knocks at his door. There’s no real point in bothering with gobaloos like Mattie McGrath, but of the other genepool Fianna Fáil independents, it’s no harm to give them a ring to see exactly how apostate they are. Stranger things have happened.

Fianna Fáil Doomed From the Outset
As for Fianna Fáil, the reality is that the election was lost when the banks were bailed out 2008. Not necessarily because they were bailed out per se – how many people understand the banking business anyway? – but because the party’s position was neither explained nor defended.

In the absence of government explanation or defence, the vacuum was filled by condemnation, ranging from accusations of incompetence to graft to treason. None of this was taken on by Fianna Fáil spinners, through either the front channel of the Taoiseach addressing the nation or the back channel of getting media people onside (as Fine Gael got media people onside, for instance).

By the time the election rolled around the electorate had its mind made up that Fianna Fáil were absolutely and utterly to blame for the recession and nothing that Fianna Fáil could have done or said during the campaign was going to change that. Aughrim had long been lost. Long faces and pussing about suffering from putting the country first were no good.

If the people thought Fianna Fáil had put the country first, the people would reward them. If not, then the whole democratic system is a sham by definition. But while Fianna Fáil talked about putting the country first, they never convinced the people that they had done that. Maybe history will be kind to them. The electorate was not, and dispensed summary justice to Fianna Fáil candidates all across the nation.

Is This the End of Rico?
Is this the end of Fianna Fáil? Who can say? A lot depends on the formation of the next government, and when the next election will be. The real end would be if Fianna Fáil were to coalesce with Fine Gael as a natural right-wing alignment, and the pattern of vote transfer between the parties would indicate that this makes sense.

But the political establishment faces the same problem in doing this that Nick Clegg faced in Britain last year. The clear judgement of the people is that they don’t want Fianna Fáil in office under any circumstances. The only way that could happen would be if the Fianna Fáil party were to dissolve and its members join Fine Gael. That’s not likely. Having gone through what they’ve gone through, they’re not going to chuck it now.

Besides. A Labour/Fine Gael coalition will be the best thing that could happen to Fianna Fáil.

Follow the Money
The most under-reported story of the election was the Fine Gael fundraiser in the Aviva Stadium. One of the reasons that Fine Gael got elected was because they had so much more money to spend. The people who were funding Fianna Fáil are now funding Fine Gael. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But while those boys might have been happy enough to have Jack O’Connor and the unions sign off on things when cash was flush, they’ll be a lot less happy to see whiskery trade unionists in Government when it’s time for the blade. RAF moustaches are ok, but beards are not business friendly. So will the pendulum swing back to Fianna Fáil now that Fine Gael didn’t achieve a majority?

Fianna Fáil have never taken anything even vaguely like the battering they’ve taken in this election, but time is now on their side. An Spailpín Fánach doesn’t think history has been made yet. And while everybody was talking about political reform during the election, it’s been this blog’s experience that talk is cheap. We’ll wait and see how many plates of chicken and chips Micheál Martin has to eat before he can get stuck into the squab pigeon from Touraine once more.

FOCAL SCOIR: Almost all the pics are from the Irish Times. Aren't they outstanding? I almost feel bad lifting them. The only that isn't is the dinner. I lifted that from somewhere else. My own dinner would be a lot more chicken and chippy. And eaten in the middle of the day.

Irish West Wing: The Personal Touch

2011-02-23T10:00:00.001Z

We have a guest writer for this week's episode. If your Spailpín ate one hundred weetabix he would not come up with material like this. Not even one one thousand weetabix. One thousand weetabix, soaked in porter and whiskey instead of milk, and personally spooned into me by Keira Knightley herself. Not a hope. This is in a different league.

Five Constituency Bets. Because We Might As Well Have the Craic

2011-02-21T09:30:00.003Z

An Spailpín Fánach is enjoying Ivan Yates' constituency betting tips on Betfair almost as much as he's enjoying the statesmanship of our politicians, who surely put Periclean Athens in the ha'penny place.

Ivan is very much the insiders' insider, of course, while An Spailpín Fánach considers himself more of an outsiders' outsider, despite having never dispensed advice to the Minister for Finance in his kitchen, and being in the habit of putting his money where his (very big) mouth is.

Here, then, in ascending order of price, are An Spailpín's hugely unscientific bets to give you a bit of interest on Friday. Might be best to calibrate your stake according to price, by the way. No point in taking a complete bath. And these aren't necessarily endorsements, either, before someone takes the head off me. An Spailpín's dream of a United Federation of Planets, as outlined in Star Trek, burns brightly still.

Luke "Ming" Flanagan, Independent/New Vision. Roscommon-South Leitrim. 10/11.
Luke Flanagan is the nap of the meeting, for two reasons. Firstly, the electoral circumstances are made to order for a protest vote, and the electorate of Roscommon South-Leitrim will search long and hard to find a candidate less like those that have gone before than the Emperor.

Secondly, what people who have never met him may underestimate about Luke Flanagan is that the man is a consummate politican. He is supremely gifted in the political arts and, to borrow a favourite phrase of my father, if you burned Ming for a fool you'd have wise ashes. How else could he poster all of his constituency? War Rocket Ajax has been dispatched. Deal with it.

Maria Corrigan, Fianna Fáil. Dublin South. 10/11.
Media darling Senator Shane Ross is favourite to get the fifth seat here, but An Spailpín has heard that resentment towards George Lee still festers among the leafy suburbs. This will hurt Fine Gael's chances for a third seat, Alan Shatter and Olivia Mitchell being shoe-ins, but it will also hurt Senator Ross, who is nothing if not George Lee lite. The Fianna Fáil vote has to go somewhere, and Senator Corrigan is a reasonable bet for enough of it to remain in house to wash her ashore in fifth place. There are very few sisters running in the election, and that might stand to her in this particular constituency too.

Therese Ruane, Sinn Féin. Mayo. 2/1.
An Spailpín is a long time in exile from that earthly paradise that is the County Mayo, but my God, four Fine Gael seats out of five is a lot to ask. It would require vote management of the highest calibre for even the Free Beer Party to win four seats in an Irish five-seater, and it's doubly difficult in a constituency with as much ground to cover as Mayo.

The fifth seat will be down to transfers, which are a lottery, plain and simple. Getting 80% of the transfers on the ninth count is no good if you've been eliminated on the eighth. Again, as with Dublin South, the FF vote has to go somewhere and Sinn Féin is the natural destination for a disillusioned Fianna Fáil voter in the West. The two candidate strategy is risky, as it's assuming that policy will be more important than geography when either Ms Ruane or Ms Conway-Walsh is eliminated, thus arguing against a two candidate strategy in the first place, but how and ever. Ms Ruane will get more votes outside Castlebar than Mr Kilcoyne, the independent, and she gets the shilling on that basis.

John Gormley, Green Party. Dublin South-East. 3/1.
Ivan Yates assures us it'll be two Fine Gael, two Labour in Dublin South-East, but An Spailpín Fánach cannot get it out of his head that John Gormley's defence of his patch against the curly black smoke of that nasty incinerator won't stand to him.

It was hard not to pity Gormley on the Frontline leaders' debate last Monday. He seemed the most rational and thoughful of the five of them, but he's like one of those Japanese soldiers on a pacific island who fought on forty years after the Enola Gay flew over Hiroshima. He's worth a punt at threes, God love him.

Gerry Kilrane, Fianna Fáil. Roscommon-South Leitrim. 10/1.
This is the longshot punt of the card, but my goodness, could it really be true that county Leitrim could be without a TD for two consecutive Dála? An Spailpín can't come to terms with that, irrespective of party. Ivan didn't even mention Gerry Kilrane's name in his review of Roscommon-South Leitrim, and seems to believe that Martin Kenny is the only Leitrim candidate on the slate.

An Spailpín believes that Gerry Kilrane, despite the Fianna Fáil downturn, is more voter-friendly than Martin Kenny in Roscommon and can bubble up to the third seat on Kenny and Connaughton tranfers. It's a longshot, but that's why you get tens. You get nothin' for nothin' in this mean old world.

Irish West Wing: Mind Your (Native) Language

2011-02-16T09:00:00.001Z

Dog Days Are Over - Enda Kenny Can't Be Caught

2011-02-14T09:00:00.002Z

The cackling over the Fine Gael Valentine eMessage cards – appalling though they are – doesn’t matter. Broadband penetration is so poor in Ireland that two out of three people will never even see the damnable things. The reality is that the people have made up their minds. They want Fine Gael, and that’s that.

The hide Enda strategy was not as high risk as some people – your humble correspondent front and centre among their number – thought. If anything, it’s been genius and, after being hidden for so long, Enda may be about to come shining into the light this week. The Merkel trip today is the first step in that – a move that’s much more clever than it appears, because it broadens the scope of campaign and joins battle on a totally unexpected flank, as we shall see below.

An Spailpín doesn’t think Fianna Fáil face annihilation, but the weekend poll must have broken their hearts. There is a chance that the party will do better than expected, because of our inability as a people to properly understand who Fianna Fáil actually are – as discussed on this blog earlier this year – and because it’s possible that where Fianna Fáil used to get first and second seats in constituencies, they may now limp home in fourth or fifth place, for a variety of reasons.

A seat is still a seat, and Fianna Fáil will count their blessings while they may. The sea-change question will be decided at the next election, rather than this one. But as an option for Government, the people cannot forgive Fianna Fáil at this election.

If Fianna Fáil were to promise to turn the Hill of Tara into the Big Rock Candy Mountain itself, it would make no difference. The people want Fianna Fáil to do their penance and live off bread and water for a while.

The choice for the governance of the next Dáil, then, is Fine Gael or Labour. This now has less and less to do with minutiae of policy, but with broader strokes – pain now or pain later, private sector v public sector, and so on. Fine Gael have done their sums better and Labour are suddenly in danger of being outflanked by that huge collection of independents who are united by their difference.

There was general speculation in the press over weekend that Fianna Fáil and Labour will now form a bizarre alliance of convenience in a desperate effort to haul Fine Gael back to the pack, but while that would certainly make sense for Labour, who are now looking at power slipping from their grasp, it would not make sense for Fianna Fáil.

Even before he became leader of Fianna Fáil, Micheál Martin pledged to support the new government if they followed the broad outline of the Fianna Fáil four year plan. It would make no sense in that context to hobble Fine Gael with a Labour party who famously opposed the bank guarantee, as Joan Burton delights in reminding the nation.

Eamon Gilmore said yesterday that the people didn’t want a single party government, but he’s wrong. Strong leadership is exactly what went missing in 2008 and the nation have been crying out for. People don’t understand what’s going on, and that’s why the support for Fine Gael is strengthening now. People want certainly, and Fine Gael is the only party offering that certainty.

An Spailpín would prefer if Enda Kenny fought a different campaign and addressed the nation as a whole via the medium of television rather than in random bunches on the campaign stump, but it’s impossible to deny that the strategy is not only working a treat for them, but is surely going better than they could have hoped.

The nature of the electorate is such that any attacks on Enda Kenny’s competence are now likely to work out, in a remarkable and depressing irony, like the questioning of Bertie Ahern in the last election – personal attacks rather than legitimate inquiries on a question of governance. The leading from the back campaign isn’t terribly good for politics but for Enda Kenny himself and his struggles to hold onto the Fine Gael leadership over the years, it’s sweet redemption.

Fine Gael can’t be caught. The only question is whether or not they will form a majority government, a minority government propped up by independents or coalesce with a deeply grateful Labour party. The Angela Merkel visit tomorrow may turn out to be a masterstroke to overshadow a debate that most people won’t watch anyway, because it's too short a format for five voices.

The German visit may prove a masterstroke because Angela Merkel is leader of the Christian Democrat party in Germany, which is a part of the European People’s Party in Brussels. Just like Fine Gael themselves.

Expect a big thumbs up for Enda from Angela tomorrow and Enda returns to Ireland having planted an Irish flag at the heart of Europe, and having cut yet another rod with which to beat Gilmore after his ill-judged remarks about "Frankfurt's way" on TV3 last week. It seems that while Enda wasn’t there himself, someone must have shown him a tape. Ouch!

Irish West Wing: Making a Contribution

2011-02-09T10:00:00.001Z

Comórtas na Sé Náisiúin - Sos ón ár mBuartha

2011-02-04T10:00:00.000Z

Tá scíth tuilte ag na Gaeil i rith na drochaimsire seo, agus tíocfaidh anocht í. Ná gá dúinn breathnú ag bladaráil na bpolaiteoirí ar Prime Time na duine eile ó bhialann RTÉ ag bladaráil le Ryan Tubridy. Tá rudaí cailte ón rugbaí ó chuaigh ina chluiche gairmiúla é, ag nuair atá cluichí cosuil leis an Bhreatain Bheag in aghaidh Sasana i gCaerdydd, mar atá beo ar an teilifís anocht, táim buíoch go leor as.

Is cluiche mór é do na Sasanaigh - bhídís lag go leor i dáiríre ó d'éirigh leo sa gCorn Domhanda i 2003, seachtas an t-aon feachtas amháin dó-chreite sin ag an gCorn Domhanda sa bhFrainc i 2007, ach táid ag teacht arís anois. Caineadh Martin Johnson go minic, ach tá foireann á chur le cheile aige mar a chuid féin - crua, láidir, fód-sheasamhach.

Tá deacrachtaí aige fós i léiní 10, 12, 13, lár na gcúlaithe, ach tá páca láidir go leor aige agus is leath an chatha i gcónaí é sin. Má éiríonn leis na Sasanaigh i Caerdydd beidh an ghaoth leo, mar a bhí le hÉire i 2009, agus caithfear cách a bheith ar a aire.

Níl fadhb ar bith ag na Breathnaigh ins na cúlaithe, ach níl an páca acu chun seasamh leis na Sasanaigh. Deirtear go bhfuil dul chun cinn mór déanta ag Andy Powell, ach is deacair creideamh é, mura raibh sé buailte óna asal cosuil leis an Naomh Pól ar bhóthar na Damaisce, tráth.

Níl meas ag na gnáth-Breathnaigh ar Stephen Jones ag leath-chulaí amach, cé go bhfuil 96 roghnú aige, agus gurbh céad rogha na Leoin i 2005 agus 2009 é. Bhrís croí na mBreathnach nuair a chur Barry John a bhróga ar leathaobh níos mó ná dhá scór ó shin, agus táid ag fánacht ar a fhilleadh fós, mar a bhíodh Paul Simon ag fánacht ar Joe Di Maggio.

Tá an cluiche athraithe go deo ó laethanta Barry John agus níl an draíocht céanna ag an ndeich mar a bhí - ní cead dó. Tá an leath-chulaí amach faoi ghlas ag an ngameplan anois, agus sin mar atá agus a bheidh.

Beidh na Gaeil ag teacht chun na Róimhe amárach, agus dúshlán na h-Iodáile a ghlacadh. Má tá na Breathnaigh mí-shásta le Stephen Jones, feic ar chruachas Nick Mallett - bhí Astrálach amháin aige mar leath-chúlaí amach an bhliain seo caite agus Astrálach eile anois, Kris Burton, an Satháirn seo chugainn. Tá bród mór agus croithe láidre ag na h-Iodáiligh, ach ó thaobh rugbaí táid marbh go deo ón uimhir a naoi amach. An lá ag na cuairteoirí.

Beidh dúshlán i bhfad níos laidre ag na Gaeil i mBleá Cliath an deireadh seachtaine seo chugainn, agus an Fhrainc os a gcomhair. Tá talann thar moladh beirte ag na Francaigh agus na leath-chulaí is fearr sa gcomartas i Trinh-Duc agus Parra acu - seachas Phillips agus Jones na Breataine Bige, b'fhéidir.

Tá roinnt sa meáin Ghealacha ar an dtuairim go n-éireoidh leis na Gaeil go maith an comórtas seo, ach ní feiceann an Spailpín an chuis dhóchais. Tá tosaithe na hÉireann ag strácáil seilbh na liathróide a fháil, agus níl an cultúr rugbaí na tíre seo láidir go leor chun frapaí a fhorbairt.

Beidh an triúr faoi bhrú maith sa Róimh fiú amháin, ach smaoineamh ar an Sathairn i gcoinne na Fraince. Uair caite ar an gclog, abair, buachaillí na hÉireann beagnach ag gól le pian agus iarracht, cad a smaoineoidís má fheiceann siad ar an taobhlíne agus buachaillí nua Francaigh ag teacht chun catha? An t-aon rud amháin a smaoineann tacadóirí Fianna Fáil os comhair doirse na hÉireann - a Thiarna, déan trócaire.

Irish West Wing: There Will Be Blood (Relations)

2011-02-02T10:00:00.000Z

The Start of the League - Only Six Months to Wait Until It's for Keeps

2011-02-01T10:00:00.002Z

Two thousand people at the Mayo v Roscommon FBD League game two weeks ago, and a palpable sense of expectation this week before Mayo host Down under lights in Castlebar on Saturday night. There is nothing like football to capture the imagination after the long and lonely winter.

Not that either game matters a whit, really, of course. There will be coverage in the papers this week about how great the League is and why don’t the GAA promote it more and look at Cork, weren’t they able to win the All-Ireland after winning the League first, who says the League isn’t important? And so on and so forth.

Please. The reality of the GAA season now is that there are four competitions. There are the provincial work the pints off games that have just finished, there is the National League, there are the backdoor games from May to July and then there is the only one that counts.

The only competition that counts is what’s left of the knockout blood and thunder Championship as we knew and loved it, reduced from a competition between thirty-two counties to one featuring just eight. The trick of the next seven months is ensuring that you’re one of those eight irrespective of how you get there, through front doors, back doors or windows if it comes to that.

That’s the frustrating thing about the first half of the year. Only bad things can happen. Every win is worthless. Every game reduces to a training session, where it’s only a question of what you learn about yourself and your team to be used when the real bullets are flying from August on. All else is shadow boxing.

Who won the last five Munster Championships? God only knows. It doesn’t matter. Those boys are playing for the big pot and if you want to be big time you’ve got to look at the world the way Kerry and Cork and Tyrone, God be kind to them and the burdens He’s asked those good people to bear, do.

Every game an inter county team with All-Ireland ambitions plays from the third Sunday in September until the end of July is about learning about yourself and becoming stronger. It’s important not to lose twice between May and July of course, but do your sums. The odds are heavily in favour of continued experimentation. If you do get a bullet twice, chances are you deserve it and are as well off at home.

This is not a great situation of course, and every year your faithful correspondent calls for the return of the old Championship but in the meantime we have to make do. An Spailpín Fánach would watch a Mayo team playing the Eton wall game and still consider it a treat. I doubt that I’m alone in that.

And the game against Down will be a treat. Down have been aristocrats of the game since they burst through in the 1960s. James McCartan’s recently published book, The King of Down Football, is on the bookshelf opposite my laptop and I am looking forward to tucking in and reading about how they forged their legend.

In the meantime, off to Castlebar for the weekend where we shall run the rule over our bucks and they shall run the rule over theirs. No harm done either way – it is, after all, only the League.

Only One Winner in the Democracy Now Fiasco - George Lee

2011-01-31T10:00:00.000Z

There is only one winner in this Democracy Later debacle and that is George Lee. George Lee tried. The media cabal behind Democracy Not Just Yet didn’t, and that will be their legacy. It now looks like they were all just hot air.

Fintan O’Toole’s extraordinary justification for his excellent imitation of the Grand Old Duke of York in Saturday’s Irish Times is a remarkable document, and a deeply depressing one.

This sentence seems particularly worthy of analysis: “An inadequate effort wouldn’t be a noble failure. It would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them.”

Remember the boy or girl in college whom everyone fancied in vain? You eventually pluck up the courage to ask him or her if, on the off-chance he or she has no plans, he or she wouldn’t mind being your date at the Engineers’ Ball on Saturday week only to get the wan look and pitying smile that are the inevitable precursors to the bullet behind the ear.

You are let down, politely but firmly, with the intelligence that, as a worm like you and a god/goddess such as he or she could never be an item in this or any other alternate reality, it would actually be crueller for the god/goddess to build your hopes up now only to inevitably dash them later by breaking your tiny little heart. Better to leave you in the mud with all the other lower phyla.

You can hear him or her say it, can’t you? “Oh no, John/Jane. I really respect you as a friend but you see, going to the Engineers’ Ball with you would be would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them.”

Worse than nothing at all. Staggering.

In what parish between Hell and Bethlehem would the country be worse off, actually worse off, if Fintan O’Toole and his chums in Democracy at Some Point in the Future tried to get elected but didn’t? Not even didn’t get elected now, or did get elected, but *tried* to get elected and didn’t? How could Ireland possibly be worse off?

Would the national debt increase? No. Would we all be conscripted into the infamous pan-European army, to fight General Zeb and his intergalactic clone army from the military labs of Alpha Centauri? No. Would corporation tax go up if Fintan O’Toole didn’t reach the quota? Hard to see causality. Would the US multi-nationals move out? Dearest Reader, the boys that run those corporations couldn’t pick Fintan O’Toole out of lineup of one.

The most sickening part of all this is that Fintan running would actually be a good thing. Politics is moribund in this country. The Taoiseach-elect’s media strategy seems to be to keep the head well down and hope he’s still ahead when the smoke of battle clears. Nothing else.

Debate on the country, how we went wrong, how we can stop that happening again, reflection on the nation on the eve of the hundredth anniversary of the Rising? Forget about it. It’s Fine Gael’s turn, and that’s it. And when that hits the rocks Micheál Martin will take the salute outside the GPO in 2016 because that’s how the pendulum swings.

If his candidacy allowed even a chink of a changed dynamic from civil war politics ninety years after the civil war Fintan O’Toole’s bid would not have been in vain, even if he didn’t even save his deposit. But to try to defend it with this hopeless blather about “an inadequate effort wouldn’t be a noble failure. It would be worse than doing nothing at all because it would raise hopes and then dash them” is galling in the extreme.

Because it’s not about Fintan and his chums, and egos so huge they have their own gravitational pull. It’s about how we debate politics in this country – do we turn around to look outside the cave, or do we look at the shadows on the back wall forever and think that’s all there is and all there can be? Fintan would only have been the hammer, not the hand. But he doesn’t even seem capable of seeing that.

A lot of people will have read that Fintan O’Toole article on Saturday morning while listening to George Lee serve his penance on RTÉ with that appalling Business show on Radio 1. The programme is a shocking waste of Lee’s talents, and a grim reminder of what happens when you try to make a difference. It’s like Lee’s been put in the stocks in the town square, as a grim example to those who would think of rocking any cosy little boats.

But at least George never told us that the country is worse off because of his own inadequate effort, his own noble failure. At least he spared us that. George put his money where his mouth was. If he failed, he failed, but he never pretended the nation was worse off for his having made the attempt.

If you pass George in the stocks some time during the campaign, maybe you can give him an apple as he sits in stoical silence, or wipe some of the mud from his little face. Whatever else George Lee had, he had courage. That’s not common in Irish public life. And it seems an even rarer commodity this week.

An Apology: to the Banner County of Clare

2011-01-27T10:00:00.000Z

An Spailpín Fánach would like to take a moment in these stressful times to apologise to Bannermen and Bannerwomen the world over. The authorities have found a couple of hundred acres of the Cappawalla mountains in the county of Clare resting in An Spailpín’s account, and are demanding an explanation. In the light of which your faithful correspondent can only say: honest to God lads, it’s all been a complete misunderstanding.

Earlier this week the blog posted about the demise of Connacht rugby, with a not-every-expertly photoshopped representation of the Cinderella province, and thought no more about it. Only problem is, Cinders wasn’t posing before Connacht with the Gilbert size 5 ball tucked under her oxter. She was posing in front of Munster. Specifically, that part of Munster that is always the Banner.

A furious Bannerman’s wrath descended on the blog yesterday morning, demanding the return of that parcel stolen land to the parish of Kilfenora. An Spailpín is only happy to oblige with a new image, featuring a bit of land that An Spailpín is quite sure is in Connacht, and a heartfelt apology to Ger Loughnane, Biddy Earley, Eddie Lenihan, Maura O’Connell and Doctor Moosajee Bhamjee.

In reparation to that finest of Bannerman who raised the alarm, and in the name of friendship and fealty, a pledge of one glass of Irish stout, imperial pint measure, when next we meet. A time which I hope shan’t be long distant. Up the Banner.

The West Wing - Irish Style

2011-01-26T10:00:00.000Z

Connacht Rugby Has No Future - Set the Cinderella Province Free

2011-01-24T10:00:00.001Z

Munster’s destruction at the hands of Toulon last week was more than the end of an era in Irish sport and culture. It was also the end of the illusion that Connacht rugby has any future and should be closed down for the good of all concerned.

The IRFU are determined to talk up Connacht and the rugby writers of Ireland are clearly instructed to stay on message on the topic. But what the IRFU say exists in inverse proportion to what they do and, as anybody can tell you, talk is cheap. Actions count.

The IRFU announced some policy initiative or other before Christmas to give Connacht the support the IRFU claim it deserves as a development team. Seasoned watchers may have wondered what the big deal about this was, as a development is what Connacht were meant to be for the past decade or so. The ugly reality behind the high rhetoric came three days later, when three prominent players announced they were on the way out. People voted with their feet.

Neil Francis, though flawed in many respects, is an accurate barometer of Dublin 4 rugby. Francis has made it quite clear that the idea of a move to Connacht appals any right thinking, fin-headed rugby player inside the M50. And what the Munster defeat does is put the big provinces on the same side of the players. They have no interest in losing players that they need themselves.

Suppose you’re the coach of Munster. You’re watching the rapid aging of your golden generation and you’re coming to terms with the realisation that the younger generation aren’t coming through as you would have liked – O’Leary and Buckley, for instance. And now you’re being asked to sign off other up and coming players to give someone else a dig out? I don’t think so.

Prior to the introduction of the Italian teams this year every team in the Magners League last year had played at least one season of Heineken Cup bar Connacht. Every one. After ten years, that’s no longer a coincidence.

Connacht is falling between two stools. It’s not a development province, because while players have come through it’s been more or less by accident. The other provinces hang onto their own good players and would be mad not to – you didn’t see Ulster sending Paddy Wallace west to take some of the wrinkles out of his game.

And Connacht isn’t a viable professional entity because all the provinces are IRFU dependent, with their central contracts and what have you. Connacht is more dependent than the other three because there is a stronger history of rugby in the other three provinces but the IRFU will only spend enough money to kept Connacht barefoot and dressed in rags. Cinderella got less abuse from the ugly sisters.

And that’s not good enough. The rugby public of Connacht deserve better than to be treated like the Union’s mushrooms. Why persist with the idea of provinces anyway? Ulster is the only one that accurately reflects its people. Munster’s fanbase is more than the geographical province and Leinster’s is less.

The IRFU don’t need a Connacht and the good rugby people of Connacht don’t need being strung along by the IRFU. Set Cinders free from the scullery. She’s scrubbed enough pots by now.