The Working Man's Lament for the Pint of Stout

Joe Hill is one of the great folk/protest songs, and has been covered by the best folk/protest singers - Paul Robeson, Joan Baez, and Luke Kelly. As such, you're correspondent has decided to lift the tune and disgrace it, in order to bewail my own utterly selfish wants (that may, nonetheless, be shared by a good big slice of the population). All together now, here we go:

THE WORKING MAN'S LAMENT FOR THE PINT OF STOUT

I dreamed I heard a pint of stout
hissing from the cask
Says I but stout, it's level five
And I can't drink you through my mask
I can't drink you through my mask

The pubs are closed, I said to stout
as the ghostly vision swayed
The only jars we see these days
Are full of marmalade
Are full of marmalade

The Palace Bar, and Mulligan's,
and all the pubs in Dublin town
Where porter flowed like mountain springs
Today are all shut down
Today are all shut down

I saw George Lee, on RTÉ,
Say we're locked down for the quarter
I damned his eyes, and cursed my fate,
and I dreamed once more of porter,
I dreamed once more of porter.

The Demon Drink

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A dangerous quantity of black porter
in the Palace Bar. Allegedly.

Ireland’s relationship with alcohol is dysfunctional, dangerous and destructive. It makes us overlook the inexcusable and give a pass to behaviour that should be completely unacceptable in every circumstance.

But for all that, using statistics that don’t add up does the alcohol moderation lobby no favours. Once one of their propositions is holed, a shadow of doubt is cast over all of them and their entire argument is on shakier ground than it should be. The latest survey figures from the Health Research Board are just such doubtful statistics.

The Health Research Board survey tells us two things that are very difficult to believe. The first is that a frightening seventy-five per cent of all alcohol consumed in Ireland was consumed as part of binge drinking, rather than the moderated sup that we like think of ourselves as indulging in.

We think that we like a little drop of the craythur to keep the cold winter away, rather than slugging the stuff back like men caught on just as the Guards were battering down the door, horsing it back because they need to destroy the evidence but can’t bear to pour the good drop away.

However, the Health Research Board’s definition of a “binge drinking session” is “the consumption of six standard drinks” in a single sitting. Six standard drinks works out at three pints of beer.

If, as an adult of mature years, you drink three pints of beer you will be aware that you are no longer sober. But to say that you have binged on the stuff is ludicrous. Ludicrous. If three pints is a binge, what word do we use to describe the amount of alcohol consumed by many people – not everybody, of course, but many people – at Christmas? On St Stephen’s night, when everybody is home? On St Patrick’s Day? Have the Health Research Board ever been at the Galway Races or the All-Ireland Final? What do they call that level of consumption?

It could be that, as far as Science is concerned, once you’ve gone past the three-pint mark, it doesn’t matter how much more you drink. By this definition, binge drinking is like being pregnant – once you’re pregnant, you can’t get more pregnant. You’ll never be pregnant-er.

But this flies is the face of both common sense and experience. For instance, many years ago, a friend of this column was stuck in London with some friends for Christmas, looking at the prospect of a lonesome Christmas dinner of cheese sandwiches on dry bread. He did what Paddy often does when he’s lonely – he went to the pub, to drink the pain away.

Unfortunately, while in the pub, he choose to mix his drinks. The next day, this young man did not have cheese sandwiches on dry bread for Christmas dinner. He spent Christmas Day being walked up and down the living room by his friends, in the hope of returning his own powers of locomotion to him.

The Health Research Board survey tells me that man did as much damage to himself as a man who drank three pints in his local on Christmas Eve, because they both went on binges. I say phooey to the Health Research Board survey.

We are told that the three-pint limit is the European Commission standard, at which news we’re supposed to – I don’t know, cheer, I suppose. But the definition is far from agreed, as a 2009 paper in the Oxford Journals’ Social History of Medicine discusses.

The definition of binge drinking used to be what we generally understand as a binge – Richard Harris going out for a pint of milk in London and waking up slaughtered in some bar in New York three days later. The authors of the paper posit that the definition of binge drinking changed as society and politics’ reaction to drinking changed.

In the original definition, binge drinking was a sign of weakness. It showed a chap had no grit, would be read out from the altar and die drunk in an alley. This was a moral judgment.

There are have been two moves away from this definition. Firstly, alcoholism is  now seen as a disease, meaning moral approbation of the old school is no longer appropriate. Secondly, the drinkers about whom society is concerned has changed.

One hundred years ago, society was concerned about layabouts who would rather drink than work. Now, society is concerned about young people drinking, especially young women. These are not the same groups, and should not be addressed in the same language.

But where Aughrim is lost is that the terminology has not changed with the public health policy. It would not have been hard to come up with a word to describe the drinking patterns of at-risk groups like young people who have more money than sense. By not inventing a new terminology, the definition appears ridiculous.

Three pints of an evening is not a session – never was, never will be. At risk young people know this from watching adults. So they know they’re being fed a line if they’re told that three pints is dangerous drinking, and automatically switch off when they should be paying attention. The Health Research Board is doing more harm than good in releasing surveys that are fine in a lab but that have no bearing whatsoever in reality.

As evidenced by the other howler in the Health Research Board survey, the definition of a “standard drink.” A standard drink, by this Health Research Board’s definition, is half a pint of beer, a small glass of wine or pub measure of spirits.

I know more or less nothing about the grape, but beer and whiskey I’ve met before. That standard drink definition tells me that three pints of beer are the same as six glasses of whiskey. Reader, they are not.

I wrote earlier that after drinking three pints of beer you are no longer sober. After drinking six glasses of whiskey you may not know that you are no longer sober, but everyone in your company is fully sure that you are drunk and are now in need of minding if things are not to get out of hand.

Whiskey is a beautiful drink, but it should only be drunk on special occasions, one glass at a time. It’s a fine toast at a birth, and a lovely tribute after a death – I seem to remember a tradition of men going for a solemn whiskey after the opening of a grave in the ancient long ago. But more than one is almost always a mistake.

In Defence of Sugary Drinks

First published in the Western People on Monday.

“Well? Are you having a mineral?”

That was the inevitable question asked of any child in a pub in Ireland in the days when pubs were divided into lounge and public bars, distinguishable because the lounge had a carpet and the public bar did not.

The child was in the pub because one or both parents were also there, and feeding minerals into the child was considered the only way of keeping that same child quiet for the duration of the social event. And nobody saw any harm in it, as they smoked liked trains, drank like fish and drove home loaded. If anything, the child was getting off lightly – especially compared to what would happen him or her when he or she started licking all those toys painted with lead-based paint back home.

Anyway. That was then. Modernity now suggests that those well-meaning adults who bought all those minerals for all those children all those years ago would have been as well off standing the children a few bottles of stout, as at least that potion has that famous bit of iron in it. The innocent mineral, the fuel on which many a dry Pioneer dance was run, now turns out to be the real devil’s buttermilk after all.

This is an unexpected turn of events, to say the very least, but it is the current opinion of top scientists. A “Growing Up in Ireland” study recently showed that one Irish child in nine is putting on condition in a way children did not put it on heretofore, and it’s that wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, the humble mineral, that’s at the cause of it.

It doesn’t seem obvious that sugary drinks would make you fat, as it’s reasonable to presume that any drink at all is just being run through the system. However, the problem lies in what the drink does during that short time when it’s passing through.

The body fuels itself on protein, carbohydrates and fats, in the main. Carbohydrates and sugar are chemically similar. So when the body senses that carbohydrate/sugar intake is increased, the body wants more and more of the good stuff. The human being, like any animal, is a glutton by nature. You don’t see a lion eat some of an antelope, and then wrap up the leftovers for later. The whole lot goes down the hatch, because that’s the way the carnivore is programmed, from long before people were able to stand upright.

So, when you’re glugging back a high-sugar drink, as far as your body is concerned, you’re in the same position as the lion who has just bush-whacked the antelope and is now licking its chops, getting ready for the feast. Your body adjusts its chemical balance to prepare for what it thinks will be a carbohydrate explosion.

And then: nothing. You finish your can and chuck it in the recycling, thinking no more about it, while your subconscious hits every alarm bell it has. I’m starving, it says. Where is the food I was promised? What’s going on? Am I going to die? I’d better get some food, and quick.

And then you feel a bit peckish, and wander to the press for a nibble of a biscuit or two. But the biscuits are a little dry and you see the drinks machine in the hall and you think, oh well, why not?

And so it goes on until you’re a great fat lump who can eat his tea off his own belly. And it all starts with a sup of sugary drinks.

Or so the theory goes. And it’s true, that sugary drinks increase your appetite for more sugar. It’s the nature of the beast.

But at the same time, it’s hard to believe that a can of Coke every now again is like some sort of bicycle pump for blubber, and everything is the drink’s fault. There’s a thing in public life now where somebody reaches for an explanation that sounds half-way reasonable and it’s then promoted as the final word on a topic within twenty-four hours. Groupthink at its finest.

We saw it recently when an English comedian was praised for holding his own in an interview with the BBC’s notorious tough Jeremy Paxman. But if people stopped to think, they’d realise that the comedian only sounded good. His actual opinion, when you boil it down, was that of someone who has to fight the impulse not to use his finger to read.

And it’s the same thing with the sweet drinks controversy. People want to see black and white where there are many shades of grey, like so many other things in life.

The real problem with sugary drinks is like the problem with so much else in contemporary society. We don’t know how to self-moderate. Our materialist, consumer society tells us at every point that we can never have enough of a good thing and our materialist, consumer society is completely wrong.

The book of Ecclesiastics tells us that to everything there is a season, a time to live and a time to die. In just the same way, there is a time to enjoy a can of Coke and a time to enjoy a glass of water, or buttermilk, or even that notorious strong, sweet porter on very special occasions.

Bans and taxes on sugary drinks are a way of abdicating our own responsibilities. The theory behind it is this: If there were no sugary drinks, I wouldn’t be the fat lump I am now. The theory does not entertain for a second that I would just have got fat on something else.

Sugary drinks aren’t the problem. Drinking sugary drinks all the time is a problem. Not being active, in body or in mind, is the problem.  Go for a run now and again, go easy on the chips and you’ll be fine. Whatever gets you in the end, it’ll hardly be an odd can of Coke on a hot day in McHale Park.

Letter to a Fat Kid, Stuck on a Wall

Dear Fat Kid,

I saw you while I was on my way home yesterday evening, when you were stuck up on that damned wall and wondering how in God’s name you’d get down. I hope that was your da with the ladder. Humiliating, of course, but dammit, at least he’s family. It being one of the neighbours would have made a bad situation ten times worse. Maybe a hundred times worse, depending on the neighbour.

Anyway, the main thing is I hope you got down in the end. You were a little red in the face when I saw you, and I think that stepladder must have looked as far away as China. I wanted to run over and say come on man, nearly home now, but I thought it best to leave it. Like I say, it’s sometimes best to keep these things in the family.

But you know what I hope most? I hope that as soon as you got down off the wall you shot up there again, just as soon as you could. I hope you spent the whole evening – and the evenings are getting shorter now, so you need to make the most of them – climbing up and down that stupid wall, and maybe shinning up a nearby tree or two, for variety.

Chances are, when you were up on the wall you probably felt you were born there, lived a long life there and would eventually die there, peacefully, in your sleep, surrounded by your loving family. Time stretches when you’re stuck. But the reality is you were probably only up there five or ten minutes. It might have seemed like a long time, but it wasn’t.

See, getting stuck on a wall is no big deal, really. A friend of mine got stuck in Bohola once. Boris Johnson looked a right eejit stuck on that wire at the Olympics. On my own first ever visit to Dublin under my own steam, I got lost on O’Connell Bridge. Nothing unusual in it. Happens all the time.

And I’m only saying this now because I was a bit worried about you, up on that wall. I hope I’m wrong, but I thought you were thinking that if you ever got down off the wall you’d never go higher than two feet off the ground ever again for the rest of your days. Just enough to climb into bed at night-time, and leave that other stuff to the Indiana Joneses of this world.

And it was ok to think that thought. Like I say, time gets long up there, and ladders look very far away. But I hope once you got down and settled you realised that it is only a wall, after all. I hope you laughed about the idea of never going higher than the bed again.

I hope you told your Da to come looking for you if you weren’t back in fifteen minutes as you went out with your rope and your grappling hook for another crack at that dopey wall. There’s a whole lot of world beyond that bed-high horizon.

And I hope that attitude stays with you, all through your life. That it’s not the getting stuck but the getting out that matters. And the more you get out of jams in life, the more you’ll take from the experience.

While I’m at it – it might be no harm to go easy on the cakes either. Tell you what, try an experiment – promise yourself you’ll go easy on the cakes for the next four weeks, and maybe walk home a bit of way from school instead of taking the bus.

Weigh yourself every morning, and write down your weight inside your sums copy – nobody will twig it among those other numbers. It’ll just be you that’ll know. After four weeks, you’ll be surprised how much the number has gone down. And you’ll notice that you’re feeling a lot better too.

There’s nothing wrong with being fat. Kids pick on other kids for being fat – there’s a special place in Hell for bullies, so you needn’t worry about them. Screw them. This is about you. It’s a fact of life that you’ll feel better when there’s less of yourself to carry around. You’ll get places quicker too.

Of course, the chief reason I’m writing to you is because I’m writing to myself as well. I didn’t even like climbing in the first place, when I was your age. But when I saw the red face and the terrified look up on the wall just now, I could have been looking at a mirror.

Take it easy, Fat Kid. It does get better, you know. I remember very well what it’s like, being stuck and scared and overweight and undercooked. But it’s ok. It gets better.

Your friend,

An Spailpín Fánach.

When Will We See Hello Magazine's Gangland Edition?

An Spailpín Fánach is genuinely incredulous at the way crime and criminals are reported in the Irish popular media.

There is no journalistic need to give criminal activity the level of press exposure that it gets. In a proper, law-abiding society, “Three hoods hanged. Weather continues fine” on the bottom of page two would do the trick nicely. What else do you need to know? Instead, a bizarre glamorisation of criminals are criminality has emerged, and shows no signs of abating.

The reason why this glamorisation is currently the case is because this type of reportage sells papers. But it also tells us quite a lot about who buys papers, and the news is far from cheering.

If you want to sleep safe in your bed without worrying about gangland shootings, drugs, robberies and all the various other criminality that goes with all this, reading about shootings and drug deals and feuds doesn’t make any difference. Only the nicknames change. The rest goes on and on.

If you want to do something to tackle criminality, vote for political parties who will either enforce the current laws, enact new laws or do both until it’s really not worth the criminals’ while to continue with criminality. In Michael Collins’ words about something else entirely, it’s all a question of what breaks first – the body or the lash.

The huge press reportage of criminals and criminal activity does nothing to stop criminals committing crimes. What it does do is glamorise the criminals, and make it appear to the less sophisticated among the community that being a drug dealer or a murderer or an armed robber is no different from being a butcher, a baker or a candle-stick maker.

A teacher friend of the blog was rather taken aback when one of her young people replied “a drug dealer” when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. But why wouldn’t he?

Drug dealers are the major figures of the community in which he leaves. He can read about the local exploits of Dublin criminals in the Irish papers, and he can feel part of the great brotherhood of ganstas glorified by rappers in the US.

Remember Jimmy Rabbitte’s remarks in The Commitments about Dubliners being the blacks of Ireland, and northsiders being the blacks of Dublin? An Spailpín is pretty sure that there is a huge population who believe that. Look at the posters on sale on Henry Street on Saturday afternoon. Tony Montoya abounds. It is a very real culture, and it is being succoured and supported in the media.

Joe Duffy was taken aback on his show recently when someone suggested that junkies are now a part of who we are. Joe wasn’t buying this. But it’s not like junkies have come here from a galaxy far away, like the prawns in District 9 (or are going back there, worst luck). This is part of the culture now, and the popular media is embracing it, either innocently or cynically.

The picture at the top of this post might look funny now, but don’t be surprised to see it in the shops someday soon. If it’s not already here. God help us all.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, culture, society, journalism, crime, anti-social behaviour

For Pity's Sake: Time for Assisted Thinking on Assisted Suicide

The current public trend of broad acceptance of euthanasia, as exemplified by the generally favourable reaction to Kay Gilderdale’s acquittal over the death of her daughter, Lynn, is deeply disturbing. And disturbing on a number of levels.

Euthanasia represents a fundamental change in the way we value life. Prior to this, for over a thousand years of western civilisation, we have placed huge value on life. On the very fact of being alive. As the years have gone by, we’ve protected it more and more.

But euthanasia, and the philosophical basis behind it, qualifies life. Some lives become more valuable than others. And An Spailpín Fánach would be deeply interested in finding out how decisions about which lives are no longer valuable are made, and who makes those decisions. Very interested indeed.

We do joined up thinking badly. The general reaction to Mrs Gilderdale’s decision to end her daughter’s life was that if one were in the same boat, one would do the same. And there are very few who wouldn’t. An Spailpín has not made a study of the case but, from what I do know, I believe I would have done the same myself as Mrs Gilderdale. But that doesn’t mean I would have done right.

Extreme cases make bad law, and Lynn Gilderdale’s was an extreme case. What is worrying your correspondent is that there is no bigger debate about euthanasia, and so called mercy killing or assisted suicide.

There are huge philosophical questions to be decided. None bigger. At stage do we decide, as a society, that someone’s life has peaked, and that it’s all downhill from here? At what do we decide that it’s alright for others to intervene in that downhill trip, and give someone a whoosh to journey’s end? And how do we deal with a conflict where society has decided that someone is over the hill, but the someone themselves reckons he or she is just fine, thanks, and has no interest in hearing the choir invisible for a few years’ yet?

One of the reasons why Kay Gilderdale was acquitted was the belief that Lynn Gilderdale wanted to die. Was it Lynn Gilderdale's right to make that decision? Was Lynn Gilderdale capable of making that decision? Must you be in your full mental faculties to make that decision? If you’ve been bed-ridden for seventeen years, can you have you full mental faculties?

This is not a debate that’s taking place, but an acceptance of euthanasia seems to be growing, and this is very worrying. We don’t want to make hard decisions. We want hard decisions to go away, because we want the world to be a happy place. Even though it’s often the exact opposite.

One of the great lies of our age (currently exposed in Barbara Ehrenreich’s recently published Smile or Die) is that the world is a happy place. This makes people who are miserable feel even more so, because their misery is exaggerated. And if they are that vulnerable, what will public acceptance of euthanasia do to the suicide rates?

It’s a little know fact, but you cannot commit suicide by holding your breath. Even though you think you want to die, you cannot shut the system down by force of will. You have to double cross yourself, and do yourself in by violence, by rope, river or bullet. But you cannot die without help. It’s clutching at straws, certainly, but that’s what you do when you’re on the edge. Society should provide straws for the vulnerable, not help to push them over the edge.

The leading philosophical proponent of euthanasia is Peter Singer of Princeton. Singer is also a leading advocate of animal rights. So, if I have him right, he thinks eating a burger makes you a monster but gassing Granny because she no longer knows or cares who’s President is fair enough. I guess they’re not making philosophers like they used to.

Let’s hope Peter himself always knows who’s President – he mightn’t like it some day when he doesn’t know any more, and the nurse says there, there, Peter, there, there, don’t worry, and nods at the doctor, who draws the curtains and starts patting his pockets, wondering where he left his sodium pentobarbital...






Technorati Tags: culture, society, euthanasia, mercy killing, Kay Gilderhale, Peter Singer

Hooliganism

“In Poland,” said the man on the bus, “we don’t let our children put their feet on the seats.”

An Spailpín was on the bus home, queuing for the next stop. Ahead of me, a man was talking to the driver. They knew each other. Perhaps they spoke in English in order to practise; perhaps the driver wasn’t Polish as well, but an immigrant from somewhere else. I don’t know.

“If the children are on their own, of course, they will put up their feet – it’s the natural instinct to rebel,” the man continued. “But what I can’t understand is why they do it when they are accompanied by a parent. Why don’t the parents stop them from being so selfish?”

An Spailpín has thought hard about that Polish man in the past few days since the horrific shooting of Aidan O’Kane in East Wall, Dublin, on Sunday night. An Spailpín does not attempt, of course, to draw a parallel between putting feet on bus seats and gun crime. But your correspondent is pretty damned sure that if a child has sufficient consideration to put his or her feet on the floor and leave the seat opposite open for other commuters, that child will not then collect a dozen eggs when he or she gets home and goes off with his or her friends for an evening’s hooliganism.

The bigger picture here is not this particular shooting, terrifying though it is. The issue is that there is a sub-strata of feral youth that exists outside of the society that supports them, and there is zero political will to tackle the situation. Because tackling the situation would mean a radical rethink of the way Western society has been organised since the Second World War.

In certain areas of cities, there are gangs of children hanging around outside convenience shops in the evening. Their pastime is to harass and annoy the people working in the shop. Does it ever occur to them that these shop workers are people just like themselves, trying to get by, who don’t need a depressing job made worse by this hooliganism? No, it does not. All they are into is themselves. They show exactly the same ability to empathise or look to the future as an animal.

And what can the shop security do about this? Nothing. That’s why the kids persist. Their parents don’t care. The children know they can’t be touched. What’s the point in chasing them if you can’t do anything once you catch them? What’s the point in calling the Guards? What are the Guards going to do? The Irish Times reports that Mr O’Kane contacted the Guards on Saturday night after an attempt was made to torch his car. But what were the Guards to do? What do they ever do?

There are two factors here. The first is that there is a tremendous abdication of parental responsibility. You only need a license for a dog, not a child, after all. The second is that the Guards’ hands are tied by a judicial revolving door process. If you have twenty previous convictions, what earthly difference will a twenty-first make to you? How deeply depressing is it to read in this morning’s Irish Independent that a thirteen year old being held for questioning in the Aidan O’Kane killing is out on bail, while the prime suspect, a fifteen year old, has “made several court appearances in the past?”

At some stage, unknown to ourselves as a society, we lost the big picture. At some stage the needs of the many became less important than the needs of the few. Societal order is held to ransom because nobody is willing to be judgemental; nobody is willing to say that hooligans are not victims. They are hooligans, full stop.

How unwilling are we to say that? We’re so unwilling that the only person who uses the word “hooliganism” to describe people throwing eggs at other people’s houses is myself. “Anti-social behaviour” is what hooliganism is called now – look at the story in the Irish Times again. Anti-social behaviour is turning down an invitation for after work drinks in Neary’s; throwing eggs at people’s houses, annoying shopkeepers and shooting people is criminal hooliganism, and should be punished as such.

Mr Dermot Ahern, Minister for Justice, said in the Dáil debate on the Shane Geoghegan killing that “the Government will rule nothing out which is reasonable and consistent with the rule of law in tackling these gangs head on.” Note the phrase “reasonable and consistent with the rule of law.” That phrase is a copout. That phrase allows all manner of squirming to avoid taking actions that will cut this sort of stuff off at source.

The opposition are no better. Mr Charlie Flanagan, the Fine Gael spokesman on Justice, has called for tougher sentencing on murder and possession of deadly weapons. Tougher sentencing is a marvellous idea. The only thing is that tougher sentencing means longer sentencing, which means bigger prisons and more prison officers. How are we going to pay for that? It’s fine in principle, but it helps all the old people living in Ireland who are now even more terrified of hooded youth than before not a whit. It’s nothing more than pointless hand-wringing.

If the political class want to do anything to cut down on this hooliganism, why don’t they introduce legislation – and that’s what they’re paid to do, isn’t it? Legislate? – that allows shop security, for instance, to use necessary force to defend the premises. This means that a security man can give a hooligan a shoe in the hole and not have to worry about losing his job as a result of it. Some people will claim this will lead to victimisation, and this is an example of the needs of the few outweighing the needs of the many once more. But if some guy gets a busted lip when he didn’t deserve it, it’s worth it if it allows people to do their shopping and get on with their lives in peace. Nobody every died of a busted lip.

The other common argument against a return to common sense is that these sort of measures victimise the vast majority in communities who are good and upstanding citizens. Aidan O’Kane was one such good and upstanding citizen, and Aidan O’Kane is dead today because neither he nor the police could stop hooligans from pelting his house with eggs or setting his car or his bins on fire. That’s the bottom line. It’s that simple.

In Poland, they don’t let their kids put their feet on the seats of the buses. We need to take a lesson from Poland.




Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, hooliganism, anti-social behaviour, crime, Aidan O'Kane, society

Parting Is Such Tweet Sorrow...

An Spailpín Fánach is having trouble with a bird.

Like his friend An Tomaltach, An Spailpín Fánach is no greater lover of housework. However, as with choosing the next captain of the Irish soccer team, it has to be done and so, with a heavy heart, Easter Saturday saw your correspondent mopping furiously, while all the time becoming aware of a certain odour.

Gentlemen are not fastidious as ladies are. It is entirely possible that, somewhere in a dark corner of a gentleman’s chambers there may exist many foul items and apparatus. But An Spailpín isn’t that bad in this respect, and had he opened an abattoir or slaughterhouse somewhere on the premises he would have damned well remembered it. And still the stench pervaded.

Perhaps our friend rattus rattus, the creature that follows man in every step he takes, was visiting in the attic, and while there, expired, gasping his last? The corpse could now be doing what corpses do, and returning to dust as ordained by the Big Man. Opening the Stira trapdoor, braced for the matted and rotting remains of a big hairy rat falling on my head, took a certain stiffening of the sinews; when none emerged, and an exploration of the attic found nothing, it was time to think again.

It was then that I noticed the fireplace.

I approached. The stench got stronger. I retreated, and the smell lessened. I drew four conclusions.

1. There is something in my chimney.


2. It is dead and decaying.


3. I haven’t a bog how to get it out of there.


4. My dear Jesus but it stinks.

This made for an unhappy bank holiday weekend. Reader, if you desire to spread laughter in the world, ring the chimney sweeping community and see if they’ll come out in an emergency. Their merry laughter filled my ears, just as the rotting smell of former birdie filled my nostrils. Your Spailpín was as fánach as he’s ever been on Saturday, travelling from Spar to Spar, stocking up on air freshener and scented candles.

Tonight, a stand-off exists in this charnel house. Upstairs, the fetid ball of feathers rules supreme. A scented candle burns before his chimney like some pagan lamp somewhere in the Grecian archipelago two thousand years ago, in honour of Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. And downstairs, bottle of sense-neutralising whiskey at the ready, upper lip coated with Vaseline a la Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs, sitting at the laptop, your correspondent, An Spailpín Fánach.

The sweep comes tomorrow to remove the remains, and to seal the tomb so that if any other bird feels the need to expire he can do it in the only place fitting for his kind – the starring role in a snackbox springs more or less immediately to mind. In the meantime, we sit out the night together, my rotting house guest and I. At least John Cleese, in one of his many moments of immortality, was able to bang his dead parrot off the table. If I tried that with himself upstairs, he’d probably splatter all over the damned counter, and Michael Palin is too nice a man to deserve that rough treatment.

The Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus wrote a very famous elegy on the death of his girlfriend’s sparrow some two thousand years ago. “Meae puellae flendo turgiduli rubent ocelli,” wrote the poet, “my girl’s little eyes are red with weeping.”

Yeah. If she thought that was bad, Lesbia should have gone a few days with the sparrow rotting next to her, and see what she made of them onions. She would have gone out and got a bloody dog instead.





Technorati Tags: Dublin, society, chimney, chimeny sweep, Catullus, dead bird, dead parrot

Monageer: An Adjustment

I was doing a lot pontificating on this tragedy earlier today, and accusing people of bandwagoning over fresh corpses. Now it looks like I was as bad myself, using the tragedy as a platform for my own long held (and still held, incidentally) views on modern Ireland. But the RTÉ nine o'clock news had a story tonight that casts events in a whole new light.

The story is this: Adrian Dunne did more than just visit an undertaker's. He and his wife placed a family order, specifying white coffins for the children and what they were to be buried in.

Even in our rotten, deadwood-choked public service, surely that should have rung every damned bell in there. How could it not? Dear God in Heaven, what have we become?





Technorati Tags: Ireland, society, politics, Monageer

Monageer

One would be considerable less than human not to be deeply distressed by the tragic events that occurred in Monageer, Co Wexford, over the weekend. The events are so distressing that it’s hard to see how anyone will ever be able to mention Monageer again without people thinking of the harrowing deaths of the Dunne family. However, some of the coverage of the event has been considerably less than intelligent, and this is also beginning to distress your regular correspondent.

For instance – this morning, Ms Orla Barry, presenter of a show called “Life” on Newstalk 106, castigated the Garda response on Friday night. Ms Barry feels that the calling of a priest to provide pastoral care was an outrage, and the correct response would be for the Gardaí to “do something.” By the time I had switched over to Lyric FM, Ms Barry had not yet identified just what that something was – to take the misfortunate Mr Dunne down to the barracks, handcuff him to the radiator and beat him with truncheons until he told them where he’d buried Shergar, perhaps? Is that what Ms Barry thinks the Gardaí should have done?

An Spailpín Fánach gets the sickening feeling that we, the nation, are going to have to spend the coming week listening to liberal Ireland examining its conscience, but never going so far as to join the dots, or being logically consistent, or, in Ms Barry’s capturing of the zeitgeist, “doing something.”

Should the Gardaí have unlimited powers of seizure and arrest? Should we go from nanny state to police state? As it currently stands, the papers are reporting that the children could have been removed under Section 12 of the Childcare Act 1991, which allows the Gardaí to enter a house, without a warrant, and remove a child to the care of the local Health Board in circumstances of “immediate and serious risk to the health or welfare of a child.”

Immediate and serious risk to the health and welfare of a child. I was walking into town down Amiens Street, Dublin 1, on Saturday evening, and I was asked for a light by a junkie who was in the company of a little girl, aged two or two and a half. Your man was middling shook – was there an immediate and serious risk to the health or welfare of that child? Should I have alerted the Gardaí on Saturday?

One of the more distressing sights in daily life in the city is seeing junkies with children. Junkies can’t look after themselves, generally. The thought of children being in their care is frightening. Does this constitute immediate and serious risk?

Section 13 of the 1991 Child Care Act allows for a justice of the District Court to issue an emergency care order to place a child at risk in the care of the local Health Board for a period of eight days. Section 13 of the 1991 Child Care Act doesn’t say what happens on the ninth day – is it the case that everything is automatically ok then? Is the child then returned from whence it came?

An Spailpín talks to teachers in Dublin a lot. I have heard stories about children in “normal” schools, parochial schools, that would curl your hair. The fact is that the State will not step in to the running of a family unit except in circumstances of the most profound and distressing horror, and then, as it was yesterday in Wexford, it may be too late.

Let’s try some joined up thinking. Suppose we, the people, thought that the State should act, and should step in where children are in danger, on the basis that we cannot put a price on our children’s future. This means that the local Health Boards (which no longer exist, of course) will have to look after these children for longer than the eight days specified in Section 13 of the 1991 Child Care Act. The only way to do that will be to build orphanages.

Hands up everyone who thinks the coming election can be won on a platform of raising taxes to build more orphanages?

Even if the State were to build orphanages, you then have the issue of staffing them. Orphanages are not easy to run. You need a ratio of about 3:1 in staff to children, and that’s not even counting teachers, doctors, counsellors and the rest. That is no small undertaking. And what do we have currently?

Well, we have a state where we can’t keep hospitals clean, something Florence Nightingale was able to manage in Crimea in the 19th Century. We have a State that can’t provide water to Galway, the third biggest city in the State, and it looks like the people of Portarlington will have to stock up on the bottles of Ballygowan now as well. And what’s the main issue in the election so far? The political establishment is bursting itself to be the first to abolish stamp duty for first time house buyers, a source of €2.7 billion of revenue to the State last year. Revenue that will be necessary to clean the hospitals, provide clean drinking water, build and staff the orphanages – fripperies like that. And necessary to pay the hospital consultants, of course, who last week condemned an offer of €200k pa as “Mickey Mouse money.”

As a nation we specialise in examining our consciences in hard cases, like this tragedy in Monageer, but when it comes to the bigger picture, to act, to try and prevent this happening again, we fail miserably. It’s not something that we do well. If journalists like Orla Barry want to do something about children at risk, then let her join the dots and look at the big picture. If she just wants to take a cheap shot at the guards or the priest who went to the house, wouldn’t we all be better off if she’d just shut up and go away?

God have mercy on the Dunne family. I hope they find the peace they never found here. Ar dhéis Dé go raibh an teaghlach bocht brónach.






Technorati Tags: Ireland, society, Monageer, politics

Can Somebody Please Turn Off that Infernal Racket? Thank You

The Lake Isle of Innisfree is one of the great poems in the English language, written by one of the language’s greatest poets, our own WB Yeats. It’s a poem about finding peace and quiet in a busy world, where the only sounds are those of the “bee-loud glade” and “evenings full of the linnet’s wings.”

It is not hard to extrapolate, therefore, that a visit to either a convenience store, run by either Spar or Centra, or a doctor’s surgery, or any public place at all, would now result in the misfortunate poet being driven to an even greater state of dementia than he was moping about after that lady of notoriously high maintenance, Miss Maud Gonne. Were the poet to visit Spar, eagerly seeking another Troy for Ms Gonne to burn, his delicate poet’s ears would be assailed by the unspeakable muck that is 98FM or FM104 as played in this city, perpetually, from what your tearful Spailpín can figure out. The sound of one million millions of empty vessels clanging and booming and making most noise is as peaceful as the water lapping with low sounds by the shore of that very Lake Isle of Innisfree compared with some cretin named Rick! or Jonny! or Tim! who feed a slow, spirit-sapping and soul-crushing drip drip drip of imbecility into the ether.

An Spailpín is safe at home, as every radio in the house contains, in order of greatest emergency, a channel selector, a CD player, and, if worst comes to worst, an off switch. However, if one is at a doctor’s surgery, say, as would be the case of an Irish airman who foresaw his death and was wondering if he could get a potion of some kind to postpone it for fifty bloody years or so, one’s already delicate mental balance would be tipped past the melting point by the misery of having to listen to Gerry Ryan talking about how much pudding he ate for his tea last night, or RickJonnyTim!!! asking his congregation to text in their carefully worked-out opinions on whether or not a young woman who’s lived with a camera going through her garbage for the past ten years, post binge, post divorce, post shaving the hair off her head might-maybe-would-you-think have a few issues. I wonder would she, she would? What do you think Natalie?

At this stage, of course, were the poet Yeats in the surgery, he would have taken his cane to the wireless, showing that he too had picked up some of those violent ways that La Gonne was teaching ignorant men at the start of the last century. But some welterweight of a nurse would come out from behind the counter and take the cane off the puzzled poet, and tell him that he can wish for the cloth of heaven as much as he bloody likes, but the waiting room will listen to Cap’n Gerry and that’s the long and short of it.

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney
Folk dance like a wave on the sea
But why they can’t quiet that bastard
Seems damnable strange to me

Mutters the poet sadly to himself, and An Spailpín can’t blame him. Why can’t people just sit quietly once and while? Would it really be so hard? If you want to listen to the radio, can’t you buy headphones, and not drive a Nobel Laureate – and two-time Irish Blog Award® nominee – demented? Please?

Technorati Tags: Ireland, society, culture, radio

All the Animals Come Out at Night

That Dublin youth have become more feral in recent years is no secret, as the last post here may have indicated, even to the slow and wilfully stubborn, who refuse to believe the evidence of their eyes. But just how common this feral, beastly, behaviour is can be forgotten as Darwin kicks in, as we adapt, keep our heads down, and say nothing. These are the last three hours on Saturday night of the October Bank Holiday weekend, 2006, just from my own personal experience. This is what I saw on my ordinary routine, without going out looking for the foul and rotten. God only knows what I would have come across if I made an effort.

Six o'clock. A gang of youths, at least twenty in number, with their faces smeared with dirt and swinging sticks, marches up one of the residential streets on the Northside of the city, a street undergoing gentrification where a 700 square foot two up, two down semi-detached house retails at half-a-million Euro for starters. They were like something out of the Dark Ages. One of them, with half a broomstick in his fist as his weapon of choice, asked An Spailpín where were his tyres, and remarked that he - the youth - would be back later to collect them. The child isn't old enough to shave yet. An Spailpín saw a girl in the group, who should have been in some sort of supervisory, big sister, role, was also in combat camouflage, but she looked very unhappy. Under the dirt, she would have been pretty. It was a strange side to choose.

Seven o'clock. Two young men are attempting to gain entry into the shop of a Statoil garage near where the mortal remains of former Taoiseach Charles Haughey lay in state. The bouncer bars them by physically standing in the door; they gain entry when a civilian exits through the other door. The bouncer chases them around the shop, while they knock stands and displays. But all he can do is escort them off the premises when he finally catches them; he has no other power of sanction. Nobody is on his side. Therefore, it is no surprise to An Spailpín Fánach that the youths camp out in front of the shop door, enjoying their night's fun, wrecking his head and attempting to regain entry. There was no time to ask the bouncer if he got paid enough money to put up with this.

Eight o'clock. A youth, again too young to shave, steps out of the darkness to throw something at An Spailpín Fánach's car. The area in which the youth is standing has houses that sell at €600,000 and up.

Nine o'clock. An Spailpín is in another garage. Two girls are inside, drunk, causing trouble. An Spailpín returns to his car. As An Spailpín gets in, a man emerges from the car parked next to An Spailpín on the garage forecourt, goes into the corner and starts pissing there. There is a bar less than fifteen yards away whose toilets are fully functional. Sir Galahad prefers al fresco. His famous discretion temporarily abandoning him, An Spailpín looks into the car next to him, to see what sort of company the bladder reliever is keeping. There's a girl in the driver's seat, a nice girl, a girl who doesn't need to see her "fellit" - in the current argot - pissing in public. Or does she? Could she not do better? Why does she put up with this ape, this cretin, this louse? Mystified, An Spailpín pulls away, returns home, turns on his computer, and sadly files his report.

Our society is wretched, rotten, and surely doomed. This will all end in tears - all we have left to decide is who will be doing the weeping. And your correspondent is not optimistic on that score.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin

Only Losers Take the Bus

An Spailpín is still trying to come to terms with a clip from Liveline he heard this morning, just before the eight o’clock news on Radio 1. It seems that a 19 year old man was thrown off the upper deck of the 77 bus in Tallaght at the weekend, and is currently pretty badly shook up in hospital.

Thrown off the upper deck of a bus. Isn’t that astonishing? And if it is, why hasn’t it been front page news? In his efforts to faithfully chronicle contemporary Irish life, An Spailpín likes to keep an eye on these things, and this story is definitely well under the news radar.

What about the comments of John McGrane of the National Bus and Rail Union, reported in this morning’s Independent, that they will have no option other than not to go to Tallaght anymore if the gardaí aren’t going to protect their drivers? An Spailpín isn’t the greatest Irish public service union man in the world, but it’s very hard not to see Mr McGrane’s point.

Not least when we discover that a man being thrown off the upper deck of the 77 bus is only one of twenty-five reported incidents on buses serving west Tallaght in the past month alone. These include:

• A passenger’s coat being set on fire
  
• A bus driver being spat at in the face
  
• A child being assaulted
  
• A bus being set on fire
  
• Fighting in the upper deck
  
• Drug-taking in the upper deck
  

On reading that list of depravity, we quickly realise that it’s not just the bus drivers that need protection here. All his life, An Spailpín has heard about how Tallaght is one of the fastest growing and biggest towns in Ireland, and how its needs need to be looked after. So what An Spailpín now wants to know is: what is the government doing to protect the ordinary, decent people of Tallaght, who are in the overwhelming majority, as we are always reminded whenever these reports of so-called “anti-social behaviour” occur? What steps are being taken to stop Joe or Jane Citizen from having their clothing set on fire, their bus set on fire, their means of getting to and from work being set on fire, their children being spat at or assaulted?

The gougers rule the city of Dublin. We saw it during the riots, we see it every day in the city, and we sit back and accept it. There is zero political will to deal with the issue and in the meantime ordinary decent people have to get up and go to work without knowing what sort of foul horror will confront them once they get on their bus. And what do they get in return? Lectures about inequality in society on the op-ed pages of the Irish Times.

What they don’t get are results. What they have to suffer every day doesn’t even make the news. An Spailpín has searched today’s Irish Times in vain for the story about the potential disruption in bus services to Tallaght, and he can’t find it. Here’s the link to the Article Index in today's Irish Times – happy hunting.

The Irish Times isn’t slow to laud itself as the paper of record, but on an issue that affects a huge tranche of the population it has nothing to report. Zero. Zip. The null set. Madam ought to be ashamed of herself. As for any poor dumb bastard that’s trying to commute to and from Tallaght, may God help you, because nobody else gives a fiddler’s. Only losers take the bus.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Dublin, Dublin Bus, Anti-Social Behaviour