We Have Learned Nothing in Irish Politics

First published in the Western People on Monday.

I, for one, welcome our new overlord.

The analysis of the by-election results in Dublin South-West and Roscommon South-Leitrim has focused heavily on how voters are turning away from the major Irish political parties. This was especially obvious in Dublin South-West, where Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour managed just 26% of the vote between them.

To put that in perspective, there has never been a government in the history of the state that hasn’t featured at least one of those parties in its makeup, and now they can only manage one vote in four between the three of them.

Why the public are so disillusioned is certainly due to a combination of reasons, one of which seems under-discussed in the national media. Could the disconnect between the mainstream political parties and the mainstream of Irish political life have arisen because the mainstream political parties have treated the electorate like fools since the crash, if not before?

For instance: during the end of the bailout debate in the Dáil last year, the majority of speakers made a point of commending the Ballyhea Says No Protest.

Ballyhea is a village in County Cork. Every Sunday without fail since March 6th, 2011, a group of locals have held a protest against the bank bailout.

There is a better chance of the GAA stripping Kerry of this year’s All-Ireland title and awarding it to Mayo in apology for events in Limerick than there is of the Ballyhea Says No protest group doing anything other than getting colds now that the weather has got chilly again. The Ballyhea protest is an attempt to get toothpaste back into the tube or water to flow uphill. The world doesn’t work like that. It just doesn’t.

Ballyhea says it’s not our debt. Of course it’s our debt. If it weren’t our debt, we wouldn’t be bloody paying for it, would we? This is how the world works.

Does anybody stand up and say this in the Dáil? No, they don’t. If the people were told that the milk is spilled and is now gone, never to come back, could they deal with it? Of course they could. Milk gets spilled all the time and the world doesn’t end. The world carries on just the same. But the Irish political establishment doesn’t trust the Irish electorate to come to terms with that.

Whether they were right or wrong, whether they were had their arms twisted or they were just thick, the government that signed the bank guarantee were fully mandated by the people to sign that guarantee. That’s what representative government is.

The sovereign people elect representatives to make decisions on the sovereign people’s behalf. If the government screws it up, it’s partly the fault of the sovereign people who elected them in the first place.

This isn’t news. This principle goes back to the Ancient Greeks, before the birth of Christ. There is nothing novel in this.

But representative democracy can do something that toothpaste-back-in-tube movements can’t do. They elect someone else. And that is what the voters in the two by-elections are clearly eager to do.

That is what they did the last time, but they were sold a pup. The people remain eager to get what they voted for, and so we get the voting patterns in the recent by-elections. The sad thing for the country, though, is that the new dispensation is just as likely to be a mutt as the last.

Michael Fitzmaurice, the new TD for Roscommon South Leitrim, seems a good and honest man. The type of man on whom you can rely to help you when you need it and pretend after that he did nothing at all. In the case of Roscommon South-Leitrim, the man’s own decency and likeability may have had as much to do with his victory as anything else.

But the reality is that he’s just one man. One man can’t govern. To govern, you need to form alliances, and how many Michael Fitzmaurices are there in the Dáil? The Independents dream of some sort of we’re-all-Independent-together faction in the next Dáil, but where is the common ground between Shane Ross, Michael Fitzmaurice and Michael Lowry? The gap is too big to bridge.

And then you have the socialists. Paul Murphy, Joe Higgins, Clare Daly and Joan Collins were all in the Socialist Party once. Presuming that the Anti-Austerity Alliance isn’t one and the same with the Socialist Party, the four of them are now in four different parties, even though they all agree with each other on policy.

They all agree, and they can’t get on. They won’t be forming any government, or if they do, it’ll probably have broken down in the time it takes them to go the Phoenix Park to get their seals of office from the President.

Besides. The establishment parties aren’t alone in not being entirely upfront with the electorate. Paul Murphy was elected in Dublin South-West because he is anti-water charge. Most people who voted for him won’t be liable for water charges in the first place. There are places in Dublin South-West that are so deprived, so far removed from mainstream life, that even to drive through them feels like having crossed into another country.

If there were honest politics in this country, the only issue on the doorsteps in areas like Jobstown and Cherry Orchard should be that candidates would move Heaven and Earth to keep children in school and on the straight and narrow. Dysfunctional though the adults’ lives may be, if it can be brought through to them that it may be possible to save the children from perpetuating the cycle, that would a treble victory for the people, the community and the nation.

What did we get instead? Extraordinary placards that beseeched us to stick our water meters up our bottoms. Not quite Meagher’s speech from the dock.

So here we are. Faith is lost in the establishment parties. The only people to rally to Lucinda Creighton’s flag were those who had nowhere else to go. The alternative parties hope to get their chance but, if their slogans are a guide, it’s hard not to think of the men to whom WB Yeats referred in The Fisherman one hundred and one years ago – “no knave brought to book / Who has won a drunker cheer.”

There are no leaders here. The country continues to go around and around in pointless, hopeless circles.

Forgive us, Frau Merkel. Come back to Erin, Mr Chopra. We promise to be nicer to you than those beastly Scots, Mr Cameron. Please. Somebody take us in. We just can’t make it on our own.

Margaret Burke Sheridan - Visse d'Arte

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The birthday of the greatest female singer Ireland has ever produced falls on this Wednesday. She is not a national figure because she was an opera singer, and opera has never been popular in Ireland. It’s a pity though – opera is one of the great achievements in human art, and Margaret Burke Sheridan was one of our own.

Very much one of our own, in fact. Margaret Sheridan was born in a house on the Mall in Castlebar on October 15th, 1889, the fifth child of the postmaster in Castlebar at the time, John Burke Sheridan.

Margaret’s mother died when Margaret was five, and her father died when she was eleven. Effectively orphaned – the Sheridan family don’t seem to have been that close - Margaret was raised to adulthood in the Dominican convent at 19 Eccles Street, Dublin 7, now part of the Mater Hospital. And it was while a student with the Dominicans that Margaret Burke Sheridan discovered that she had a gift.

At the age of nineteen, Sheridan left Ireland to study music at the Royal Academy in London. She was a success, but there was a war on and the opera scene in London was something of a backwater. If you wanted to be a star, you had to go to Italy, where opera is all.

Sheridan went to Rome, and started training again under a teacher called Alfredo Martini. And it was while training that she made the decision that set her path for the rest of her life.

A singer in a production of La Bohème in the Constanzi Opera House (now the Teatro dell’Opera) fell ill while Margaret Sheridan was staying in the Quirinale Hotel. The Quirinale is on the other side of the block from the opera house, and the manager of the opera house had heard Margaret practicing - Sheridan was in the habit of practicing her singing at her open window in the hotel. The manager took a notion, and sent a cable to find out if the nobody wanted to become a star in four days, filling as Mimì in Giancomo Puccini’s beloved opera about young love.

Fantastic, you would think. But it wasn’t that simple. Martini, Margaret’s teacher, was dead set against the idea, and for reasons that are do with what makes opera such a challenging art form.

The singing that we do in the shower or when loaded with porter is a natural ability. Sometimes the singing isn’t too bad, sometimes it’s wretched – it’s down to accidents of birth.

But the singing done by opera singers isn’t at all natural. Yes, there are natural voices, but they have to be meticulously trained, not only to make sweeter, richer sounds, but to be able to make those sounds on demand, consistently, for show after show, for performance after performance.

Margaret Burke Sheridan had a natural gift. But she wasn’t yet fully in control of her voice. She could sing, but she couldn’t sing in such a way that she could guarantee her singing wouldn’t impair her ability to sing in future. That’s how severe operatic singing is – if you don’t know what you’re doing, you are in danger of destroying your voice every time you open your mouth.

On the other hand, Sheridan had been living off the kindness of strangers since her father died. Different benefactors had invested in her talent, but it’s not the same as making your own money. And opportunities to sing a major role in a major theatre don’t come along every day. What use was there in completing her training if she were to have a perfect instrument but nowhere to sing? Besides; she could always go back and finish up her training, couldn’t she?

Sheridan made her choice. She sang Mimì in Rome on February 3rd, 1918, and instantly became a star. Even today, Italians don’t always take to foreigners singing Italy’s national art form, but they couldn’t resist Sheridan.

For twelve years she ruled the operatic stage, something John McCormack could never do. Margaret Sheridan sang in London, Naples, Monte Carlo and Milan, and was acclaimed by all. And then, after a performance as Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello at Covent Garden in June, 1930, she never sang again.

She tried to, of course. At first, she would claim a cold or a chest infection and pull out of performances, in the fashion of primas donnas. But as the years went by it became clearer that she would never return to the stage. Alfredo Martini had been right. Without the proper grounding and technique, Margaret’s talent was a castle built on sand. It would last for so long but it was always doomed. And when the doom arrived, there would be no way to rescue it.

Sheridan was still a star. She was offered concert recitals – the form that made McCormack a household name and a very wealthy man - but she turned them down. As far as Sheridan was concerned, it was opera or nothing. Opera isn’t just the singing – it’s the acting, the music, the performance, the whole. To just sing without the rest of opera’s heady mix would be like drinking black tea. It just wasn’t the same.

Sheridan turned a brave face to the world, but the remaining thirty-odd years of her life were tough on her. She came back to live in Ireland but we are not a great nation for accepting our countrymen and countrywomen who have had success abroad.

But Margaret Sheridan was generous to the next generation, and did what she could for them. In her definitive biography of Sheridan, Anne Chambers writes of a Feis Ceoil winner, Phyllis Sullivan, who was tutored for a time by Margaret Sheridan.

Sullivan recalled Sheridan as being temperamental, but never mean. If Sullivan made a mistake, Sheridan would sing the line properly herself (while always avoiding high notes). Sullivan asked Sheridan why she didn’t sing in public anymore.

“My voice is finished,” replied Sheridan. “It’s all right singing for you, darling, but I would break on my top notes and I am nervous.”

Margaret Burke Sheridan died on April 16th, 1958, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. The back of her headstone reads “Margherita Sheridan, Prima Donna. La Scala, Milan. Covent Garden, London.” Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam uasal.

Bias in the Media

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Although his politics are shared by very few people in the country, Joe Higgins, TD, has always been lauded for being a “diverse” voice in the Irish political landscape. Political correspondents often remark in their end-of-term parliamentary reviews how good it is to have Joe Higgins in the Dáil to provide “balance” to debates.

Well. We all must be careful what we wish for, and the national media discovered this the hard way when the terms of reference to the long-awaited Banking Inquiry were announced recently.

The Banking Inquiry was conceived, originally, as a fine instrument for dipping the previous government into a vat of boiling oil. However, that methodology would probably give some busybody in the UN another reason to give out to us, so the current government had to adjust the terms of reference.

The Banking Inquiry is now set to investigate all banking practice in Ireland from 1992 until the crash, some sixteen years. And just as everybody was about to sign off on this, Joe Higgins put his hand up and made a last-minute suggestion.

Higgins proposed that the inquiry examine “the development of a prevailing consensus, including the role of mass media and advertising and mortgage brokers, financial consultants and property development and sales companies.”

Since the crash, we’ve all heard a lot about “groupthink” in Irish political life. But Joe Higgins’s amendment to the Banking Inquiry is the first effort to discover what exactly this groupthink is, where does it come from, what does it do and is it a good or a bad thing.

Not everyone is happy about this. Ciarán Lynch, TD, chairman of the Banking Inquiry, was on Morning Ireland the week before last to discuss the Inquiry, and he seemed a little shocked to be hauled over the coals about the media angle.

“The media has no legislative power,” the Morning Ireland presenter kept repeating. Mr Lynch may have considered replying that a government backbencher doesn’t have all that much power either, but probably thought he’d only get into more trouble.

It is unlikely the nation wll be any the wiser after the Banking Inquiry. Anyone who expects anything other that stonewalling from witnesses and grandstanding from committee members hasn’t been following these Oireachtas Committee very closely.

People can be compelled to appear but they are under no obligation to say anything of any interest whatever once they’re there. So it’s all for show, really, a lot like the Houses of the Oireachtas themselves.

What makes this twist about the media interesting though is that it gives us an opportunity to consider the question of bias. All news reporting has to deal with bias, from the very start of a news cycle. By reporting one thing and not reporting another, any media organisation has already taken a step that may be affected by bias, either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s how the media organisation deals with that bias inherent in the news-gathering process itself that’s interesting. And there are two schools of thought here.

The current fashion is for admitting bias from the start. More and more media organisations don’t even try to be fair, but simply tell their audiences what they want to hear. The right-wing Fox News in the USA is (in)famous for its partisan reporting, but there are plenty of channels in the US who shout for the Democrats too. The problem is that people don’t get to see both points of view at once, and this causes a democratic deficit.

The classical model of good reporting in journalism is to acknowledge bias but to strive to overcome it at every opportunity. This is the model practiced here in Ireland – in theory, anyway – but it seems Joe Higgins is inclined to double-check that idea, just in case.

Does Higgins have a point? Well. It certainly is a remarkable thing that the entire country was convinced that the housing market could provide infinite wealth for so long. It also a remarkable thing that when the crash came, the country was equally convinced there was only one reason behind it. How much of these twin illusions was due to the way the boom, the bust and the repercussions were reported in the media?

The media is all-pervasive in our lives. When you get up, you know if the shower was hot or cold, you know if you could find your socks, you know if there’s milk in the fridge when you open the door. You could look out the window to see what the weather is like, but you know that could change in fifteen minutes or less.

For everything else that impacts on your life, you need the media. Do you need a new car for the morning commute? Can you afford one? Are car prices going up or down? Are petrol prices going up or down? What will it cost to tax and insure the thing? Should you forget the family saloon and buy some sort of jeep, because the road is all potholes and it costs money to repair broken axles?

You don’t have time to study economics to see overall market trends. You can’t keep up with the geopolitics of the oil-producing countries, or the physics of all the new ways of getting oil out of the ground. And you certainly can’t pop in to Leinster House and find out what future taxation and infrastructure policy will be. There are plenty in there who have no idea no more than ourselves.

So you rely on the media for this information. You watch the news and listen to it on the radio and buy a daily paper along with your weekly Western and you take a sneaky glance at the web at work too.

But reader – can you fully believe what you read in the papers, hear on the radio or see on the TV? Is everybody trying really hard to maintain objectivity, or do they go on the occasional crusade every now again? Or not even that – could it be that one side of the argument is presented, and a balancing counter-argument just doesn’t make an appearance? Who exactly is telling us what to do?

The Redmond Problem

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Former Taoiseach John Bruton is not to be dissuaded in his support for John Redmond as a great Irish patriot and parliamentarian. But is John Bruton aware that the case he is currently building could blow up in his face and help sweep Sinn Féin to power just in time for the 100th Anniversary of the Easter Rising?

John Burton’s advocacy of John Redmond is part of the wider campaign to water down any commemoration of the 1916 Rising. This watering-down campaign has not been announced as policy, as there are concerns that such watering down would go down badly with the people. As such, the campaign has been a little more subtle.

There was Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland, which received blanket media coverage. There was President Higgins’s return visit to the United Kingdom, which was covered no less.

There has been this spurious “Decade of Commemoration,” where successive governments have tried to lessen the impact of the 100th Anniversary of the Rising by saying the Rising was just one of a number of things that happened at that time.

As a strategy, this is in the same league as a callow youth’s plan to sneak a copy of some naughty magazine in between a National Geographic and this week’s Western as he approaches a till manned by a live, actual female.

No-one is fooled. The people don’t care. We had a year-long commemoration of the 1913 Lockout in Dublin last year, and this year’s love-bombing of the 100th anniversary of the start of the “Great” War. Both were met by the same shrug as the checkout girl’s, who has zero interest in the callow youth’s taste in periodicals. The nation doesn’t care about a decade of commemoration, but there seems to be a big green X marking the spot for either April 24th or Easter Monday of 2016 somewhere at the back of our minds.

That the Rising still means so much to people is surprising, and certainly not in line with how successive governments have been viewing the situation. It only became obvious after the Presidential visit to the United Kingdom when, in a flush of enthusiasm, an invitation was extended for some members of the British royal family to come over and be part of the fun.

The nation reacted with horror and the proposal hasn’t been heard of since.

The reason that Irish governments have been very wary of the 1916 Anniversary is that the Rising was legitimised after the fact. Padraig Pearse and the other rebel leaders had no mandate to do what they did. They couldn’t declare a republic in 1916 because they didn’t represent anybody but themselves in 1916.

The 1916 mandate was backdated by the first Dáil in 1919, and since it all turned out grand in the end, nobody but an anti-national spoilsport would go questioning the morality of the whole thing. For the first fifty years after independence, everyone wore the white cockade.

And then, on January 4th, 1969, a march in support of a crazy notion of one-man, one-vote in Northern Ireland was ambushed on its way into Derry, to the supreme indifference of the watching policemen as a fusillade of stones, iron bars and nail-studded sticks rained down on the marchers.

One thing led to another and by the 1970s getting tanked up and singing Seán South of Garryowen south of the border didn’t seem like harmless fun anymore. Nobody wanted to mention the war.

That war-that-wasn’t took thirty years and over three thousand lives until a serendipitous accident saw political leaders in Ireland, Britain and the USA come to power, leaders who were willing take chances and bend rules for peace.
There are those who are sickened by retired terrorists swaggering around the corridors of power instead of doing stir in some suitable jail, but that is the price of peace. People have to turn a blind eye to things in the name of the greater good.

Until a bull charges into a china shop as John Bruton did when he condemned the 1916 leaders in a speech delivered at the Irish Royal Academy on the day of the Scottish Referendum.

For Bruton, the Irishmen who fought for Britain in the “Great” War were patriots, whereas those who rebelled in 1916 were not fighting a just war. But Bruton makes a logical error here. He presents reaction to the 1916 Rising as an either/or scenario.

If you are against the 1916 Rising, you must be in favour of Redmond, and you must therefore do your duty by the Empire. Meaning, in this case, head for the Somme two months after the Rising and get mown down by the German machine-guns in your thousands and thousands.

There was a slogan that was common in Ireland during those troubled times one hundred years ago – “Neither King nor Kaiser, but Ireland.” In his speech at the Royal Irish Academy, Bruton has eliminated that third way as an option at the time, and has presented war as inevitable. The only question was whether you marched under the tricolour or the Union Jack, but march and kill or be killed you surely would.

And that’s a very inappropriate road for Bruton to have gone down. Just how inappropriate was spotted immediately by the current Minister for Agriculture (and favourite to become the next leader of Fine Gael), Simon Coveney. On the morning of Bruton’s speech, Minister Coveney tweeted “For the record: I believe much of John Bruton’s commentary on 1916 is simply wrong and does not represent the views of Fine Gael supporters.” Duly noted, Minister.

It may be that Bruton doesn’t realise that he polarised the choice, and it was just unfortunate wording on his part. Or it may be that he’s fully aware of what he’s doing, and believes that, in times of peace and (returned?) prosperity, the nation will follow the good man Redmond ahead of gunmen like Breen, Barry and O’Malley.

But nationalism works at a level beyond the senses. When it boils down to flags, the Irish nation, for all the faults of the state, will rally under only one, and it won’t be the one still flying over Edinburgh. That is the nature of the patriot game.

Laois Are Hurling Champions Too

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The hurlers of Kilkenny and Tipperary will face each other on the field on honour once more this weekend. There had been no draw in All-Ireland hurling finals since the late 1950s; the replay at five o’clock on Saturday will be the third in three years.

And no harm either. The GAA has priced the tickets sensibly, and the finals of recent years have been epics of skill and spirit. Tipperary and Kilkenny share a border of thirty-five miles, give or take, and every yard of it bristles with rivalry. All the more so in September, if the great prize is at stake.

Whoever wins the All-Ireland on Saturday will deserve it. There’s no argument about that. But Croke Park will contain more than partisans from each competing county. As with football final, Croke Park will contain men and women for whom the game is all, even though their chances of ever seeing their own team march behind the Artane Band as the evenings shorter and the weather gets colder are slim.

Consider the place of Laois in the world of hurling. Laois were the All-Ireland hurling champions of 1915, when they beat Cork on a wet day in October in the final.

The senior hurlers of the O’Moore County have won only one title since – the Delaney Cup in 1949, when they squeaked past Kilkenny in the Leinster Final, 3-8 to 3-6. Laois went on to beat Galway to return to the All-Ireland Final, where they faced Tipperary. Tipp slaughtered them, 3-11 to 0-3. Laois have won nothing since.

But for those long and fallow years, Laois haven’t given up. Giving up is not what GAA people do. Laois soldier on.

If you are old enough, you certainly remember the Cork footballers beating Mayo 5-15 to 0-10 in 1993, and the memory still stings. The Cork hurlers played Laois three years ago in the preliminary round of the hurling qualifiers. Cork won by 10-20 to 1-13. How can you possibly go on after that? And yet go on Laois do, year after year, summer after summer.

Séamus “Cheddar” Plunkett is the current Laois hurling manager. Keith Duggan interviewed him in the Irish Times in March, and asked him if he ever wished he had been born “over there,” on the other side of the border. Plunkett’s answer is the answer of every GAA person worth his or her salt: “I don’t actually want to be from there. I know where I’m from!”

And so he does. Séamus Plunkett played on the Laois team that made it to the 1984 Centenary Cup Final. Pat Critchley was a midfielder on that team. Critchley would go on to win Laois’s only hurling All-Star the following year, and now Critchley is the manager of the Laois minors.

But Critchley and Plunkett’s personal connection exists outside hurling. Friends since childhood, they went on an adventure in the late 1980s that was every young person’s dream, at one stage or another.

In the late 1980s, Pat Critchley and Séamus Plunkett’s brother, Ollie, were in a band. The band was formed as the Drowning Fish, and then later came to prominence – of a kind – as The Mere Mortals.

They played at Féile, the big outdoor concert that succeeded Siamsa Cois Laoi and preceded the Electric Picnic, in 1990. The Mere Mortals charted in 1991 with a single called Travelling On after appearing on Barry Lang’s Beat Box, a music show that was on TV after Mass on Sunday morning, and their path to being the next U2 seemed certain.

Therefore, they hired Séamus Cheddar Plunkett to be their manager, because you always need a sensible one to mind the money. When Plunkett imposed a two-pint limit before every gig, the band knew they had hired the right man.

The video for Travelling On is on You Tube. It’s of its time, which is a nice way of saying that it’s awful. Paul Marron, the lead singer, looks like Bono did at Self-Aid, with an overcoat and great big woolly mullet. The song itself is built on one of those ning-ning-ning-ning guitar riffs that were the sound of Irish rock at the time. It’s brutal.

Pat Critchley’s role in the band was to play the accordion and the yellow maracas. This makes Travelling On and Where Do You Go To, My Lovely the only songs in the canon to use the accordion play rock and roll.

It’s easy to look back on an ‘eighties music video and laugh. But reader, those Mere Mortals probably had more fun in one weekend in Portarlington than any of us will have in our entire lives, because there were In A Band.

And there’s something about that aspect to Critchley and Plunkett, the Marx and Engels of the (hoped for) Laois hurling revolution, that speaks to the best of us. The Mere Mortals struggled to fulfill all their gigs because the lads had hurling matches to go to. For them, there was nothing greater than the game, nor anywhere greater than Laois.

In a feature on Today FM’s Championship Sunday during the summer, Pat Critchley reminisced on his childhood in Portlaoise, and how he always wanted to mark Billy Bohane at hurling training, even though Billy Bohane was an old man at the time.

Who’s Billy Bohane? He was a midfielder on the 1949 Laois team that Tipperary destroyed. A footnote in the national record, a hero to his own. As Patrick Kavanagh has told us, gods make their own importance.

So good luck and God bless the hurlers of Tipperary and Kilkenny, the best we have in the country. One of them will be crowned All-Ireland Champions for the 35th or 27th time, and be worthy of the title. But raise a glass on Saturday night to the likes of Laois and our own Mayo hurlers as well, counties who hurl away from the limelight but hurl on none the less. They know the ultimate truth. The GAA isn’t about winning. The GAA is about being. Long may it last.

Scotland and the Call of Freedom

First published in the Western People on Monday.

A Scotchman, yesterday.

It’s all fun and games until somebody loses a country. The sage parental advice sounded ne’er so true as when the British political establishment suddenly woke to the prospect that, for all their blather, the perfidious Scots might just go and vote for independence after all.

It’s not just the rest of the United Kingdom who are suddenly transfixed by events north of Hadrian’s Wall. An independent Scotland would be something of a floating joker in the European context. Its proponents say everything will be fine and an independent Scotland will be welcomed with open arms in Brussels, while opponents grimly remark that one does not simply walk into the European Union and leave it at that.

For Ireland too, an independent Scotland would be more hassle than we need right now. Ireland’s great selling point for direct foreign investment, apart from our corporation tax, is that we are an English-speaking gateway to Europe. But they speak English in Scotland too – what happens if Scotland becomes a more attractive place to locate than Ireland? Nothing good.

Ireland certainly can’t come around and plead with the Scots to stay in the UK, given our own history, but the last thing we want is having our eye wiped by a free Scotland that’s also claiming to be the best small country in the world to do business. Therefore, the Irish keep schtum, and hope for the best.

But an independent Scotland might be too busy fighting for its very survival to even think about raining on the Irish parade. An independent Scotland will face two big questions. The biggest question of all is: what will they use for money?

The proponents of independence say that the money will be fine. They can use the pound sterling, just like always. But we in Ireland don’t have our own currency, and look how we got rolled around in a barrel because of it over the past few years.

Money, in itself, isn’t valuable. Money is a measure of value. That value is set by governments. If Scotland uses the pound sterling as its currency, it doesn’t get to set the value of that currency.

Scotland currently has a say in the value of the pound sterling, as part of the United Kingdom. But a vote for independence means the Scots get no say at all. So if Scottish interest rates are rising while English interest rates are falling – well, it won’t be pretty.

And then there is the EU conundrum. There are plenty of European countries that have regions that dream of independence. A smooth Scottish ascension to the EU would have the same effect on such Catalans, Basques, Silesians and others who hear the call of freedom as spinach had on Popeye the Sailor Man. If the Scots want in to the EU, they will have to sing for their supper. The door won’t just swing open for them.

There is also the peculiar thing about the EU being a union of like-minded peoples, sharing values and cultures. People like those in the United Kingdom, whose values are now at such odds with Scottish values that the Scots have no option but to strike out on their own. So the Scots are like everyone else in the EU, from Westport to Warsaw, except the British, from whom the Scots are so different that they need to be independent. Whatever way you slice it, that never adds up.

And so we return to the crux of the question: why on Earth do the Scots want to be independent in the first place? What Scottish values exist that aren’t also British values? What freedom will the Scots gain through independence that they haven’t got now? What currently existing Scottish oppression will end through independence?

There is a romantic inclination to connect the notion of Scottish independence with Irish independence. That Scotland, like Ireland, is entitled to independence in the name of the dead generations from whom she derives her long tradition of nationhood.

But that’s not the case with the Scots at all. Whatever strain of that long tradition existed heretofore was well and truly wiped out at Culloden’s Moor on April 16th, 1745, by His Grace Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Scotland has been, to echo a phrase from our own past, as British as Finchley ever since.

So how have they now got it into their heads they’re not as British as Finchley? How is Scottish independence so close that the British Establishment has been love-bombing Scotland for all its worth for the past week, and promising the devil and all if only the Scots won’t walk out the door?

It is simply the appeal of the patriot game that’s caused the Scots to short-circuit the notoriously severe common sense of the man in the street in Auchtermuchty, and go chasing a hopeless dream? If it is, they won’t be the first people to be so short-circuited, for whom some woman’s yellow hair has maddened every mother’s son.

Of course, Ireland and the Irish experience isn’t a factor in the Scottish referendum at all, which is a little hurtful. However hurtful it may be, it’s not at all difficult to understand. A lot of people in Scotland despise the Irish. Ibrox is filled to the rafters every week, with the Billy Boys gustily sung every time.

But one thing the Scots can learn from the Irish is that there is a big difference between being able to revolt and being able to govern. It’s hard not to look back on the early years of the Irish Free State and see men slightly lost in the corridors of power, wondering what in God’s name are we meant to do now?

We all throw back the shoulders when we look up and see the flag fluttering in the breeze. But what does the notion of a nation state really mean in the globalised world of the early 21st Century? We were talking about being able to set your own currency earlier but even that is limited by the size and resources of your own country. Things like sovereignty and independence are ephemeral things in the modern world, especially when compared to the solid reality of economic prosperity and political stability. It would be a pity if the Scots, that most practical of people, were to lose all that now in chasing a will-o-the-wisp.

A Three-Point-Plan for the Coming Election

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Houses of Oireachtas reconvene this day week, the fifteenth of September. A leading bookmaker is currently laying odds of Burlington Bertie, 100/30, that there will be an election this year. That is a very tempting price.

We are currently in the run-up to the Budget and, as is the time-honoured tradition with these things, ministers are flying flags to protect their own departmental budgets. There’s nothing unusual in that.

What is unusual this time around is that the Labour Party have mandated a new leader to make a stronger Labour case at the cabinet table while Fine Gael continue to hold the austerity line. Eventually, something’s got to give.

Neither side wants an election, but sometimes these things take on a momentum of their own and, once the snowball starts rolling down the hill, there’s no real way to stop it.

If there is to be an election, this column is happy to announce one vote for hire in the next general election. Whatever party comes closest to the following list of demands is the party most worthy of your correspondent’s favour when exercising his democratic franchise.

Reform of the Electoral System
Everybody talks about reform, but if that talking doesn’t contain a practical suggestion it’s just so much air. Commissions to see if Ireland should lower the voting age to sixteen are all hooey. Platitudes. Deckchairs on the Titanic.

Real reform is something that shakes up the political system, and ours is a system that is badly in need of shaking up. We can’t object to Europe taking over the powers of our national parliament when our own national parliament is, for want of a better phrase, a joke shop.

A parliament exists to hold a government to account. The Dáil does no such thing. The TDs obey the party whip, which means that Ireland is an oligarchy as much as it’s a democracy – the Taoiseach of the day takes advice from his unelected but nicely remunerated advisers, and the sheep bleat their support in the chamber.

Why is this so? This is so because the Irish nation prioritises the local over the national interest. Why would we do that? Because the electoral system forces us to do that.

For example: suppose there are two candidates for election. One is someone who speaks well, understands the economy and has a vision for the future. The other is someone who doesn’t care one way or the other about visions, but will pull every string going to fix the main road into town.

If the first person gets elected, nothing changes. He or she is full of great ideas but, as discussed earlier, you’re as well off writing to Santa about them as speaking in the Dáil, because nobody is listening in the Dáil.

If the second person gets elected, nothing changes at the national level either, but you do have a chance of getting that road tarred. A simple choice for anyone who can tell the difference between half a loaf and no bread.

If the electoral system is changed, we can then change the type of politician we elect, and the new politicians can then make more radical changes to the system of Government. But without that first step, nothing changes at all. This column’s preference would be for a single-seat constituency supplemented by a list system of elections, but I’m not dogmatic about it. So long as the politicians realise a change of system is the difference between getting elected and not, that’s the main thing.

Deflating the Dublin Housing Market Bubble
How can you have a housing shortage in a city that is surrounded by ghost estates? It makes no sense, yet this is what we’re being told to believe about housing in Dublin. We’ve spent the past five years watching TV documentaries about ghost estates, and now we’re expected to believe there’s a housing shortage and we need to build, build, build?

Average house prices in Dublin are rising by six thousand Euro a month. There is no way that is not a bubble. No way. Speculator cash is driving up the price of houses, and it’s being facilitated by the National Assets Management Agency, NAMA. NAMA’s remit is to get the best price it can for the assets on its books, and NAMA is supremely indifferent to whether there’s a bubble there or not. Managing the economy isn’t NAMA’s concern.

Managing the economy is, in fact, the Government’s concern. Vote for a party at the next election who will make deflating the bubble a priority. The crash is only five years’ distant – surely we haven’t forgotten that lesson already?

Decentralisation
One of the reasons that Dublin currently has a housing market bubble is because, post-recession, the Government has abandoned all pretence at treating all regions equally. Right now, Government policy centres on developing the capital as a hub for foreign direct investment, and letting the regions go whistle.

The theory behind the policy is that Dublin has to compete with other cities of the world like London, New York, Mumbai and Amsterdam in being attractive to a globalised workforce, and it is the duty of the rest of the country to pull on the green jersey and get behind the capital.

The theory is deeply flawed. Foreign direct investment is a false god. Indigenous industry will always be more reliable than foreign direct investment, for two reasons. Firstly, being indigenous means the company is less likely to move away to somewhere cheaper. Secondly, if one indigenous company folds, it doesn’t take the whole industry with it. All our eggs will not be in one basket.

Again, there is no rule that says Ireland can only look to foreign direct investment for its development. This is the information age – the absence of resources and infrastructure don’t hamper us anymore. We need electric power, computers and good broadband. Once we have that, we are only limited by our imagination and bravery.

Fine Gael won their greatest-ever number of seats in the last election on the back of a five-point-plan. Here’s a three-point-plan that the voters should use to decide the next government – electoral reform, financial prudence, and decentralisation. Are they really too much to ask?

The Black Hole that is the Late Late Show

First published in the Western People on Monday.

If Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, there exist, somewhere in the universe, things called black holes. A black hole is a region of space where matter has become so compact it has collapsed into itself. A black hole’s gravitational field is so strong that it draws everything around into it, allowing nothing – not light, not gravity, not anything – to escape.

In Ireland, we are familiar with black holes. One will start broadcasting against this Friday night at nine-thirty on RTÉ 1, holding all otherwise sentient, sensible people in its iron grasp for the next two and a half hours.

People once thought that the Late Late Show couldn’t survive Gay Byrne’s retirement. They’ve had to think again – although Uncle Gaybo has never really gone away, his last Late Late Show was fifteen years ago. And still the show goes on after him, Friday after Friday, year after year.

It is not entirely unreasonable to expect that, should the direst of warnings come true and Ireland is three feet underwater as a result of global warming, or the proliferation of windfarms and pylons and the Lord knows what has left the green isle of Erin habitable only by rats, badgers and the rougher sort of insect, there will still be a tower in Montrose that will fizzle fitfully into life every Friday in autumn, winter and spring to announce that tonight, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the Late Late Show, and here is your host ...

Being the host of the Late Late Show is, supposedly, the premier job in Irish broadcasting. This is the reason RTÉ has historically paid its stars great pots of money for the apparently straightforward job of asking some British soap opera star how much she liked visiting Ireland and if, perhaps, she had any relations here. If someone like Pat Kenny wasn’t paid a big ball of money, the fear was that he would go somewhere else, and take all his listenership with him, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

The interesting thing is that the bluff has been called. Newstalk made Pat Kenny an offer he couldn’t refuse last year and so Kenny left RTÉ after forty years to do his old show for a new boss. Newstalk’s plan was that Pat’s pipes would sound from Marconi house, and Kenny’s loyal listenership would obey the massive advertising campaign to “move the dial” and follow their leader.

Except that’s not what happened at all. The latest figures are that Pat Kenny’s radio show on Newstalk gets 143,000 listeners, while Pat’s old show in RTÉ, now hosted by Seán O’Rourke, gets 307,000. That’s a hiding by double scores in anybody’s language.

The nation now has solid field data about what happens when a big star moves. Nothing is what happens when a big star moves. RTÉ get someone else, and someone else becomes a star instead. And what is the result of this? UTV come along and offer Pat even more money to do a Late Late-style show for them, once they get up and running. If this column were ever in a position to interview Pat Kenny, the first question would be “can you believe your luck?”

Pat Kenny’s successor as host of the Late Late Show, Ryan Tubridy, is equally blessed in having a career that seems impervious to the market’s opinion of him. In one way, Tubridy was given the media equivalent of a hospital pass when he was asked to replace Gerry Ryan in the 2FM schedule after Ryan’s sudden death. Ryan was not everyone’s cup of tea but those who liked him, loved him. And those who loved Gerry Ryan are not impressed by his replacement.

But in the bigger picture, the poor radio figures don’t really matter. What is amazing about Tubridy is that in the age of the world wide web, internet streaming, Netflix, Sky plus, digital TV and more, Irish adults will sit down on Friday and watch the Late Late Show, let it matter a damn who’s on it as a guest or who’s presenting the show. It could be Ryan Tubridy interviewing Miriam O’Callaghan or Miriam O’Callaghan interviewing Ryan Tubridy. There’s no real difference. It’s Friday night, and this is what we do.

Ryan Tubridy’s Late Late Show isn’t the worst show of its kind on television. That strange show RTÉ broadcast after the nine o’clock news on Saturday night is surely the racing favourite for that dustbin honour. In fact, that show is so far from good it’s hard to understand why it’s not on TV3.

The galling thing is that the Late Late Show isn’t meant to be a show that isn’t the worst show on television. It’s meant to be the best show on television, the show that holds a mirror up to Ireland as this great nation of talkers and wits discuss and debate the great issues of day, from Ireland’s role in Europe to whether the nation should simply put Brian Cody in charge of everything and be done with it.

That is very different from listening to comedian Des Bishop, economist David McWilliams, stylist Lisa Fitzpatrick and Dolores Kehoe. Who on earth is Dolores Kehoe? Who cares what the other three think about anything?

Writing in the Irish Times about Tubridy’s unhappy radio listenership figures, Laura Slattery suggested that the problem wasn’t Tubridy but RTÉ management, for asking Tubridy to do a job for which he clearly isn’t suited. But it’s easy to see how RTÉ management could be puzzled by Tubridy, as he’s not suited to presenting a TV show that holds a mirror to a nation either, and the figures for that show are solid as the rock of Gibraltar.

The answer, as is often the case, lies closer to home. It’s us. It’s the nation. The people of Ireland would watch the Late Late Show even if were presented by Lorcan Murray and featured the cast of Fair City reading tweets of the week. What incentive is there for the Late Late Show to be any good if there’s no disincentive for it to be awful? Why can’t we move the dial? Why do we feel we have to do what we’ve always done? What’s the matter with us?

Kathleen Ni Houlihan at the Rose of Tralee

First published in the Western People on Monday.

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Thank you, thank you, no, you’re too kind, thank you. A chairde go léir, tá fáilte is fiche romhaibh back to the Dome in Tralee where, after that break for the news, it’s time to meet the next Rose. And here she is now – it’s Kathleen Ni Houlihan, ladies and gentlemen!

Oh, thank you Daithí, it’s really great to be here in the Dome in Tralee.

Well, you’re very welcome of course Kathleen, as are all our lovely, lovely girls. Now Kathleen, where are you from? What’s your story?

From? Well. I’m from Ireland of course. You could say I am Ireland, if you want to get metaphysical about it.

Now Kathleen, there’ll be nobody getting physical here tonight before the watershed, we’ll have none of that carry-on. Sure where are you from, woman?

Oh God. Look – let’s say I’m from Sligo if it’s that big a deal. WB Yeats was from Sligo, and he wrote a play about me. It’s as good a place as any.

Oh, it is of course. Beautiful place, Sligo. Lovely fiddlers. And Kathleen, what is it that you do?

What do I do? What don’t I do?

Now look Kathleen, there’ll be time enough for the tongue-twisters later, when we’re backstage. What do you do for a living?

A living. Well. God. I’m a slave I suppose.

A slave! Well by God, we haven’t had one of those, I don’t think, ever, not even back in Gay’s time, and that isn’t today or yesterday. And tell us, what sort of life is it being a slave? Could you call it glamorous?

Glamorous isn’t the first word I’d use, no. It’s not a very glamorous life.

Isn’t it, isn’t it? Well sure, we can’t have everything? And Kathleen, where do you do this slaving?

Oh right here Daithí. Right here in Ireland.

In Ireland! Well, I never heard of that. And how did you get into it?

Oh, I’ve been a slave for years, on and off. I suppose you could say it started eight hundred years ago –

Eight hundred years! Go away out of that!

I’m sorry. I’m speaking now. Eight hundred years, yes, when the Normans came. They weren’t so bad, the poor old eejits. Then the English came. That wasn’t so great.

Indeed it can’t have been. Sure amn’t I often enough in the Aviva myself for games against “The Auld Enemy,” or that never-to-be-forgotten day at Croke Park when –

I’m sorry. Who’s telling this story? You, or me?

!

Thank you. So yeah, the English owned me for years and years. It seemed awful at the time, and there was one of them – what was his name? Ozzy? Odell? No, Oliver; yes, Oliver. He was a pig of a man, there’s no other way to describe him. And it’s true that the Famine wouldn’t have happened in Kensington. Or even Scotland. Besides, if they had a famine in Scotland, how would anybody be able to tell? That’s a hungry country if ever I saw one.

Now Kathleen, don’t get political. We’re live on television, there’s a big referendum coming up –

Are you still here?

Right. I’ll shut up now.

Good. It won’t be before time. Now, where was I? Oh yes, the English. Yes, they seemed a real pain when they were here and we blamed everything on them, a little like the way Dónal Óg Cusack blames everything on on the Cork County Board. He’s funny. But then, when the English left, things were still bad. So it can’t have been all their fault, can it? And then, as if we hadn’t enough of fighting, we started fighting amongst ourselves, because there weren’t enough of us dead. It was bad down here, I remember.

Yes. Yes, it was.

There may be hope for you yet Daithí. Just don’t push your luck. Now, where was I? Oh yes – so, there I was, the English gone, and me still somehow dressed in rags, chained up and scrubbing from rosy-fingered dawn until the black dead of night. So I began to wonder just how it was I could be free and still a slave. There could be one or two in those fancy boxes I see at the back of the theatre here who might know the answer to that.

Oh God. I’ll never get this gig again. They’ll have that little ceolán from Kildare back next year, sure as anything.

I’m sorry, what?

Oh, never mind me. Go on, go on.

You do fairly go on, you know. Anyway, where was I – oh, that’s right. I was down on my knees, scrubbing, every day the good God sent me. And then what do you think?

You entered the Rose of Tralee?

No, you ape. No, I got rich! I met this high roller and he swept me off my feet. We had good times, baby, I’m telling you. That man had pots of money – every summer at the Galway Races, drinking champagne out of my shoe, getting a new car because the old one ran out of petrol, all that. Sure we were all at it.

Not me. I was a butcher, back then. Before all the bling and wasted dreams.

Butcher? I wouldn’t have thought it and how Eleanor Tiernan confused you about the sausages that time. Anyway, there I was, having a fine old time and thinking hard times come again no more, when one day the guards paid us a visit in the Princess Grace room in the Shelbourne. Turns out every check the buck wrote bounced higher than an O’Neill’s size 5. They cuffed him and took him away, and next thing I know I’m finding out that those red-soled shoes might look good in magazines but they’re not so hot for legging it cross-country from Dublin to the Dome in Tralee with the police in hot pursuit.

And tell me Kathleen, do you think you’ll ever learn?

Do you know Daithí, that could be the first intelligent question ever asked at the Rose of Tralee? I hope I do learn, yeah. It’s long past time for me. Robert Emmet said he’d keep a seat for me among the nations of the Earth and maybe, after two hundred years, it’s time I took him up on that.

The ESRI and the True Nature of Education

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Economic and Social Research Institute, the ESRI, have published a report about the Leaving Cert. The report, titled “Leaving School in Ireland: A Longitudinal Study of Post-School Transitions”, is a sequel to the Institute’s 2011 hit, “From Leaving Certificate to Leaving School: A Longitudinal Study of Sixth Year Students.”

This year’s report is shorter than the 2011 version – it is seventy-four thousand words long, five thousand shorter than before. One would like to think it’s shorter become some editor, with his cigarette, eyeshade and blue pencil, returned the first draft to the authors with instructions to “punch it up a little bit,” but hope may be in vain.

As may be any hopes of the authors that anyone would read their reports. Seventy thousand words qualifies as novel-length – who on earth is going to plough through all that, and why? A look at what appeared in the press last week would suggest that not only does the ESRI’s Leaving Cert Report tell us nothing we don’t already know, it is based on some painfully naïve suppositions about how the great world turns around.

The ESRI report tells us that social class is a major factor in whether or not a child goes to university, a revelation equal in shock to hearing that night follows day or water is wet.

Some years ago, possibly as many as twenty, Fintan O’Toole wrote a genuinely magnificent column in the Irish Times about the nature of social class. He considered two children, both born on the same day, and rolled dice at each pivotal stage in their development to see what their luck would be like in life.

At birth, the middle class kid rolled a six and the working class kid rolled a one. By the time the kids were in school the gap was of the order of 24-4 or 30-6 and will never be bridged. That’s how the world turns, and has done for as long as humanity has recorded its own history.

The ESRI report does address the problem of students learning off answers for the Leaving Cert, but not quite in the way you might expect. Should the State make an effort to make the foremost exam in the State less predictable than clockwork and taxes?

Why, sure they could do that but the ESRI would be much happier if “discussion could usefully focus on the potential role of project work and team work within senior cycle in equipping young people with the kinds of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market.”

This is the sort of stuff we have to listen to all the time about education. Forget all those fuddy-duddy notions about learning stuff you didn’t know. Project work and teamwork are very much where it’s at.

Reading these sorts of theories, you would be forgiven for wondering if some of the theorists have ever worked on a project or in a team, because the chief thing you learn from working on a project or in a team is that Hell is other people.

Projects aren’t collaborative efforts. The majority of people on a project aren’t pushed. They’ll do enough to keep the boss off their backs but after that, well, life is for living, not projects, as far as they’re concerned.

One person on the project will do more than half the work, for different reasons – enthusiasm, natural leadership, fear, whatever. But as sure as God made little green apples there will also be at least one person on the project who won’t do a tap, not even under threat of violence. He or she has figured out that the leader and/or the others will crumble and cover for him rather than shop him to the bosses. And that sort of Machiavellianism is not a lesson that we should be teaching our children.

The other thing you have to wonder about these educational theorists is if they ever met a child. They seem to have a very vague idea of how children operate. The theorists will tell you that, rather than hammering home times tables and handing out mountains of homework, if you just open the child’s minds to the wonders of mathematics, they’ll light up like tiny stars on every point of the co-ordinated plane.

The theorists tell you that people shiver and break out in hives at the very mention of the world “maths” because the teachers are teaching it badly. The theorists may be assured that if the maths teachers knew a better way to teach maths they would do, for the same reason they walk into the classroom, rather than hop.

The current vogue in teaching maths seems determined to make what was once straightforward complex, for no apparent reason. Its proponents say it’s because it encourages the children. But being confused isn’t the same as thinking, a fundamental point the theorists seem to miss.

The US equivalent of our Project Maths is called the Common Core. One of the Common Core support materials outlines an old school maths question – “If 3(y-1)=8, what is y?” – and goes on to say it’s no good because “this question is an example of solving equations as a series of mechanical steps.”

How is that a bad thing? All maths is built on one single sentence, written by Euclid of Alexandria, three or four hundred years before the birth of Christ. “A point is that of which there is no part” is the sentence with which Euclid opens his book, The Elements. Euclid took the smallest thing there is, a thing can cannot be broken into smaller parts, and built a whole mathematical world on it, in a series of mechanical steps.

Reader, if it was good enough for Euclid, it’s good enough for you. If you got your Leaving Cert results last week, congratulations and the best of luck to you. If you’re facing into the Leaving next year, there is one little-known and under-exploited trick that will stand to you. Keep doing your homework. Everything falls into place after that.

Mayo v Kerry, Down Through the Years

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Kerry and Mayo are both western, coastal counties, with neither one likely to be mistaken for somewhere in the Golden Vale or the Garden of Ireland. Both are ravaged by emigration, both have Gaeltachta, and they even share an obsession with Gaelic football.

But here is the difference – when it comes to football, Kerry win and Mayo lose.

Every country’s folk literature has prince and pauper stories – two boys who look exactly alike but, through accidents of fate, are living completely different lives. In Gaelic football, Kerry are the royal sons, enjoying the spoils of victory. Mayo … well, Mayo are down in the scullery, washing the potatoes.

It’s hard to believe in the light of current events, but the Mayo and Kerry rivalry hasn’t always been one-sided. Kerry faced Mayo as Munster Champions when Mayo won their third and last All-Ireland, in 1951. They drew the first semi-final before Mayo edged past the Kingdom in a 2-4 to 1-5 victory in the replay.

Few on that 1951 team could have thought that Mayo would win just four Nestor Cups in the next thirty years, in 1955, 1967, 1969 and 1981. For the remaining twenty-six years, Mayo couldn’t get out of Connacht.

Mayo played Kerry twice in the four semi-finals that followed those four Connacht titles in those barren thirty years. In 1969, Kerry were reeling from their third-straight defeat at the hands of Down in an All-Ireland Final, a streak of northern dominance that gets Kerry backs up still, nearly fifty years later.

Mayo had a golden generation at that time that was born, to borrow Thomas Gray’s words, to blush unseen. It was the bad luck of Ray Prendergast, Johnny Farragher, Willie McGee, the peerless Jinkin’ Joe Corcoran and more to be in their pomp when Galway had their greatest-ever team. Mayo finally beat Galway in 1967, and had their best chance at an All-Ireland final appearance two years later, when they faced Kerry in the semi-final.

Mayo lost by a point. They had a free to draw, but it sailed wide. Kerry went on to beat Offaly in the All-Ireland Final, while Mayo went into decline. For twelve years Mayo lost to every county in Connacht in one year or another. Some years Mayo were unlucky, and some years they were just plain bad. But Mayo always lost, year after year.

Until Mayo finally broke through in 1981, and met Kerry again in the All-Ireland semi-final. At half-time it was all going to plan as Mayo led 1-6 to 1-5.

But Kerry’s greatest-ever team woke up in the second half, and scored 1-13 without reply. Mayo were buttered up and down Croke Park, scrunched up and put out with the rubbish. Welcome back to the big-time.

Fifteen years later, the teams met again in the first All-Ireland semi-final of 1996. Kerry had won only their second Munster title in the nine years since O’Dwyer’s men finally fell to Father Time, and were managed by one of Dwyer’s great lieutenants, Páidí Ó Sé. The early ‘nineties weren’t good for Mayo either, as every year the team found new ways to get knocked out of the Championship in a more humiliating fashion than the year before.

John Maughan was named the new Mayo manager in 1995. A former county player whose career was cut short by injury, Maughan had managed Clare to a Munster Final win over Kerry four years before. Mayo had beaten Galway on a wet day in Castlebar to win the Nestor Cup, but when the sides met each other in the All-Ireland semi-final, everybody knew who were the aristocrats and who hadn’t a seat in their trousers. And then the ball was thrown in, and the world turned upside-down.

Mayo have had many sweet days in the summers since 1981, but there’s a strong case to be made for that semi-final win over Kerry in 1996 to be the sweetest. It certainly wasn’t expected – there was strolling room on the Hill that day, room to wander down to another barrier, ask the people there if they could believe it either, and then wander back, shaking the head.

In their dreams, Mayo might have thought about scraping by Kerry, somehow. No-one saw a six-point thumping, 2-13 to 1-10, graced by goals by James Nallen (“Nallen has it now … to McHale … back to Nallen ... GOAL! JAMES NALLEN!”, as Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh put it at the time) and the current Mayo manager, who revelled in the great stage of Croke Park during his playing career.

The 1996 Final and replay were what they were, but none of that seemed to matter on the morning of the 1997 Final. Mayo were back in the Final after beating Galway in Tuam for the first time since the 1950s, and feared no man. Someone said later that Mayo must have been the first team to play Kerry in an All-Ireland final and think they just had to turn up. Nobody told Maurice Fitzgerald, and the Kingdom was restored by a man who is a bigger hero in Kerry than even the medal-laden heroes of the seventies and eighties.

Mayo and Kerry have met four times since, with Kerry winning them all. No; with Kerry unleashing Hell on Mayo, great waves of brimstone-filled fiery wrath and destruction, flailing Mayo to ribbons time and again.

But the defeat in 2011 was not like those of 2004, ’05, and ’06. James Horan’s team is being paid the greatest complement that can be paid a team, and they showed signs of that in the first year of Horanism. Mayo are now streetwise, and not to be tangled with.

By contrast, there is an echo of 1997 about Kerry, with their having discovered yet another skinny magician who seems able to command the very elements themselves. Kerry are hungry to make up for the 2011 Final loss to Dublin should Donegal fail to win the other semi-final, while Mayo have long ago gone past hunger to a deep and awful spiritual want. Who will triumph on Sunday? Reader, watch this space.

Is UFC Really a Sport?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Consider two fighting Irishmen, in fair Las Vegas where we set our scene. But these men are not alike in dignity, and are viewed differently despite their very similar pursuits.

Conor McGregor, the Ultimate Fighter, is hailed on all sides as an athlete and hero while poor Sheamus O’Shaunessy, being a professional wrestler, is considered some sort of circus act.

It’s hard to make a case for professional wrestling being a sport, chiefly because it’s not. Wrestling is not a sport the same way Coronation Street isn’t a sport. But it entertains the children and can’t really be said to do any harm.

But since when did we decide to take Mixed Martial Arts seriously? Is there really that big a difference between these two wild and whiskery Irishmen?

Is the Ultimate Fighting Championship an evolutionary leap from boxing, as its adherents would attest, or is just an offshoot of wrestling, sold in the global marketplace like so many pounds of lard and with just about the same nutritional value?

Men have always fought, and probably always will. It’s too deep in the genes to ever go away. Fighting is certainly in the Irish genes – we had the faction fights of the 18th and 19th centuries and even today some families, for better or for worse, still settle disputes in the old-fashioned way, with their bare knuckles.

John Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, was the man whose twelve rules codified fighting into boxing, the sweet science, and it was boxing that was the pre-eminent fighting sport of the 20th Century. Mike Tyson once said that the Heavyweight Champion of the World was the “baddest man on the planet,” by which Tyson meant that being Heavyweight Champion made you the hardest man alive. It’s not hard to understand the attraction of that.

But that was twenty or more years ago. Boxing is a dying sport now, killed by its own greed. Being the “baddest man on the planet” ceased to mean anything when there were four or five baddest men on the planet at any one time, as different associations named different Champions in the hope of getting a slice of the lucrative American TV pie.

The increased money available in the other professional sports attracted men who might otherwise have been boxers. The sanitisation of society and real fears over the long-term damage that boxing can do haven’t done anything for the sport either. Amateur boxing is popular but it’s nearly unrecognisable from the pro sport in its terrible glory.

Boxing’s slow death has opened a vacuum in the market, and it’s that market that the discipline of Mixed Martial Arts, through its primary exponent, the Unified Fighting Championship (UFC), is trying to fill. As a marketable product, UFC is inspired, a perfect fit for its throwaway age. As a sport – well. Ultimate Fighting isn’t quite, as the young people, all that.

The idea of the Ultimate Fighting Championship is that a Champion is just that – ultimate. He would win a streetfight as quickly as he would win a boxing match. It is boxing without the science or, indeed, the sweetness. Raw, visceral, primal stuff.

Except that it’s not, is it? The UFC is as far removed from streetfighting – or brawling, or causing public nuisance, as streetfighting is also described – as boxing is. Barefoot streetfighting might not be the best tactic, not least as some Rommel of the backstreets may be wearing bovver boots himself, and take an ungallant advantage.

There is something counter-evolutionary in seeing a barefoot person wearing gloves. It’s as if he or she got mixed up somewhere in the process of evolution. But kicking has to be part of this Ultimate Fighting, not because it’s a fully-rounded martial art, but because some sort of kicking motion is essential for audience appeal.

A lot of people who like UFC grew up watching video games, and fighting video games always feature kicking. Therefore, the UFC had to have some sort of kicking action in the show, so the lads in the audience would know when to cheer.

They couldn’t have booted kicks though, because there’s a big difference between a kick from a bare foot and a kick from a booted foot. Real life isn’t a video game. Therefore, UFC’s tough guys fight barefoot. In their tootsies, like little girls.

You don’t read that on the posters.

It’s a pity that boxing has gone into its terminal decline. The Marquess of Queensbury brought a kind of nobility to fighting. Before its corruption, there was an honesty to boxing that is not so obvious in UFC.

Domhnall Mac Amhlaigh, a Galwayman with Kilkenny roots, wrote an excellent memoir of his life as a navvy in England after the Second World War called Dialann Deoraí – “Diary of an Exile.” At that time, socialising was done by attending dances run by the local Catholic parish. The dances themselves were dry, but the pubs nearby did a roaring trade as men reacted as they always do in times in drought. They loaded up, and arrived at the hall steaming.

Naturally, fights broke out as a consequence. However, there was one priest who ran a particular dance and didn’t care for the Irish letting their nation down in pagan England. He broke up the fights himself, and held the combatants back until the dance was over.

Then, when there was no-one in the hall but themselves, the priest marked out a ring, handed out boxing gloves and had the boys settle their disputes like gentlemen.

There is no real trace of the gentleman about UFC and how it markets itself. Certainly, gentlemen were few and far between among some of the men who climbed through professional ropes over the years, but the sport always had that aura, that layer of discipline and self-control running through the violence and holding it in check. This counts for nothing in UFC. It’s all about the shaping.

Shaping, because it would be interesting to know just how tough these lads really are, when they have their shoes on and aren’t oiled up for the cameras. We have seen some robust exchanges in Croke Park recently – would any of the Ultimate Fighters fancy seventy minutes of that?

A friend of the column was fascinated by WWE Wrestling when he was a child. One day, his father came in as he was watching some fight, with some guy posing in the ring. “He might look tough now,” said the old man, “but I wonder how tough he’d be after digging twelve ridges of potatoes?”

Not very, is this column’s guess.

Did Ireland Win the First World War?

First published in the Western People on Monday.

There are so many events commemorating World War I this month that you’d be forgiven for thinking that Ireland won the thing.

Last week saw a Nationwide special on the four Irish regiments that participated in the war, and this week sees a TV series broadcast over two nights called “My Great War”. There’s also a panel discussion to be chaired by John Bowman after the second episode of “My Great War” where we discuss the war and what we can learn from it. We will discuss it sensibly, as a nation. Just like we always do.

Because Irish culture has never been so influenced by that of the United Kingdom since we theoretically severed our links with the mainland, it’s important to notice that two strands are being woven into the World War One narrative in the media that swirls around us, all day, every day.

The first strand is the narrative of the war itself; that it happened, how it happened, how and where it was fought, and all that. Most of this is coming from the UK, and is very interesting for those interested in that period of history.

The second strand, however, is very particular to Ireland. That narrative is being spun like a top and it’s important to be aware that spinning is going on.

This second narrative posits that World War One was a ‘just’ war, fought for honorable reasons, and that the soldiers who served in Irish regiments were unfairly discriminated against when they came home and also in subsequent history. Those that did come home, of course. Many did not.

And that narrative is fine. It’s a perfectly legitimate point of view. Former Taoiseach John Bruton made a related argument in a hugely under-reported speech at an event in the Irish Embassy in London last month to mark the hundredth anniversary of the passing of the 1914 Home Rule Act.

Bruton made the point that the Easter Rising had legitimised violence in Irish politics, and the nation would have been better off if the Rising never happened, had stuck with John Redmond and had Home Rule delivered after the war in 1919.

There are a lot of people who currently think Bruton may have had a point. There are those who were never happy about independence. There are those who were badly treated by the independent Ireland are very understandably bitter of over it.

And there are other people who are beginning to look back on the ninety years of Irish independence, and don’t see that much to show for it. We had the boom and the crash and now, worst of all, it looks like we’ve learned nothing, zero, the null set, from it all.

The Dublin property market is overheating again, the Banking Inquiry is looking like a sequel to the Mrs Brown movie and the Taoiseach and Tánaiste have to find a way to mix oil, water, fire and ice to pass a budget in October. So asking if it was all worthwhile is a legitimate question.

But Irish public life is ill-suited to legitimate questions. Politicians and public figures call for calm and reasoned debates on abortion or the nature of marriage or Ireland’s role in World War I but they certainly don’t get them.

We don’t do town hall debates. We don’t do going on the record. We don’t follow Martin Luther and say “here I stand; I can do no other.” What we do instead are shouting matches that properly belong outside chip shops at two in the morning.

And while men are threatening to remove their jackets and engage in boxing, the actual business of public life and government is going on just the same, in much more sedate, though hardly more civilised, surroundings. Nods are nodded and winks are winked until eventually, through highways and byways, deals get cut and things get done while the politicians are still roaring to be held back, before they do damage.

It would be something if people took their stand and said yes, it was a great thing that Ireland played a role in the Great War. Or if they took an opposite view, a view that was quite common until the hundredth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination loomed into view, and people saw a chance to rewrite some history books.

Because the opposite and long-standing view of the Great War is that, of all the many wars fought for no reason, World War One was the most pointless. It was a war fought by political entities that were wiped out by it – the House of Hapsburg in Austria-Hungary, the House of Hohenzollern in Germany, the House of Romanov in Russia and the Ottoman Empire that was based in Turkey.

The only House that survived was that of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who were clever enough to change their name to the rather more British-sounding Windsor on the 17th of July, 1917. We look forward to the commemoration of that anniversary in three years’ time.

The rulers of the three “Great Powers” – Germany, Britain and Russia – were all first cousins. Pictured side-by-side, it’s nearly impossible to tell George V of England from Nicholas II of Russia. The three Emperors used to give each other commissions in each other’s army, because all three of them loved dressing up and playing soldiers.

But small ripples can transform into great waves, destroying all before them. These three Emperor-cousins’ love of playing soldiers lead to real soldiers being mobilized one hundred years ago this week, real soldiers who were slaughtered in their thousands and thousands for the next four years.

John Bowman’s TV debate will probably focus on the Irish in the British Army, but that’s too narrow a scope to tell this story. It would be nice if the full story of how the First World War started were told as part of the debate – not least as events in the same corner of the world seem to be getting edgy once again, one hundred years after the start of the war to end wars.

Joe McHugh Goes Back to School

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Is there a heart in Erin’s green isle that hasn’t been moved by the thought of Junior Minister Joe McHugh on his first day at school? While all the other boys and girls are off for the holidays, building sand-castles outside their Floridian beachfront properties or converging on Ballybrit for the Galway Races, Little Joe is setting off down the road with his schoolbag up on his back.

Minister McHugh can be forgiven for feeling like a man with the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Simon Harris, the new Junior Minister for Finance, isn’t being fostered out to David McWilliams for a course in economics. Neither is Seán Sherlock, the new Junior Minister at the Department of Foreign Affairs, being locked in a closet with an atlas and a flashlight, under orders not to emerge until he can match capital cities to countries with ease and confidence.

No such luck for Joe. Joe has to spend his summer holidays at school, learning Irish. He’s making a brave fist of it, sending a tweet in Irish last Monday about how he was off to school that very morning. There were only five grammatical and two syntax errors over the 140 characters, so it’s not like he’s at a complete loss.

That’s a little cruel, but it does make an important point. Whenever something like this happens – that is, when the language movement screams blue murder at a slight, perceived or otherwise – there’s always a lobby in the movement that insists that learning Irish is as easy as falling off a log. Why, even a child can do it, as the flourishing Gaelscoileanna all over the country attest.

Minister, if by chance you should come to read this, be warned: Irish isn’t easy to learn at all. Not even kind of. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible of course. I speak an odd word here and there myself. But don’t kid yourself that it’ll be easy. It won’t. Irish is really hard to learn, and it’s really hard to learn for three reasons.

The first reason is because Irish is an inflected language, which means that words change according to what they do in a sentence. Words don’t change in English – they used to long ago, but those traits were shed through the centuries. The only trace evidence of inflection in English is the distinction between the subject pronoun “who” and the object pronoun “whom,” and even that is on its last legs now.

Not so in Irish. The words in Irish change according to what they’re doing in a sentence. When you’re not used to that, it can be a bit of a fright. In early days, when Latin was taught in schools, it wasn’t so bad, because Latin is inflected as well. If you’re Polish, Irish may seem a stroll in the park – Polish is a very inflected language indeed. But coming from English, inflection is one of the first hurdles you have to clear.

The second problem, then, is that Irish didn’t evolve as a language the way other languages evolved. This is because somebody tried to kill it. The somebody didn’t succeed, but the wounds are still clearly visible on the body, which remains weak and fragile. This is why Fíorghaeil (literally, “True Irish people,” those whose enthusiasm for the language can be a little off-putting for the less motivated) harp on and on about what is ceart, correct, and what is mícheart, incorrect.

A language has to be true to its own idiom, its own flavour. When French had Montaigne and Hugo, English had Shakespeare and Dickens, and Russian had Tolstoy, all stiffening the sinews of their native tongues, Irish poets and writers were in the hills and on the run, not even worth the five pounds that was put on priests’ heads at the time. Irish, as a language, has a lot of catching up to do, and that’s why people can be over-protective.

And then we come to the third, and saddest, point of all. The single biggest reason Irish is so hard to learn is because we, the state, have made such a phenomenal bags of it.

Glass hammers, rubber nails and chocolate fireplaces are as masterpieces of human achievement compared to what the sovereign Irish nation has done in its efforts to revive the first language. Don’t mind that old chat about it being beaten into us. Reading, writing and arithmetic were beaten into us just as hard, but they seem to have stuck well enough.

Efforts at strengthening the language have succeeded in doing the exact opposite, like it was some sort of subtle plot to kill the language with kindness. For instance, a big effort was made in the 1950s to simplify the spelling of Irish, to make it easy to learn (this is the spelling in the Roman alphabet, not the old Gaelic typeface – that’s another day’s work).

Myles na Gopaleen ridiculed the spelling reform at the time and looking back with history’s perfect hindsight, the spelling reform has been a disaster. Irish remains difficult to spell, and the ham-fisted effort to simplify the spelling of the language has come at the cost of making any books published under the old spelling nearly unreadable.

A patriot and friend of this column sent your correspondent a copy of Seán Ó Ruadháin’s magnificent translation of Maxwell’s Wild Sports of the West of Ireland recently. I can barely read it, because it was published in 1934 and the spelling is very jarring to modern convention. Vandals, vandals, vandals.

And now it’s Joe McHugh’s turn to try his luck with the hobbled and battered language, as bruised by those who nurse it as those who tried to kill it. Not only that, but Joe McHugh has to do it when the spirit of the age says never mind the writing, it’s the speaking that’s important. Irish has no received pronunciation – we can’t even agree on how to say the colour “black”in Irish – is “dubh” pronounced “dove” or “doo”? Nobody knows. The Minister would be well advised to take sneaky notes if he gets a chance.

If Joe McHugh can turn it around, if he can suddenly somehow “get” the language and have it light a fire in him, he can become the greatest champion of the language seen since the Gaelic Revival of the last nineteenth century. It’s not all that likely, but it this column wishes him all the luck in the world. Go n-éirí an bóthar leis.

Why So Serious? The Relentless Misery of Irish Literature

First published in the Western People on Monday.

In his review of the prize-winning and more-or-less-impossible-to-read novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, Professor John Sutherland wondered in an aside why it is that Irish fiction so hates Ireland. The Professor listed the culprits in the litany of literary misery in an article in the Guardian newspaper after McBride’s novel won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction a month or two ago.

Sutherland pointed out that James Joyce and Samuel Beckett high-tailed it to Paris as quick as ever they could, with Joyce charmingly describing Ireland as “a sow that eats her farrow.” Sutherland also remarks that John Banville, whether writing as himself or as Benjamin Black, is unlikely to send anyone to the Emergency Room in the local hospital having split his or her sides from laughing.

And Sutherland hit the nail square on the head. Irish literature – that is to say, those books that the chattering classes of south Dublin like to talk about – is generally one long tedious whine, with chapter breaks every now and again so you can choke back a double whiskey to stiffen your courage.

In order to successfully compose an essay on the Irish novel as part of his English studies in NUI, Galway, some years ago a contemporary of your correspondent made the mistake of putting off the necessary background reading until the weekend before he sat down to compose. As such, he had to binge-read the four novels set for the course in order to share his insights with his professor.

The first he read was A Pagan Place, by Edna O’Brien. There is no line of dialogue in that book anywhere. It’s like being stuck beside Edna herself on a bus making its way over and back on the backroads of her native Clare on a wet Tuesday night in late October.

She drones on and on in a stream of consciousness while you yourself only want to run away into the Aillwee Caves and sit in a damp, dark and cold hole until she gets bored and nods off in her seat.

But our hero got through it, in the end. Next up, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore, a laugh-a-minute romp set in Belfast about the hilarious antics of a middle-aged spinster who deals with her loneliness by sinking into alcoholism.

Unsurprisingly, our man could have done with a drink himself by the time he got through to the end of that one, but he thought that he had the back broken on the task now. He reached up to his shelf, took down The Dark, by John McGahern, and started to read.

One chapter later, the book was on the floor and our man was sprinting into town like Keith Higgins when he sees green grass ahead of him. Our man burst into a sleepy Hole-in-the-Wall bar on Sunday night and couldn’t even speak until he had imbibed a quart or two of that Heavenly soup brewed in St James’ Gate.

After reading three Irish novels in a row, each more miserable than the last, this student of literature found himself in the same position as Lucille, that strange woman whom Kenny Rogers met that time in a bar in Toledo – he was hungry for laughter, and here ever after, he was after whatever the other life brings. Anything but more McGaherism, Moore-ism or, God between us and small farms, O’Brienism. Anything but O’Brienism.

O’Brien and McGahern were giants of the ‘sixties generation of Irish novelists. Has the boom given rise to a slightly jollier style of Irish novelist? Could it be possible that the bust that followed the boom has dragged the Irish novel into a more mature worldview, the sort of sangfroid that comes from viewing triumph and disaster, and viewing both disasters just the same?

Er, no. As well as Banville the Bleak and McBride the Miserable, mentioned above, the other two greats of contemporary Irish fiction are Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright.

Tóibín’s great hero is the American writer of the last century, Henry James, a man assured of a podium finish in any list of Great Bores of Letters. If that’s what Tóibín is looking for good luck to him, but I don’t plan to plough through ten dense pages only to discover that Hector has put two spoons of sugar in his tea.

Anne Enright won the Booker Prize for a book that she herself described as “the intellectual equivalent of a Hollywood weepie.” Be still, my heart. Not only are you wall-to-wall with the slowly dying and the terminally dysfunctional should you decide to read the thing despite all advance warning, you are also in danger of having young men in horn-rimmed glasses and beards too big for them corner you in bars wanting to talk about the work moved them. Thanks a lot, Anne.

Because Literature is Serious-with-a-capital-S, people think that means it can’t be light-hearted, even just a little bit. But we’ve known since Aristotle that the line between tragedy and comedy is a very thin one, and it can often be difficult to tell one from the other. Life itself is like that, and art is meant to reflect life, not to provide pseudo-intellectual fibre in hipsters’ morning cereal.

Shakespeare has long been considered the greatest writer in English and what people seem to overlook is that Shakespeare was a funny guy. Even his bleakest play, King Lear, is shot through with flashes of humour, chiefly involving the love triangle between Lear’s daughters and the Duke of Gloucester’s son, Edmund. Edmund is quite the boyo, all things considered.

Most appropriate of all to today’s discussion is the fate of Cinna the Poet in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Marc Anthony has inflamed the passions of the masses after the murder of Julius Caesar, and there are riots all over Rome. A group of rioters catch Cinna the Poet and assume he is the anti-Caesar conspirator of the same name, crying “kill him! Kill him!” all the while.

“I am Cinna the Poet! I am Cinna the Poet!” pleads Cinna. There is a pause, as the disappointed rioters mull this disappointing news over. Then one of the mob, inspired, shouts “Kill him for his bad verses! Kill him for his bad verses!” and that is the end of Cinna.

Miserable Irish novelists might be well advised to stay out of Rome. Just in case.