Silk Purse, Sow's Ear

It is utterly reprehensible that certain politicians, backed up to the hilt by elements within the media, are doing their level best to play the race card in the run up to next year's election. That bile-inducing, poorly-disguised fascist, Mairead McGuinness is the latest inevitable fellow traveller on the racist bandwagon. On Questions and Answers last night, she tried to cause a furore regarding the news that Cowen's one-off 1000 euro payment to parents of under-sixes would extend to Irish parents of children who resided abroad.

Big. Deal.

Ignoring the reality that this is COMPLETELY in line with EU law and practice, our crusading militia-miss from the midlands bemoaned the cost to the exchequer, arguing that this measure, brought in to lift the burden off parents crippled by creche costs was not achieving its objective, i.e., bringing down creche costs in Ireland.

To play the race card under the guise of budgetary considerations - considered negligible by those in the know, as it happens - is not simply wrongheaded. It is sick. McGuinness, while denying explicitly that she was analyzing the issue from a racial perspective, qualified her inferences with the telling line, '...but it must be said that there is a growing concern on the ground regarding immigration'.

I would like to state, and I hope I'm not alone here, that I am fully aware of the implications of our comparatively lax immigration laws. I am prepared for the reality that, when jobs get scarce, we will all have to compete with those who have arrived over the last few years, and in many cases, we will lose.

Welcome to the real world.

The behaviour of the Opposition on this issue is symptomatic of a political movement starved of new ideas, dynamic figures and justifying its existence as a workable alternative on the pathetic, narrow grounds that it's better than another five years of those other fuckers. I'm beginning to believe that, for all their tangible faults, FF and the PDs are streets ahead of McGuinness and her braindead ilk.

I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence. But let's be realistic here. Bertie, McDowell, Cowen, Harney and Hanafin vs Kenny, Rabbitte, Bruton, that rabid bitch Olivia Mitchel and Liz McManus.

Who would you take home to meet the parents?

Stones of Influence

Listened to Pet Sounds last night, which played the top 10 most influential British albums of all times. There was something for everyone. Blur for the indie kids. The Smiths for the lyricists. The Stone Roses for the melodies. The Sex Pistols for pretty much everyone. The Arctic Monkeys for those who don't understand the word 'influential'.

I should state, at this juncture, that this is not a slight upon the Arctic Monkeys, whose music is growing on me at a frightening pace. However, to refer to them at this early stage as 'influential' says more about the world we now live in than it could ever say about the band itself.

No Bowie!

I was shocked.

So in response, I would like to know who you, my three and a half readers believe to be

a. The most influential British band of all time
b. The most influential Irish band of all time
c. The most influential band of all time.


a. Out of a group of The Smiths, The Sex Pistols, Joy Division, The Who, The Kinks, The Beatles and David Bowie, I am going to say.......The Sex Pistols. Not really a fan myself, but 'Anarchy in the UK' changed the music landscape in a way that no other album did before or since. It attached balls to melody and people rocked out like it was 1979. Personally, The Smiths would be my greatest British influence.

b. My Bloody Valentine. Personally, toss up between Horslips and Planxty

c. A very tough one, personally and objectively. But I'll have to go for the Velvet Underground, over Led Zeppelin, The Pixies, The Beatles and The Stones

Let the debate begin!!

Blunt as a BreadKnife

Watching telly in the comforting glow of my gas fireside last night, I felt a great urge to consult my thesaurus. The first word I sought to explore was 'insipid'. Alas, there was no entry. I ventured subsequently towards 'bland'. Here is what I found:

'Insipid, flavourless, mild, dull, boring, uninspired, uninspiring, unoriginal, unexciting, tedious, nondescript, trite, vapid, mediocre, humdrum, weak'.

Fitting and all as many of these epithets were, none conspired to meet the requirements of what I was watching. I chanced upon 'dangerous'.

'Perilous, unsafe, hazardous, precarious, unsound, alarming, ruthless, nasty, treacherous'.

Here I found myself getting close to the source. In a desperate attempt to find the words I was looking for that would mirror my sentiments as I watched RTE 2 between 11.30 and 12.30. After searching high up and low down, I found them under a particularly fitting word.

'Edgeless, candid, forthright, bluff, tactless, rude, abrupt, insensitive, weak'.

What was the word?

The word was Blunt. James Blunt. Be afraid. Be very, very afraid.

James Blunt assaulted my television screen with his hopelessly awful blend of cat-cries and aural sodomy for nearly 25 minutes. Friends of mine have remonstrated with me over my sustained attacks on his music, his views and his haircut. 'He's harmless they say'.(Innocuous, non-toxic, mild, non-irritant, inoffensive, unoffending, innocent, blameless, gentle).

James Blunt is none of those things. He is evil. He is Satanic. He is vile. (nasty, unpleasant, disagreeable, obnoxious, odious, repulsive, repellent, repugnant, sickening, monstrous.) He has plumbed new depths. When someone like John Kelly, an ardent champion of all things alternative, indulges this bastard child of the mainstream, you know the rules have changed. There are many out there who believe this sucking blunt to be out there at the cutting edge of singer-songwriting. After a year in which we have been blessed with one of the most hauntingly brilliant albums of the last decade, the average punter on the street will generally respond to queries about Funeral by retorting, 'Arcade who'? while plugging in their Ipod headphones to listen to 'You're Beautiful'.

Something is rotten in the State of Music.

So, in order to strike back, please tune in to Other Voices on 15th Feb. After witnessing Horslips (ground-breaking, playful, insightful, accomplished, visionary, epic, melodic, life-affirming, influential, great, brilliant, exceptional etc etc etc) play their first electric set in 25 years, cast your vote to bring them back for the final episode of the series, and to keep Blunt away from young ears. It's the only way they'll learn.

Craw-ling out to Daddy Leviathan

Immigration is the latest issue to come under the spotlight of Leviathan, with a debate to be held in Crawdaddy on Feb 2nd. Hosted by the everyone's favourite barely tolerable but keenly incisive overgrown schoolboy, David McWilliams, it promises to be a lively evening. More info here

The Irish Family a la the Bert

"The reality is that the traditional family based on marriage has presented great benefits to our society. It has given social stability and, in general, it has provided a most favourable context in which to rear our children".

So did emigration, to those enabled to stay behind. Fuck the Constitution

Quotation from Irish Times. Our great leader was responding to the decision of the All-Party Oireachtas Committee not to broaden the constitutional definition of the family to include unmarried couples. Hurrah for Modern Ireland.

Never Mind the Cassocks

I see Fr Vincent Twomey, professor of moral theology in Maynooth is flying the flag of compassion again, stating in no uncertain terms that Catholics cannot vote for same-sex unions.

'To ask a Catholic politician or citizen to vote for civil unions is to ask them to give public recognition to acts which the church has always taught are, objectively speaking(my italics), gravely sinful, since they constitute a misuse of our God-given sexuality'.

Sometimes there just isn't enough vomit in the world, is there?

Migration Debate For The Birds

And the award for THE most awful blog title ever goes to.....

The immigration issue is a thorny one, and the return of the question of work permits to the civil and political arena clouds the matter even further. I was quite struck by the coverage afforded by the Irish Times yesterday of TNS polls that highlighted a latent suspicion among respondents that immigration should be restricted, now that Irish society has accumulated a sufficient underclass to do the jobs that we now believe ourselves to be above. The island of saints and scholars and gombeens and greed.

This alarmist tendency that pervades coverage of the issue is not new. When the first wave of immigrants began to arrive in the mid- to late nineties, the papers accomodated a deluge of scaremongering and rhetoric to the effect that our traditional value system was being eroded by an army of lawless Nigerians and Romanians (oblivious to the explicit reality that this sorely-bereaved set of values had already been jostling with O'Leary in the grave for quite some time). Now, in the wake of the Irish Ferries dispute, the citizens of this fair country are considered ripe for a 'balanced' debate regarding immigration once again by the media. Hence The Time's front page, sensationalist analysis of a society quaking in its boots at the loss of jobs to non-nationals.

Pat Rabbite's advocacy of the reintroduction of work permits is extremely curious until one considers his love affair with fellow Mayo man Enda Kenny. In a reverse of the FF/PD relationship, Fine Gael seem to set the terms of their relationship with Labour rather than vice versa. The PD's are robustly opposing the scheme, while FF lumbers along as always, mumbling and guffawing and generally acting like yahoos at the Church door on a Saturday night.

The work permit system in its initial phase did not work because it bound the immigrant to his employer. Anyone who has worked for a bar owner/builder/restauranteur/list goes on and on will know where that path ends up; grotesque, indefensible exploitation. However, it is also clear that affairs as they stand are far from perfect - as Ross O'Carroll Kelly is wont to say, I'm talking Gama - and there can be little doubt that non-nationals willing to work for less will ever be offered more.

As for them taking Irish jobs, ask any Irish person their opinion on the free market and the invariable response will be posited a few miles away from the Charles River. Our entire welfare is based upon the rituals of nihilistic worship at the breast of nio-liberal economics, albeit backed up by a complicit state. Now that its tentacles are tickling our own chins, we're not so keen that an absence of regulation is the way forward. Furthermore, from a corporate perspective, the introduction of a fair-minded work permit scheme that would enhance rather than restrict the fortunes of immigrant workers would drive countless industries out of business in a matter of months. Stand up the hospitality industry.

But that won't happen. Because regardless of who is in power, or who writes the news, the over-riding agenda will be to preserve our own hides. This will inevitably mean either the preservation of the status quo which discriminates against new arrivals, or the reintroduction of work permits, which will keep the darkies in their place.

How far we've come.

As the above will suggest, I'm not an expert in this area and my opinions are quite jumbled, so comments are eagerly courted

Some Suggestions

For those of you with anything more than a passing interest in media analysis, check out Dav's Blog. The boy dun gud.

And if you're interested in Irish society, you'll be interested in The Pope's Children by David McWilliams, which i read over Christmas and meant to tell you all about. For the record, I hate McWilliams. I hate the way he talks, walks, chews and sneers. Essentially he is passable as a slightly less repulsive Kevin Myers. But his book is a useful indicator of where we've come from, what we're at, and who we're going to be. If you can manage to bear his incessant social labelling - from the faintly amusing 'Kells Angels' to the plain-shite 'Breakfast Roll Man' his book will provide the reader with a landscape of modern Ireland within which one can frolic, ponder, worry, and question at will. Available on all good liberal coffee tables in Ranelagh and environs.

Regal Delights

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.


Absolutely loved this!

Attended Chomsky's lecture again last night. He waxed lyrical on the subject of the nuclear threat posed to the world by America's aggressive rejection of arms control. Again, the questions at the end were served with a side salad of simpering adulation. At least Mark Little of Prime Time gave him a good grilling last night.

Challenging Chomsky?

Happy New Year Everybody.
The last few weeks have been spent at a blistering pace, tempered by a trip to London - highly stimulating but monetarily prohibitive - heavy drinking and new year's resolutions, most of which have already either been broken or reneged upon. High on this year's list is to achieve something in the realm of music. Any potential collaborators out there?

Had the pleasure of attending Noam Chomsky's talk in O'Reilly Hall, UCD yesterday. Surveying the plush surroundings before our hero took to the stage, I could not but be struck by the irony of five lines of reserved seats. Chomsky is an unrelenting Democrat, surely this overtly elitist manouevre would grate upon his crusading activist soul?

The talk was highly entertaining, anecdotally informative and generally well-constructed and well-received. That said, Chomsky told me very little I didn't already know. However, my heart was indeed stirred by his response to Thomas Kador's question regarding the creeping totalitarian attempts to stifle public protests in the West. Kador asked was there anything we ourselves could do to pull a King Canute and stem the tide. Chomsky's response is still ringing in my ears, and serves as an excellent starting point for anyone trying to take on the system. Simple but highly efficient.

Ignore Them.

I nearly leapt to my feet to explode with rapturous applause.

I have, however, one unsettling observation to make. Out of all the questions offered to Chomsky, who had spoken at length about rejecting conventional wisdom regarding the exigencies of geo-political conflict, no one offered him a challenging question. No one put it to him that his own views might be as problematic in practice as those of the neoliberals are in theory. But this is more a slight upon ourselves, and serves to reinforce the image of Chomsky as the Cheerleader of the Left. It would have been nice if even one of us had the courage to take the Chom on. Personal ignorance regarding the subject matter prevented me from asking a question. But surely someone like Vincent Brown or Sean O'Rourke, two veteran broadcasters known for their deadly incisiveness, could have tabled something that might have at least shook the man on the podium? Alas no. O'Rourke was anonymous, while Brown tottered about taking candid photos and acting like a besotted groupie who had at last neared his idol.

Perhaps the problem with challenging Chomsky is that his views, to any thoughtful person, are not controversial, but highly rational. The United States is a highly volatile influence upon the world. Its actions are hypocritical, even immoral. It's promotion of democracy and freedom finds its nearest rival in the Sunday Independent's promotion of the integrity of the press. Both forces achieve the exact opposite effect of that stated, which, conveniently, is the effect desired by both forces in the first place.

So why is the world the way it is? Why can't we all just get along? Chomsky did awaken within me a very salient point; the timespan of change. If we really wish to make a difference, a national day of protest is but the beginning. The civil rights movement did not begin with Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, nor did it end with the legislation drafted by the Johnson administration. The worldwide national day of protest in 2003 was a good beginning in terms of changing public perception of the war in Iraq. Another is mooted for March 18th of this year. I urge you all to be there.