That’s Ireland

Cardinal Connell is trying to block the child abuse Commission from seeing 5,586 documents, out of a total of 66,583. His apologists quote this statistic as if it proves that he is only trying to hide a small number of documents. Of course, they are also likely to be the most important documents, but put that aside for a moment.

Just look at the scale of this. You know what a ream of A4 paper looks like. It contains 500 sheets. Well, Connell is trying to hide an absolute minimum of between eleven and twelve reams of paper, all dealing with his response to complaints about paedophile priests.

And that’s assuming that each ‘document’ is only one page long, which would be unusual for most legal documents. The actual total might be twice that, or even more.

But the scandal is even greater than this. >>> (more…)

On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me… a video of Fairytale of Drumcondra, Bertie Ahern and Digout Des Richardson’s version of Shane McGowan’s Fairytale of New York.

And here are the lyrics: >>> (more…)

Some friends and I have an annual Christmas lunch at which we vote for the Eejit of the Year, and this year’s lunch is today. My hot tips earlier in the year were Eddie Hobbs, for his spectacular photos in ‘You and Your Money’, and Liam O Maonlai for his Irish phrases CD that was free with the Indo.

However, Hobbs has failed to keep up his early pace, and has struggled to maintain his eejitry in recent months. And O Maonlai has proved to be a one hit wonder, failing to follow up on the success of the CD. Hector O Heochagan is a perennial favourite, and no doubt some late nominations will emerge.

My dark horse is John Waters, who started with a strong burst of eejitry in the Eurovision Song Contest, sustained the pace with some classic articles including his ‘I’m crying, writing this’ eulogy of Katy French, then finished strongly with his appearance on the Late Late Show 7 Up Celebrity Ice Skating Competition. Here are the highlights of John Waters’ eejitry in 2007: >>> (more…)

Can you recognise who this are? It’s a half-way image of a morph between two very serious Irish statesmen having a bit of an old laugh. I really like this one.

Here’s the answer, and an animated version of the morph. >>> (more…)

To celebrate the run-up to Digout Day on December 7th, here is a video version of Fianna Fail’s Fifty Ways to Laugh at Voters, to the music of Paul Simon’s Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, with some extra material during the choruses.

Click Here to Email a Friend about this Video

If you enjoyed the video, here is the post that it is based on:
Fianna Fail’s Fifty Ways to Laugh at Voters.

And don’t forget to check out the Digout Day site.

If last Friday’s opinion polls are true, the Irish electorate may be finally realising that Fianna Fail have spent years in power laughing at us every day, serving up wave after wave of scandals, any one of which could bring down a Government in a functioning democracy, but knowing that we have become so desensitised by the sheer volume that we accept them as normal.

And so far they have gotten away with at least fifty ways to laugh at voters, including taking the highest-paid political salaries in the democratic world, Bertie Ahern’s incredible fairy-tales about getting dig-out loans from plasterers, giving £30,000 to someone he can’t remember and getting briefcases of cash from future landlords who were at dinners but didn’t eat the dinners, Frank Dunlop’s stash of bribes for buying councillors, Liam ‘Mr Big’ Lawlor being jailed three times after chairing the Dail Ethics Committee, Michael Collins being found guilty of tax evasion, Michael ‘Stroke’ Fahey being jailed for fraud while chairing a Prison Visiting Committee, Ivor Callely having his house painted for free and John Ellis owing money to farmers yet both being made Senators after the electorate voted them out of the Dail, €52 million so far spent on unused electronic voting machines, using taxpayers money to make secret deals with scandal-hit independent TDs, creating new Junior Ministers with salaries of €150,000 a year, appointing people to State boards because they are your friends, Willie O’Dea posing with guns pointed at cameras, Jim McDaid drunk driving on the wrong side of a busy dual carriageway, GV Wright drunk driving and knocking over a nurse, Conor Lenihan referring to Turkish workers as kababs, Ray Burke accepting corrupt payments from property developers and radio station owners and being jailed for breaking a tax law he had helped to pass, Beverly Flynn helping people to evade tax and suing RTE for telling people about it, PJ Mara failing to co-operate with a Tribunal, Ned O’Keefe voting on issues his family had business interests in, Joe Jacob giving comical interviews on radio that resulted in useless iodine tablets being sent to every house in the country, Charlie McCreevy nominating a disgraced ex-judge to a £147,000 job as Vice President of the European Investment Bank, Denis Foley ‘hoping against hope’ that his £100,000 was not in an illegal offshore account, Padraig Flynn complaining about the difficulties of maintaining three houses in 1999 on ‘just £100,000 a year’, and a Tribunal finding that Charles Haughey took €45 million in today’s money and granted favours in return.

All of the above have happened since Bertie Ahern became leader of Fianna Fail in 1994. There is a full list below of the most obvious fifty recent Fianna Fail scandals, and I’m sure I have left out a lot more. So, while the opinion polls show that more people are waking up to this, please help to spread the word.

Click Here to Email a Friend about this Post

And here is the full list of fifty ways to laugh at voters. (more…)

A lot of Irish placenames are Anglicised versions of Gaelic names. Do you know what placenames came from the Gaelic words for:

• Town of Excrement, County Wexford
• Town of the Dungstand, County Down
• Hillside of the Breast, County Fermanagh
• The Buttock, Counties Donegal, Galway and Mayo
• The Fat Buttock, County Kerry
• Backside to the Wind, Counties Armagh and Mayo
• Buttock Island, County Kerry
• The Two Breasts, County Kerry
• Bottom, County Monaghan
• Black Bottom, County Donegal

Placenames like breast and buttock typically refer to the shape of hills. Answers just a click away: >>> (more…)

I was tidying up my bookshelves today, leaving them considerably more messy than when I started, when I came upon an intellectual blockbuster of a publication from the early nineties. 67 Reasons Why Condoms Spread AIDS is an expensively produced propaganda booklet by the self-styled Childrens Protection Society, and it is one of the funniest things I have ever read in my life. Here are my favourite leaps of logic from the people whose next publication should have been 67 Reasons Why Crash Helmets Spread Motorbike Accidents: >>> (more…)

I was at the Mahon Tribunal yesterday, listening to the latest fantastic twists in the fable of Bertie Ahern and the Magic Briefcase, and I have designed these two posters making public appeals that could solve all of the mysteries.

And here is the second poster, which deals with Ahern’s latest story - that he believes that he gave somebody £30,000 to buy sterling with, but he can’t remember who he gave it to. >>> (more…)

Some time after my first series of letters to Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary about saving money by running airplanes with no seats, I noticed that he had made reference to the topic in two media interviews. I immediately assumed that he was preparing the ground for a joint venture with me manufacturing seatless airplanes, so I wrote him this letter: >>> (more…)

Here’s an unplugged version of one of Bono’s strangest hits - his sermon about finding God living with the poor in a cardboard box. Here’s what still puzzles me about this. No matter how often Bono delivers this sermon, he never seems to wonder about this obvious conundrum: if God exists, and is actually living with the poor, then why does God do nothing to help them?


The Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, Archbishop Sean Brady, had a bit of swipe at some of his rival superstitions yesterday. He slammed horoscopes, astrology, palm-reading, clairvoyance and mediums, pointing out that:

One of the most subtle but disturbing signs of this underlying fear in Irish life is the increasing reliance of people on practices which claim to ‘unveil’ the future… Those who put their trust in them or take them seriously are colluding with an illusion, promoting a fiction.

He’s correct, of course. But he would be just as correct if he had said the exact same thing about Christianity. It too appeals to underlying fears, it too claims to ‘unveil’ the future, and those who take it seriously are also promoting a fiction.

However, he is wrong when he describes horoscopes, etc, as ‘the new Irish superstition’. And here is why. >>> (more…)

Here’s a prank letter that I sent to Cunard Cruise Line a while ago. It is a query from an Irish lottery winner with a peculiar requirement for a cruise. >>> (more…)

I’ve just been to see the latest Harry Potter movie, and I spent most of the film trying to think who Kreacher reminded me of.

Then it dawned on me! Have a guess before you look… >>> (more…)

Update: This advert for Plavsa has now been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority of Ireland. For more details please click here or else read comment number 120 at the end of this post.

According to a full page ad in this Sunday’s Irish Mail magazine, a ‘Dr. Slausberg from the University of Gotenberg (Sweden)’ has discovered ‘Plavsa, the slimming capsule that soaks up fat’. I have asked the Advertising Authority of Ireland to investigate the claims made for this and related products.

According to the hard-to-find Dr. Slausberg, Plavsa occurs naturally in fish, ‘which is why you never see a fat sea animal.’ I assume the good doctor has never seen a whale. Or a walrus. Or a seal. The ad also says that Plavsa ‘stimulates your digestive system by rapidly eliminating the binded fat molecules’, which sounds to me like a fancy way of saying that it makes you shit a lot more quickly than normal. So, more like a laxative than a slimming pill, perhaps?

The ad then points us to a website, health2udirect.com, where the claims get even fishier. >>> (more…)

This is my video tribute to John O’Donoghue’s entertaining temper tantrum on his first day as chairman of the new Dáil, and in its first week it was YouTube’s 15th most viewed video in Ireland. It’s going to be a fun five years!

I spent Friday at Tolka Park watching the good, the bad and the ugly of League of Ireland football. First, here’s the good: Bohemians fans bringing colour and atmosphere to the event. Opponents Shamrock Rovers are in a legal challenge with GAA club Thomas Davis over a new ground in Tallaght, so the Bohs fans had a giant crowd-cover flag emblazoned with a statue of Thomas Davis.

The video is from BohsTV. Now let’s look at the bad and the ugly. >>> (more…)

This is the first in a series of posts about how happy the Irish are.

Ireland is the eighth-happiest nation in the world over the ten years from 1995 to 2005, according to researchers at the World Database of Happiness in Rotterdam. Denmark is the happiest, and Tanzania the least happy, of the ninety-four nations that were regularly surveyed. Here are the top 25. >>> (more…)

One of the best pranks from RTE’s hidden camera series Naked Camera. Musician Don Baker hires a taxi, which is driven by the very funny PJ Gallagher.

Here are the real names of ten Irish people who each became better known under a different name. What did they change their names to?

• Rosemary Brown
• Colm Caffrey
• Glen Coroner
• David Evans
• Paul Hewson
• Declan McManus
• Eithne Ní Bhraonáin
• Gerry Reynolds
• Sean Sherrard
• Graham Walker

Answers just a click away. >>> (more…)