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…)

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…)

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.

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

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…)

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 the first post in a series about a bizarre decade in Dublin – the pirate radio era from Radio Dublin, A.R.D. and Big D in the 1970s to Sunshine, Nova and Q102 in the 1980s. It was a craze without rules, where anyone with enough nerve and a half-decent record collection could make up an exotic ‘DJ name’ and defy the law.

During my final years in secondary school, I started listening to crackly signals from Radio Dublin on my new portable radio. I soon joined thousands of teens in a protest march, calling for the pirates to be legalised. Then I started visiting Radio Dublin, at first answering the phone and taking requests. >>> (more…)

Bono finds God living in a cardboard box. But what on earth is God doing there? Listen to Bono make an impassioned sermon that unintentionally makes a strong argument for atheism.