Southill Joyriders in no danger of penalty points

Let's start with a digression, if such a thing is possible. 

Limerick gets a very bad press, and even here in Dublin you'll get hardchaws who won't go  within an ass's roar of the place in the interests of self-preservation.  In fairness, head-for-head, there isn't much difference in the crime-stat stakes between the two cities... at least not according to a recent feature in The Irish Times.   

Years back, in the old mod days, I visited Limerick on a couple of occasions. While there, I happened to bump into a few fellow scooterists, and the difference between the crowd you had in Limerick and the crowd you had in Dublin was remarkable.  The Limerick lads were sound as pounds.  In Dublin they'd rob the eye out of your head at the time.  A lot of them, anyway.  Scootering solidarity?  Forget it.   

Digression over.

Next time you are watching out for the Boys and Girls in Blue trying to zap you for going a few klicks over the speed limit on a dual carriageway, spare a thought for the Limerickonians above who steal cars and drive them dangerously around housing estates in broad daylight, post their feats on You Tube, but cannot - for the life of them - attract the attention of our wonderful gardai. 

Is there a Dunkin' Donuts in Limerick?

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"Unlucky 13" car registrations to be magicked away

The Government and the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) have put their heads together and worked out a plan to boost car sales in Ireland going forward.

Never mind the fact that, due to punitive government taxation in the form of VRT (which can see some cars sold in this country cost over 40% more than in Britain, for instance), most people living in Ireland can simply no longer afford to buy cars.   Never mind the fact that road tax can cost multiples of road tax in Britain and elsewhere.  Never mind that we are heading for the €2 litre of petrol - the lion's share consisting of tax.

The Irish Government has decided, with the help of lobbying by SIMI, to do away with the "13" prefix on next year's registration plates, on the basis that Irish people - clever sophisticates that they are - might see such an arrangement of digits as "unlucky".

SIMI - which might more appropriately stand for Spineless Irish Motor Industry - has consistently failed to tackle the continuing scandal of Vehicle Registration Tax in this country.  

Too many of their members selling second-hand cars would be loathe to see half the residual value of stock on their forecourts wiped out by the scrapping of the tax - never mind that fact that more affordable cars would surely see increased new car sales, and would mean that Irish motorists would trade their cars more frequently, as they would not take such a hit on depreciation each time they did so.

But no, let's ignore the big smelly elephant taking centre stage in the room - a mammoth Irish talent.  

Instead, let's have some superstitious meddling with next year's registrations.   

Fingers crossed, touch wood, and all that...

Government 'set to scrap unlucky 13 car registration'

Irish Examiner, Friday, August 24, 2012 - 01:11 PM

It has reported that the Government is to bring in a new licence-plate system next year amid fears that a '13' registration number would negatively impact on car sales.

According to the Irish Independent, cars registered between January and the end of June will have a '131' registration.

Those registered from July 1 to the end of the year will have '132' on the plate.

The decision is said to be based partly on fears that superstition about a '13' registration plate would affect sales and partly in response to the motor industry's plea to spread sales more evenly across the year.

Alan Nolan of the Irish Society of the Irish Motor Industry has welcomed the proposal.

"70% of new car sales occur in the period January, February, March and April, the first four months of the year," he said.

"So the industry has to find funding, and God knows that's difficult in the current climate, staffing and other resources to deliver that huge volume over a short period, and then for the rest of the year it is almost like 'deserted village' level of activity in new cars."


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Michael Collins - things would have been no different had he lived any longer

The cult of the personality in history:

Had Archduke Franz Ferdinand not been assassinated, there might not have been a First World War.

Had Trotsky not been ousted by Uncle Joe, Soviet Russia would not have become the corrupt, Stalinist state it became.

Had Hitler not possessed a hypnotic stare that could seduce the masses - or been saved by Irishman Michael Keogh -  Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the horrors of World War Two would not have occured.

Or closer to home:  if Michael Collins had not stopped a bullet from a fellow countryman adapting the same tactics he had used against "the British", Ireland would have been a paradise on Earth instead of the bankrupt little basket case it is today.  

All nonsense of course.

Whether it was the system of alliances built up prior to WW1 and the various countries' jealousy of others overseas possessions ;  a bureaucratic caste which formed in the Soviet Union after the revolution and cemented its own power ;  lots of unemployed soldiers, anti-Semites, and a fearful and ruined middle class in Weimar Germany ;  or a backward gombeen ruling class, using Catholicism and neo-Gaelicism as tools for its autonomy to take the reins of 1922 Ireland  -  the results would have, more than likely,  been the same in each case. 

Funny then, that Collins - if you read the papers, the blogs, or turn on the radio or TV - seems to be up there with Padre Pio (not to be confused with Paddy Pee) in the saintly stakes at the moment.  

All Collins did was provide a template and a pretext for generations of Lemming-like Shinners and Rah-heads.  Each one doomed to make the same mistakes as the ones that went before.  

Collins -  like de Valera, Pearse and the rest of them  -  was a narrow cultural nationalist. Nothing more. 

His death in Cork just made him the eternal poster boy for a certain strand of Irish nationalist what-might-have-been.  

That's all.

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How the defeat of fascism in Europe was celebrated in Dublin, May 1945

You could do worse than sign up for the Irish Times archive service.    You can search editions as far back as the 19th century and marvel at how little has changed in Ireland since then.  Apart from the installation of our very own gombeen class as the political "elite".

I thought the clippings above, from the very same page of the Irish Times Pictorial, 12th May 1945, spoke volumes about the stupidity and hypocrisy that seems to characterise many natives of our green unpleasant land. 

When the rest of Europe was celebrating the defeat of Nazism, this is what happened in Ireland (clip left)  -  gobshites who more preoccupied with their anti-Britishness and the order in which an Irish tricolour was placed on a flagstaff,  than the defeat of Hitler's murderous regime. 

Then (clip right) we have our shamless gombeens looking for British help for "the situation in Ireland", with 170,000 people who had worked in Britain - presumably helping the war effort -  due to return home to bolster the already significant unemployment figures.

The irony of it. 

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Numbers sitting Leaving Cert Irish exam decrease (again) despite "compulsory Irish" in 2012, as more plump for bonus maths points

There has been much ado about the extra number of students taking higher-level maths due to the recently introduced bonus points system.  Anyone who reads the blog will know it is opposed to bonus points for any particular subject, as the policy distorts overall results and attainment.  Irish Language lobbyists/careerists will know all about that.

Yesterday's Morning Ireland had a clip from a student who benefited from the new maths bonus policy, the subject being his strongest anyway.  He said something along the following lines:  “students taking maths in the Leaving got more points for a D1 in higher level than an A+ in ordinary level.”    So how artificial – or not – are the real benefits, I wonder?

Then there were increased numbers taking higher-level Gaeilge, the test having been made easier by upping the points for the oral part of the exam.   What received less coverage however, was the “massive increase” in exemptions for sitting the Gaeilge test.  (Irish Independent, Orla Bradshaw, Wednesday 8thAugust).  And this despite its Official Ireland  “compulsory” status.

The Indo article said that 7,000 were exempt for sitting Gaeilge in the Leaving Certificate this year – up 35% on only five years ago.   The same piece neglected to say how many had sat the Leaving as a whole, but Newstalk put it at 55,815.  That is more than 12.5% with official  exemptions.  That is, it did not include those many students who simply did not turn up for the exam on the day.

So what it is the overall figure for those not sitting "compulsory" Gaeilge this year?  

The Irish Times “Results 2012” supplement put the number sitting the Gaeilge exam at  42,947.  So if 55,815 sat the Leaving, that would infer that roughly 23% did not turn up for Gaeilge .

Time for establishment Ireland to end the pretence and the self-deception.

End the failed policy of compulsion.

Officially.

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John Joe Nevin's family refused entry to Mullingar pubs, Katie Taylor wins gold despite official indifference... what's there to celebrate from an Irish angle?

What did you think of the Olympics?  From an Irish perspective?

I nearly puked.  Honestly.

I mean, well done to Katie Taylor – who until recently had to train in a ramshackle shed without water or toilet facilities.   She was excellent.

Well done to the others, who won bronze and silver medals; including John Joe Nevin who, as an Irish traveller, was hardly presented with an Official Ireland silver spoon to his mouth after he received his first slap from the midwife.

The cause of my nausea was not the athletes, but the Irish media's attempts – RTE, Ireland’s version of Pravda in particular – to drum up a mood of patriotic hysteria.  Some highly salaried gobshite from RTE Radio was last week playing, over and over again, a recording of  Amhrun na… Anhram na… Omadhaun na…  The Soldiers Song, waxing lyrical about it all.

[The Solidier's Song was originally written in English before being Gaelicised.  A mercy, as few people realise how bad its lyrics actually are, but just parrot them like previous generations did the Latin mass]. 

The Irish state, and Irish society in general, did little to promote Taylor and Nevin.   I hope they refuse to be suckered into any official civil ceremony extravaganzas, and deny Official Ireland and its half-wit gombeens a chance to bask in their reflected glory.

Interestingly, John Joe Nevin's  family – including his mother, Winnie - were not even allowed to watch his big fight in their home town of Mullingar, having found local hostelries closed to them.  They are travellers, you see.  And settled or not, any pubs they tried in Mullingar were not for letting them in.

What kind of a reception was that?

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The Flat Earth Web. Welcome to the misinformation age.

You should be grateful really, being a reader of this blog.  It is a paragon of virtue, integrity and common sense compared with what is out there.   No - really... it is!

You might think that the information age, and its plenipotentiary the Internet, might make everyone wiser and smarter?  I mean, there is no excuse for being ignorant anymore, with all the information that used to cost a hefty subscription to Encyclopaedia Brittanica being just a keystroke away.

But no.  There are people out there who believe the world is flat.  That the Sun goes around the Earth.  That the moon landings were staged in a Hollywood studio.  That some unified, has-always-been, Gaelic is the language of Ireland.   Dev said so, after all... about the Gaelic anyway - not sure about the rest.

Mad stuff.

There are people who have never picked up a phone in years to speak to someone - phones are for texts - never mind see them for real.   What's the point in that?  There is Facebook after all, and they have 240 virtual friends, all of whom send them chain emails - supposedly profound or humourous by turn - which nobody actually reads.

Then there are others who believe that cancer is curable if you just ignore it.  Easy for them to say, of course.  I have had reason to look into this subject recently - you will notice the blog has been pretty quiet of late - due to someone close having the disease.

These are people with a devout belief in German New Medicine and its equally dangerous bedfellow Christian Science  - an oxymoron if ever there was one - who do not believe in bacteria, do not believe in viruses, and think that AIDS is their god's punishment.   I think they call themselves pro-lifers.

They are out there, browsing ever more selectively, and becoming ever more ignorant.

Welcome to the not-so FEW.

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Devins' latest anti-Polish remarks. Sack her... or can such a thing occur?

Who judges the judges? And are there safeguards in place to ensure that those appointed to such responsible positions – they effectively have the power to ruin people's lives – are accountable and have some grasp of reality?  Should they be  required to be somehow in touch?

Witness, My’Lud, the utterances of Judge Mary Devins, sitting at Claremorris District Court, as recalled by the Mayo News of 28th September, questioning the rights of two Polish nationals before her having access to interpreters. "Why", asked the good judge, “when the country is on its knees do we have to pay for a Polish interpreter?”

Gombeen Nation, September 30th, 2010.

See original post  Judge Mary Devins questions Polish Interpretation

Devins has form when it comes to Polish People living in Ireland.   Last week, you will all know by now, she heard the case of a man who had called a security guard a "fat Polish fucker"  (the security guard was, in fact, Irish.  Whether he was circumferentially challenged or not is unknown).

The issuer of the not-very-clever remark was up before Devins, having pleaded guilty at a previous court sitting before another judge, who had ordered the offender pay €1,000 to a Polish charity.   When the question came up as to whether there was a Polish charity in Ireland, Devins quipped:

"A Polish charity? There is. It's called the social welfare".   

Cue spontaneous guffaws and hoots of laughter from the assembled, upstanding gobshites of Castlebar District Court. 

Devins has since been forced to "apologise".  

An apology is not enough.  She is simply not suited to such a responsible role, and any Polish person coming before her cannot expect fair treatment in her courtroom.

As she will not resign - this, remember, is someone who parked on double yellow lines outside her own courtroom while throwing the book at errant motorists up before her  - she should be sacked.

Which brings us back to the question asked back in 2010:  "Who judges the judges?"

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