Day out in Wickla...

I've always said that one good thing about Dubln is that it's easy to get out of it.   Not  Liffey Broadwalk "get out of it" but the ability to get out of the Big Smoke relatively quickly for a capital city.
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Some drone and other footage from beyond the Sally Gap, last Friday.



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Irish Military War Museum, Collon, Co Meath

One enthusiast's collection of militaria in Co Meath, Ireland:





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Glendalough, Wicklow video. A day out in the Garden of Ireland.

A blustery, but sunny,  day out in Glendalough.   You have to hand it to them,  those monks knew how to put a few bricks together... 


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Arsehole driver, wrong side of road, Kildare, Ireland

It cracks me up that I could be put off the road for going at 130 km/h on a 120 km/h motorway just four times in three years.   While the lazy cops hide in their vans zapping people for such minor infringements, smaller Irish roads seem to be spawning arseholes like the one in this video.  

 Overtaking a car and a bike on a blind bend near Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland.  If I hadn't braked it would have been a head-on.

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Snow and Sun in two days, Wicklow Gap near Glendalough, Ireland.

Wicklow Gap, 1st and 2nd of March (in reverse order).   Took the Wicklow Gap road on way back from Glendalough two days running.

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Garda speed van Navan Road Dublin Ireland

PUBLIC SAFETY ANNOUNCEMENT. 

I'm sure the traffic cops are only hiding behind this bus stop on the Navan Road just before the garage and Navan Road Parkway train station, in order to "saaaaeve loiives"

So it might be worth watching out and slowing down to 60 km/h, with that in mind, if you pass that way.

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Deer in the Phoenix Park

Dublin has one good point, I suppose.  The Phoenix Park.






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Gobshite Irish drivers (again) and entitlement to the overtaking lane.

Another self-explanatory jaunt on the wonderful roads of dear old Erin...  



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Driving in Ireland - how not to turn right on a roundabout

This one's self-expanatory....   careful now!





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Flow River Flow - Ding Dong Denny O'Reilly

Just to show that the blog is dormant - admittedly for rather a long time now  -  rather than extinct,  I thought I'd "share" this little ditty from spoof Republican balladeer Ding Dong Denny O'Reilly.

What with 1916 coming up, and all that....





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Fuerteventura, Corralejo and surrounds

Holiday in the sun!



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Michael O'Leary, Vincent Browne, gay marriage, Cork

No, this isn't Dermot Morgan swinging his hurley in character as a deranged GAA Catholic 36 years ago on the Live Mike. 

This is real.  Last week.

And here's a great version put to music by White Boys:






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The Wonderful Barn, Leixlip, County Kildare

How many people out there are aware of this amazing building?

Built in 1743, the "Wonderful Barn", Leixlip, leaves all of our present-day architecture in the ha'penny place.  But how many Irish people are even aware of it?

Is it simply a case of "don't mention the famine(s)"?





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Three move checkmate - chess can be a dangerous game

Nearly a year ago, there was a bizarre and  grotesque murder not too far from us.  Two guys were playing chess and, it seems, an argument over a move ensued which resulted in the killing of one of the players.

Subsequent reports disclosed some especially disturbing details about the killing which you can read here, if you have the stomach for it

http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/chess-murder-victims-lung-was-removed-and-has-not-been-located-29910709.html

Obviously this guy was very seriously deranged, and shouldn't have been out at all...  never mind playing chess.   But when you consider the rather stuffy image of the game, it's difficult to reconcile a row over which way the knight moves (or some such) ending up in a horrible bloodbath.

Myself,  I think I will stick to Grand Theft Auto... just in case.





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Going forward - or backwards... another bubble in the making

Oh dear.

I used to think that Bernard Manning was just an ignorant, Hitler-loving, racist, anti-Irish arsehole.   Now I think he might have been some kind of visionary.

Just a few short years after the property bubble bail-out, Paddy and Mary are  borrowing more than they should to such an extent that the Central Bank, those fine gobshites who oversaw the country's first bankruptcy, are now insisting on (from January) some earnings-to-borrowings ratio restrictions!

Do they really need to be told?  

That's the problem with the bail-out culture.   Lessons are not learned, and the failed become the future.  Again.


I can't be arsed with it any more.  Let's get a few more chords in... escapism is the only option, it seems.




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Irish road safety video... RSA and Gaybo be ashamed

Do you ever get fed-up with those silly, nonsensical "road safety" advertisements the authorities transmit through RTE?

I know I do.  Surely they'd be better off instructing people how to drive rather than trying to be poor-people's Steven Spielbergs, with their film shorts of cars somersaulting and flattening kids on swings and the like?

How to use motorway lanes, for instance?  How to use a fucking roundabout?  What those orange lights on the corners of their cars are for?

I've been out and about in the fair hills of Wickla putting together my own road safety effort... watch and be enlightened!

PS, before anyone rings Joe Duffy - no speed limits were broken in the making of this video.



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Garth Brooks Croke Park gigs - gombeen Ireland in action

The whole Garth Pukes  – sorry, Brooks – thing is yet another example, as though one was needed, of gobshitery and Irishry.

Here’s a summary:

The  GAA (Grab All Association) has an agreement with local residents as to how many gigs can be held at Croke Park.    It deliberately flaunts this agreement and exceeds the agreed number.

The promoter of the Garth Brooks gigs, Jim Aikin, must know this but sells the tickets anyway -  as early as January if comments on The Journal are to be believed.

He only submits his application to hold the gigs in April, which means by the time due process would be excercised by Dublin City Council, we are nearly at the time when the concerts were advertised to take place.

After the process, which takes into consideration residents’ objections, the gigs are refused, as might have been predicted.

Next, objectors are issued with death threats and the TV is full of footage of a large Texan in a silly hat promising he will swim to Ireland to meet with our prime minister to ensure his five gigs go ahead.  (Swim, Garth… please). 

The bloke who runs those awful O’Carrolls Oirish tat shops is interviewed  on RTE news, against a backdrop of green stetsons with shamrocks and Garth Brooks in the shape of Ireland on the front, saying how awful this is for the Irish economy and Ireland’s reputation.  

(Never mind the fact that those awful shops have probably done more harm to our image than anything since the odd few thousand incarcerated “unmarried mothers”, “fallen women”, and countless children buggered by our priests, aided by our police force, successive governments, and "The Peeple"  in general.)

The whole thing is still rumbling on and you can’t turn on the telly, read a paper, listen to a radio or look at your smartphone without hearing Garth professing how much he loves Ireland and the Irish and how we should ignore our planning laws in order to facilitate a cowboy and a bunch of money-grubbing gombeens.

It’s business as usual, then.

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800 Tuam babies' grave. Different back then?

With all the bullshit of the 1916 rising centenary awaiting us, it might be timely to consider the “visions” of  some of its participants, namely the faction of bourgeoisie nationalists who won out and came to power in the end.

Padraig Pearse achieved his blood sacrifice, of course, something he held in high regard.  He envisaged a tee-total, Gaelic-speaking, Catholic Ireland (see Tom Garvin, Preventing the Future: How Ireland stayed so poor for so long).   That’s “revolution”, Irish-style.

Mercifully, the Brits put a bullet in Pearse – sadly, however, they left de Valera alive and well in order to impose his vision of a rural, conservative, Catholic, ill-educated backwater of Europe on the new State.   He succeeded splendidly.

Hence the latest revelation of 800 babies, mostly the offspring of “unmarried mothers”, 

who died in this brave new State’s care at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Galway.   The mortality rate of 35% at this institution was far higher than in general, and the dead babies were put in a large unmarked mass grave.  One might be forgiven for concluding there was a deliberate policy of neglect in order to rid  the pure new Ireland of inconvenient "illegitimates".

You might have thought there would be outrage now in Ireland at this, but no.  It’s just another scandal and it was a long time ago.

Not as long ago as the Vikings, the Norman invasion, the Tudor plantation and the famine, of course – which many Irish “remember” like yesterday, indoctrinated as they are, and still swear revenge for.   Predictably, the Gaelic version of Irish identity foisted on us carefully forgets the fact that Ireland's original inhabitants – the ones who built Newgrange – were a pre-Celtic people.  

But back to the matter of the 800 babies.  Things were different back then, you see, when the Irish State’s genocide of “illegitimate” babies was going on in religious and State institutions, with the acquiescence of the Garda and the Irish Peeple themselves.  So move on, forgive and forget and all that. It's all in the past.

Irish Independent, Tuam babies' mass grave investigation

Have a look at this Indo article on the topic, and how many of the comments on the article take such a tack.   “Things were different then”.  That’s OK then.

Things were different in Europe when the Jews were being rounded up and murdered by the then German State authorities.  The difference is Anti-semitic attitudes in Germany and elsewhere have since been addressed, and lessons on the dangers of narrow myth-based nationalism have been learned

The problem in Ireland, is that things really aren’t that much different at all.

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Racist attacks on People Before Profit candidate, Memet Uludag, election posters in Castleknock Ward

"It's much better than you, you stinkin' Irish pig!"
George Stone, character in film The Untouchables

"The cottier's cottages were built with local stone or turf and thatched with rush or straw. Many cottages did not have windows and chimneys. Windows, when they existed, were often too small for a man to put his head though. There was often, but not always, a hole in the roof to let out smoke. Ventilation was always bad. Pigs, poultry and other animals lived with the family, often sleeping in the same room."  
The Great Famine, www.maggieblanck.com/Mayopages/Famine.html


Ironic then, given the Irish association with pigs in terms of insults and historical connections, to see the following election poster for People Before Profit  election candidate for the Castleknock ward, Memet Uludag, defaced in this way.  Note that the Fianna Fail candidate above, whose party bankrupted the country, remains unscathed.

There were several of these spotted on Roselawn Road, Blanchardstown.  It seems some ignorant racist scumbag - or group thereof - targeted Uludag, a naturalised Irish person who is originally from Turkey, on the presumption he is a Muslim.

Never mind that fact that someone from a group such as People Before Profit is quite obviously a socialist and an internationalist, and is unlikely to have much truck with fundamentalist Islam or any of its "values".

Even when I lived in east London, during the hey-day of the BNP, I never saw anything like this.  

Amazing how little attention things like this get in the Irish media, and how little our otherwise forthright and opinionated chattering classes have to say on the matter of racism and prejudice -  so rife in Irish society.


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Patrick Kavanagh – Epic

You'd be worn out with it all – the same old, same old.

In "the news" lately:  Irish judges the highest paid in Europe, ditto TDs, teachers, coppers and all the rest.  

Speaking of the latter, there are ongoing (and still unaddressed) allegations of Garda corruption...  maybe we'll have a tribunal or Government investigation exposing it all in 20 years' time?   Maybe a few of them will get a taste of their own medicine and sample the inside of a jail?   

But no, didn't the great Irish public vote against giving Government investigations real powers in a recent referendum?  So the corrupt can continue to come out smiling for the cameras whenever such "investigations" take place. 

The Irish public. "The Peeple".  

The  same gobshites who voted for Charlie, Bertie, Lowry, Callely and other assorted shysters year-in year-out, decade after decade, all the way back to Dev himself.   The same gobshites who voted to keep the senate.

If you think about it too much you'll end up going insane... this is what the Irish people want, after all.  And you don't want to end up like them.

Sure 'tis a great little land.

And what better way to sum up Irish parochialism and small-mindedness than this 1938 work by Patrick Kavanagh?     "The Munich bother", by the way, is the Munich Agreement: when Chamberlain famously appeased Hitler in a hope to stop further Nazi expansion... "peace for our time".    

We all know what happened next... "The Emergency".  

Epic

I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul!"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.

Patrick Kavanagh

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