Soloheadbeg is perhaps as singular a placename as one can find on Planet Earth if one is TUT of TUT who has made an interplanetary career of tut-tutting,
Or at least the mangled Anglicised versh of the original Erse (Suilchóid Bheag) is, which, as The Ultima Thule (for it is he !) of The Unionist Times (for it is it!), during the course of his, erm, Inter-Gall-actic travels, is the (gulp) one and only versh which counts in the counties of Occidental England.
While on the topic of mangled Anglicisations of the Nation’s placenames Soloheadbeg is located in that part of Thomond, which to be or not to be, not, is a small apple’s throw away from a hamlet called (gasp) Oola. Which, as The Ultima Thule, newly arrived from the other Times of the Big Apple/ An t-Úll Mór, would be the last to inform his vast readership originally (actually still does) means Úlla / Apples.
And which once prompted one of the many memorable witticisms mumbled in 1919 by Syd to Alf, during their War of Dependence, even as they rumbled into that green village in tones that were tender and in tones that were Crossley:
-I say, mate, wot the ’ell does a big O, a small o, an l and and an a flamin’ well mean?
The Western British, erm, War of Dependence is widely known as the W.A.D. Prompted perchance by the wads of moola (it rhymes with Oola) with which Syd and Alf were rumoured to be belatedly remunerated. Partly in compensation for being shortchanged during Der deutsche Bürgerkrieg zur Beendigung aller Bürgerkriege / The German Civil War to end all Civil Wars, 14-18.
Sadly, classified documents of the Imperial War Museum in London sans Derry (LSD) which have been viewed by sources whom The Perkin of course trusts implicitly reveal that Lord Kitchener aka The Paedo in a Speedo had his hands in the Privates’ pockets for more than just the blindingly obvious reason.
Heading back to Soloheadbeg, small and all as this speck of a rural townland in the awesome spectrum of The Universe (the mere RC publication, not ) this did not deter FOTUS ( for it also he ! Fintan O Too[e Uber Shoneen) from alighting there, after his, erm, inter Gall-actic travels with his super-heavyweight intellect intacta (it is not for nawt that Fintan rhymes with Inchinn, whether he has an inkling or not) in his Ceann Mór. As per usual with his best FOT forward, while at his out and out most shouty :
THE FIRST MURKY, INGLORIOUS SHOT OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
Soloheadbeg is not much of a place, though most Irish people have been close enough to it at some stage; it is about a mile from Limerick Junction.
In 1919, by far the most famous living native of the place was Sir Michael Francis O’Dwyer, the son of local farmers who had risen to be Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab. Later in the year, he would retire from that high imperial office, blamed in part for the mass killing of unarmed Indian protestors at Amritsar.
But on January 21st, Dan Breen, waiting in ambush on the by-road from Tipperary town to the quarry at Soloheadbeg, imagined the place rather differently, evoking in his imagination the epic history of the land around him: “In this plain, dominated by the Galtymore mountains, Brian Boru and his brother Mahon fought their first great battle with the Danes in 968.”
In Breen’s mind what was about to occur here would be another “first great battle”.
“We were to begin another phase in the long fight for the freedom of our country.”
At around 12.30pm, eight masked IRA men waited on a one-and-a-half metre-high bank screened by whitethorn and briar. Forewarned by a scout, they stopped a small convoy coming from Tipperary town.
It was made up of a heavy cart carrying gelignite for the quarry, driven by a local man, James Godfrey, accompanied by a county council official Patrick Flynn and guarded by two armed constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary, James McDonnell and Patrick O’Connell. Both were Irish Catholics.
McDonnell, who was 56, was a native Irish speaker from Belmullet, Co Mayo, and was the widowed father of seven children. O’Connell, who was 30, was from Coachford, Co Cork, and was engaged to be married. Both seem to have been well-regarded in Tipperary.
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
Soloheadbeg is not much of a place.
Like, say – lemme see…….ah, yis !…….like, say, Cashel Road, Crumlin, Dublin 12 ?
As for the rhyming couplet, McDonnell and O’Connell :
Both seem to have been well-regarded in Tipperary.
Sadly, FOTUS does not tell us by who, or, to be pedantic and PC about it, by Hume, oops, whom.
McDonnell, was a native Irish speaker.
The reason is rather murky as to why FOTUS aka The Linguistic Lapdog with a Laptop, whose favourite poem of the mo is ‘Níl fuckáil focal Gaeilge agam’, frankly opted to embark on shoehorning this military irrelevance (unlike armed) into his charmingly disarming piece. Unless it is because Soloheadbeg is where Thomond and Ormond are within stone-throwing distance of each other in the vicinity of (gulp) Limerick Junction.
Or, perchance, in a pre-emptively mischievous attempt to set up a toe-to-toe between a poet of Mayo and a poet of Tipperary. In the red and green gansey, (Mise) Raiftearaí an File versus In the blue and yellow vest, Éamonn an Chnoic.
Riff ar R.A.F.
(nó, For Fliuch’s Sakes)
Mise É. an Chnoic, b.f.fliuch
A chaith i dtreo R.A.F. cloch
Bhi an luíochán
De h. pocus lón
Arsa Ollamh SJ.,boc, fadaphoc.
Gadzooks ! What on God’s Earth can this rookie reference to a reverential Ollamh SJ mean? Only that FOTUS was not engaged in a solo run re Soloheadbeg but that his ambush on the ambushers was in fact one part of a pincher movement. And the one chosen to write in tandem with him was not just A.N.Other at random; in fact, he was a pillion passenger in a million
For, a Pat Shortt, oops, a pathologicallly short time later, in fact, almost simultaneously, The Unionist Times published an almost identical Down with Ye Olde ’Ra Rant in that rare old flying RAR column – Rite and Reason (tá scéal úr ansin freisin ! ní fios fós an raibh a fhios ag FOTUS roimh ré !!) – by one …………Fr Séamus Murphy, an Irish Jesuit and professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Chicago, US.
WAR OF INDEPENDENCE SEEN AS CATHOLIC WAR ON PROTESTANTS
Corduroyprosecorduroyprosecorduroyprosecorduroyprosecorduroyprosecoruduyoyprose etc etc etc
Hmmmmmmmmmmm.
Or, perhaps,
Hymnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn sheets, the same.
Thus did combine a brainy CBS old boy and a brainy SJ old boy, from the Fianna fail-safe distance of a hundred years and which conferred upon them the military advantage of the high moral ground, going backwards. Over? Over a brain-dead Breen, under the brain-dead influence of Brian Ború and a racy of the soiled Bog-Oak Monolithic Treacy?
Well, not exactly. The stats show, after all, that TUT deals in, erm, tactful strats.
This is not the first time that Séamus Murphy SJ has come a-headin’ on over the hills where the Injun arrows are thicker than Perkypine quills in his Deadwood Stage and blown in from the Windy City for a bit of the old Whip Craic A-way and a-fixin’ to stay in the Wild West Brit Bar of – yee-haw! – TUT.
Consider the following from an onside Jesuitical online oneliner. Truly is it a doozy :
Fr James (Séamus) Murphy SJ joined the Society of Jesus in 1971, he had never met any Jesuits before applying to join, and was instead drawn to the order by reading its history.
Wow ! Bow with Re-spect.
What then is an un-nuancy boy like Perkin (An Pearcánach) Warbeck to make of this bombshell? That in fact James (Séamus) Murphy started off as a possible product of a CBS before eventually seeing the light?. Thus leaving one with the inescapable conclusion that the grapnel ambush was conducted by a pair of Paddy Stinks on lesser Mickey Mucks who dealt in shrapnel?
The sterling penny begins to drop. This, then, is TUT’s offensive version of the Vietnamese TET.:
-T.A.T.
Meaning, according the Gregorian Chant of Cambhéal, popular in pockets of Cromghleann, BAC 12:
–Tom Agus Tor / Bush And Bush.
Offensive for the following reason: T.U.T. in its T.A.T. uses lavatory tactics to, erm, flush out the Fenians. So, with The Ultima Thule looking after, erm, Number 1 it is left to the Trouser Cough, SJ , newly blown in from the Windy City to look after Number 2 ?
Scarcely necessary to remark or rebark, indeed, that a Change in Vowel Movements is a brown flag signal of Something Serious. As we find in this instance, from, TET to TAT by TUT aka TIT (where the Miaow 2s are in actual control of what they gigglingly call, The Irish Times located in Tora Street sur Dort). Tot ‘em up, Joe.
Thus, the pre-ambush preparatory pep talk of the Pee and Poop Two possibly went as follows:
-Bushes are an integral part of ambushes and Soloheadbeg is blessed with bushes galore. Do you read me, 43? I read you, 41.
For the non-militaristic civvie whose head is not of a pentagonical shape this cryptic kryptonic exchange in gorgeous Georgian barkitecture between Bush Snr and Bush Jr made be decoded in the code of (slog) Suilchóid:
-Ye Olde IRAq were every bit as m.a.s. murderous in their attacks as The New IRAq.
(m.a.s.: murky and sectarian).
Níl sé imithe go foill, tá’s agat / It hasn’t gone away, you know. For this is but a modern day updating of a rude old road-fighter’s taunt in Imperialist Crumlin, D 12, back in the day:
–Gwanoutadat: poke me in the fist with yer eye, will yiz, ya dyed in the wool gnationalist !
So, back to T.A.T.’s Tom Agus Tor.
Which of the two got to play Tom (short for the avuncular one) and which, Tor, short for Thor who knew how to, erm, hammer a job on d’enema?
One can only deduce that as FOTUS is further down the road to Occidental English Englightenment, having morphed from a mere PS of a CBS boy to delivering a humungous homily of the purest Pulpit Fiction in the borrowed confines of (bow) St. Patrick’s Cath-edral, while J(S) has only murphed from a mere MM to becoming a merer SJ, the answer is as obvious as the halo on Haley’s Comet, to be cosmic for a mo.
Ah, what tales of ambushes from Amritsar to (South) Armageddon itself those regimental penants of both the UK and the UQ could tell as they reverentially dangle like evangelical spangles over the pews for which there are queues as long as Ole Blue Eyes’ swansong.
Not to mention serve as raw redmeat homicidal material for the guest homilist. And that’s just the A’s. Bet your bottom donation on it but there would be a fair few zzzzzzzzs to be heard in the Cath-edral long,long before even as eloquent a L-plated Learner Preacher such as Outreach O Toole reached Zanibar or Zimbabwe itself,
Meanwhile, this offensive militaristic tittle tattle of T.A.T. has moved on from the Lie over, Loyola stage to the sergeant major topic of political road maps.
Specifically, on whether the ‘heavy cart’ in Soloheadbeg was breaking the then speed limit (the fake news disseminated by the bogus War of Independistas as a justification for their m.a.s. murdreous ambush) in what has become known as the Custer n’ Gelly Gangbang in Soldiers’ Field slang. This is due to be published under the Crafty Cockney rhyming s. title in T.U.T.:
-Who Phil the Greeks of 98 ?
This is the cue for the pacific Perkin to meander a mere mile and a half to the north from the south, where Soloheadbeg is infamous for outsourcing the police slang of BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for bolo-wielding boggers. And where one can still spy High Horsemen ( geldings welded by scrap merchants of political pap) on the High Moral Ground.
Cue for this cockeyed optimist on such a Somme enchanted evening to whistle ‘There’s nothing like a Dame for a Larf’ and to barf as he saunters up to (gulp) Limerick Junction. Where, instead of turning right for Bali Hai Cliath he will turn left for the city where even the local linguistic lapdogs lúide laptops are wont to bark incessantly the fake news that Deceitful Ballyneety broke the Treaty. And if that doesn’t take the canine cake, worse still, or even, worser.
(Mind you, The Perkin’s inner under-lapdog lover is loath as always to lay the blame on the nameless canines. One must look in this instance to their masters who squash into that massive cauldron of pash that is Thomond Park, honour grads to a man in Geography and Jogging from UL. There, to chorus their pulsating provincial anthem of Munster, ,erm, ‘The Fields of Athenry’ till both the cows and the bow-wows come home, designed especially to decibel out The Clash of Angela’s Ash.)
This fact, (checked) must be borne in mind as local lapdogs in the lanes and alleyways of Angela’s Anglia, bark their latest fake news to the effect that the sainted Sir Bob is never known to open his gob on account of having been stricken from birth with the curse o’God congenital shyness.
In other words, to move from a damn Ambush to a Bashful Man.
That is the reason why a misled UL (not short for Uladh) though it is is TuaidhMhumhain, but the Universtity of Perversity itself of Limerick dragged its FOT-sized feet almost bragging as it did so ‘to save the shy boy Bob from an embarrassing exposure to the public gaze of the mob’. On the basis that, unlike, say, the Homilist FOTUS of Pulpit Fiction fame, Geldof is one shrinking skypilot..
In its delayed citation once again UL noted (in words to the following effect) that the honour was being conferred on a tin-eared BG (who’s patently not fit to carry a BeeGee toon on account of its musicality) not least for the trash talker’s offloading.
Of? Of an Ethiopian-sized Dumpster from a junk truck of Asian-proportions stuffed with the Band Aid Bunkum and also his Freedom of the Boomtown (since, sadly de-ratified). All to be offloaded on and into the bunker of The National Library, already squeezed for space to sardine tin dimesnsions.Thereby saving a fine old sum, loike, in fineálaithe brúscair /garbage fines. No Tip-head in Tipperary being satisfied to take them.
Even while UL, erm, ullagowned (sic) for its tardiness.
Thus, is ™he Perkin’s inner poetaster hurt once more into póit. And who requires a perk-me-up-before putting quill to vellum:
-Mine’s a Bloody Mary
Then, armed with a dockleaf (hon.) in one hand (to mop the feverish brow) and a BM in the other:
In honorary honour of Dr. Bob Geldof
(or, Do they know he’s a lit-up Christmas Tree?)
For years UL from conferring held off
The bashful man known as B. Geldof
Pssssst, no shyness
With M’am Highness
Sir Shannonymity has a tam to doff.
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