I imagine the DUP are not normally close followers of events in the Dail but a number of them may be listening attentively for reports from there today. That’s because there’s to be a debate into…well into how republicans in the north acted around thirty or forty years ago. They’ll be hoping against hope that this time, somehow or other, Gerry Adams and Sinn Féin will suffer wounds that’ll be felt on this side of the border. As Julius Caesar (no, Virginia, he wasn’t a DUP member) said: ‘Men readily believe that which they desire’.
The DUP’s hopes will be particularly heart-felt as they themselves are faced with problems that making the landing of that space-craft on a meteor later today seem easy-peasy. On the one hand they’ve got to sound tough and unco-operative with Sinn Féin; how else to stop support from leaching away to the TUV and the PUP? On the other hand, they can’t sound so tough and unco-operative that Samson-like, they bring the whole power-sharing edifice crashing around their ears.
Why not? It’s not as if they enjoy being in bed with the Shinners. Well, should the Executive be collapsed, the chances are very much that an election here would be called, and the DUP do not want an election. No sir. They’d be heading into an election with a leader who looks as though he’s living on borrowed time, which as the Labour Party in England will tell you, is not a nice place to be. Unionism is fractured and an election under these circumstances could well result in their being the second-biggest, not the biggest party in Stormont. Which would mean Martin McGuinness as First Minister. Think about it. It goes without saying that the DUP are committed to democratic politics, especially when they emerge on top. But would they be able to swallow the democratic decision of the people if it put them in second place? I don’t think so. And you can add into that nerve-jangling mix the Westminster election in May and Naomi Long’s seat in East Belfast. The party leader will feel so confident of regaining it he’ll do a side-step and let someone like his namesake Gavin Robinson run. Young blood, up-and-coming, passing-the-baton – that’ll be the talk. The reality is that Peter dare not risk a second defeat there. Things are bad enough for him but that would screw the coffin-lid in place.
So as I say, who would be a DUPer these times? You can’t sound soft but you can’t sound too tough, you can’t let Jim Allister or the PUP (or, believe it or not, Mike Nesbitt’s party) suction away a vital percentage of your electorate; but at the same time you can’t sound as though you’re deliberately throwing Stormont out of the pram, so to say, because that would mean an election.
Then pity the poor Rosetta space scientists today, biting their fingernails and hoping to God the landing craft won’t collide with a mountain or fall down a ravine. And pity the poor DUP as they strain their ears for good news from the Dail, then go on wobbling their way along the tight-rope, hearts in mouths that at any moment they may plunge into election-land and conceivably second-party status, which, good democrat that they are, they’ll never accept. What then? Pass.
Jim Allister is behaving more like a rottweiler with each passing day. He’ll be chewing up the furniture next , his eyes blazing balefully as he scans the room for an angry rubber bone.He’s in throat-ripping mood alright.Hoking about for any weakness in proper, predatory mode ..But what the heck, Jude…the war’s over long ago .The troops that survived shuffled back from the trenches of the Troubles , foot-weary , to find that they’d cobbled together “Joint Rule” after all the years of prevarication and in fact and deed , the DUP were running the wee statelet in tandem with Sinn Fein…and not the SDLP{ooops!] The nationalists and unionists were all still the same but they’d done an upgrade to a more virulent strain and simply changed their jerseys. The people who voted were the same tired people with the same tired ideas but they were just a bit more concentrated Just like a carton of orange juice with all the bits in .
Marty and Peter? They are joined at the hip for public consumption.They are already of equal status and interchangeable ….like a Pushmepullyou animal with a head at each end . It wouldn’t really matter if Marty had ten, twenty or 500 more voters than Peter next week and then Peter pulled a few back next year….Nothing at all would change. Maybe someone should tell all our citizens{…sorry, “subjects” ,all you loyalists out there!…I know you like those little distinctions…..} that we’ve already got the cake divvied up pretty much equally and each job title at the top table is of equal status already .Swapping their little badges won’t bring on any big changes for a little while. Now doing “real” politics instead of squabbling like schoolboys …that might be a novel idea to consider, though.
Wailing in the Dail House
Outrage schoolmarm’d with arms akimbo
Poetry was quoted by one throaty Bimbo
A lass less Rimbaud
A deal more Rambo
Go away, GA ! to a spot hotter nor Limbo.
Paddy ,I hope with your ” squabbling like schoolboys” remark you’re not adopting the “one sides as bad as the other” crap
No,Michael .I judge each individual as i find ’em….
I have always believed the DUP will NEVER accept Martin McGuiness as head man, when the time comes they will scupper the whole lot, unless of course the British government changes the rules for them.As for the anti Sinn Féin agenda, I turn the tv/radio off when they start criticising, as it is all just so much hot air.
Rosetta Spacecraft, Samson and Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler
One hopes there is intelligent life in other parts of the universe. I suspect that there may be interest out there in the progress of the Rosetta Spacecraft today with the option of listening in to the debate in Dáil Éireann.
Hedy Lamarr appeared in Samson and Delilah 1949. George Antheil and Lamarr made a contribution to technology with their co-invention of an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping which paved the way for today’s wireless communications. Lamarr and Antheil were honoured with special awards for their development of a technology that has become a key component of wireless data systems.
T.D.s in Dáil Éireann are following the course of the Rosetta Spacecraft with keen interest. It is known that the impact of comets crashing into the earth, millions of years ago, left craters which contained water. The government hopes data from Rosetta will encourage the electorate to pay their water taxes in order to fund more research on this matter. Feedback from the electorate, however, is breaking up. There are garbled messages about Samson and a haircut…finance… haircut…a %… deducted from an asset used as collateral…creationists… 2,000 years ago…Sunday… just before teatime?
Today, being the anointed day appointed to Nail the Shinners, aka, Kristallgaeltag, it was not inappropriate to see a soft, shoe shuffler by the single name of Jimmy doing his thing outside the entrance to der Irisch Reichstag.
On the sidewalk beside him was his music box blaring out his one-and-only tune which kept rhythm in perfect harmony with his footwear: ‘Crocodile Shoes’.
As the topic up for discush inside the chamber of potshots was AVOCA not at all surprisingly the public galleries were packed with leading delights of the Dworkin Party, whose five-hour five-star chamber it was on the L.A. that was in it. Everyone from Una Furtiva Lagrima, who had pluckily eschewed anonymity to The Crying Boy heself who, being a male and therefore lacking the requisite family jewellery of Una, did not.
Both Una and the unknown boy are poster children of the campaign to rid the Free Southern Stateen of AVOCA, i.e, A Victim of Child Abuse. In its mission statement the Dworkin Party, whose founding member was that Bouncy Castle of Bile, the late dream date and demented Andrea Dworkin, aka the Dungareed Diva, stated:
‘Having collared one set of RCs on the issue of AVOCA it makes perfect donkey sense to do the same with the other set of RCs’.
(For RC, and RC read Roman Catholics and Republican Community, respectively).
Alas, the Curse of the Crying Boy would seem to have struck again. Some Dworks in Distress have seemingly not been keeping their finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, aka The Unionist Times and its broadcasting wing, RTE, such has been their urgent surge to vent their DD-sized discontent at a low-rent Republican in high-rise places.
The latest high-rise place being the Sheraton in the city of fruits in zoot suits, aka The Big Apple/ An t-Ull Mor. ‘Abhorrent’ was the pick of the edgy adjies which poured in a torrent from the steely mouth of Frances Fitzgerald, the Minister of Justabout Anything that Can Go Wrong.
Not cricket of the GAA-following GA all the same to drag Michael Collins into contemporary affairs: it had all the hallmarks of a craftily constructed verbal ambush. What now will the Spin Doctors of the cult known as the Sunday Independent (sic) do for a annual nixer when the speechless Blue Shirts come looking for a craftily constructed diatribe to deliver at the Annual Beal na mBlath, um, Bash.
Little surprise the Flowery Mouthed Minister got her nickname in rather a twist.
But, the Curse of The Crying Boy. Discerning reader will recognise this as referring to the mass-produced kitsch painting found in thousands of high brow homes on the mainland. Back in the mid 80s firemen began to report on the phenomenon of finding among the charred remains and cinders of numerous house fires, that the only item left intact was (gulp) a perfectly preserved portrait of …The Crying Boy. It is not believed that this piece of low-intensity kitsch is related in any shape or form to Frank Kitschson.
Perkie’s inner pyromaniac fears for the to-tag’s ri-ra in der Irisch Reichstag.
Only an hour before the star-chamber of potshots lit up with right-on anger a caller to the J. Duffy show on RTE rang in to Talk to Joe. He had his finger on the Pulse, the video game of games which the Gardai twiddle their thumbs over in their eternal hunt to stunt the spread of crime.
Fittingly, it got its name from a German Shepherd, no, not that Beethoven, but the other one, Ludwig Von the Mon:
‘The Pulse of an Irishman ever beats quicker
When war is the story, or love is the theme’
Being the beef of the caller, a former Garda himself, that the Pulse was not beating sufficiently quickly to keep up with the crime rate. Not least, and this may well be the most relevant biteen, where Domestic Violence is concerned. That would be the 97% of places where the perpetrator of AVOCA meets his victim. (And in only 3% of cases, is the perpetrator a female).
But the Minister of J. would not be the only one to be wrongfooted by the cursed Crying Boy.
Ditto the Yawnaiste whose vowel-movements were completely concerned with the m-word itself: as the movement of offenders across the frontier, in a southerly direction.
Cut to the J. Duffy Show where the caller in, a former Garda, he with his finger on the barely beating Pulse, talked to Joe of the courage of the Gardai during the shocking Seventies when the State itself was under threat. He could only have been referring to the D.A.M. inconvenience of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, of course.
When, as one understands it, there may well have been a certain clandestine movement of personnel, seemingly involved in the slum clearance business, across the border in a s. direction. A few short weeks,amazingly enough, after the Labour Party had taken office on the Mainland. The same party to whose Ard-Fheis/Shin Dig in SDLP terms the Yawnaiste’s own party sent delegates, both fraternal/ sororal on an annual basis without f. during the shocking Seventies.
Perhaps, this is the m for movement to which the Yawnaiste was referring? Alas, a zed-prone Perkie has never been quite able to remain compos mentis once the Yawnaiste goes into vowel movement mode: zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Confucius say: yawns is contagious.
Tiocfaidh ar L.A. ! as the sea-divided (s.d.) Labour Party likes to chant at their annual Shin Digs,. So called for their compulsive shin-digs at the shinners.
L.A. for Lethal Allies.
(Now, Perkie methinking, where did one leave that curse-of-God Crying Boy?)