I see the most unbigoted politician I’ve ever met and my good friend Nelson McCausland has been writing about Casement Park. Admittedly the whole project is up in the air with the clash between the Park’s developers and residents, but unbigoted Nelson has said should the development go ahead, this is a good chance for the GAA to start afresh and it could begin with the renaming of the stadium in a more up-dated and unbigoted way. He cites the example of the new Aviva Stadium in Dublin.
That’s an excellent idea. Aviva is a Life Insurance company so maybe we could forget about Roger Casement and call it the AA Park…No, that might give people the wrong idea…What about Barclays Park? That has a nice ring. And what better name than that of a bank? Or Beagle Street is another Life Insurance company – Beagle Street Park. It’d be a nice balance to the Aviva stadium, which used to be the Lansdowne Road stadium when I cycled past it on my way to work years ‘n’ years ago. The list is wide – Canada Life Park, or Asda Money Park (yes, Virginia, Asda Money is a Life Insurance group). Not that fair-minded Nelson says we need confine ourselves to Life Insurance companies: just as long as we get rid of the traitor Casement
Reports that well-balanced Nelson will lead a campaign to have Windsor Park renamed Dan Breen Park remain to be confirmed.
Ah Jude ….let’s go the whole hog and re-name everything. We could have rotating names for towns and cities…just change ’em on say a twenty year cyclical basis . We could start with something like ….say, Craigavon and just take it from there.Just line up all the wee “heroes” names and shuffle them about . . It could start a whole new industry and keep the Post Office on its toes.!!!
I can see merit in what old One-eye Nelson says.
But surely if you want to lecture people on any subject you should lead by example.
So Nelson, will you start with the totally bigoted (for Prods only) Orange Order and get them to drop that condition of membership? Will you then encourage them to be good neighbours and not to march where they cause offence (deliberately) and inconvenience to those neighbours?
Will you then have a word with your Caleb Foundation, or maybe educate them to the fact that the earth we all inhabit is not 6,000 years old, but millions of years old (as can be proved with carbon dating)?
You were a leading light some years ago Nelson of the Lords Day Observance Society which tried to insist that everyone, believer or not, should observe the Sabbath as dictated by your friends. I’m sure you will wise them up too.
Only when you have fulfilled these reasonable requests, Nelson, will you have any right to advise anyone else, never mind dictate to them in your narrow-minded bigoted way.
Does Nelson have a regular column which he uses as a conduit for his sophisticated and brain-expanding thoughts?
If so, bully for Norneverland. Down here in the Free Southern Stateen our very own Nelson once aired his one-eyed views on high to all and sundry, till one sad, early morning in 19 and 66 his column was subjected to a sudden jolt of extreme censorship. And ended up as a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard.
Indeed, to this very day on Liffeyside one can, while reading between the lines of The Unionist Times and other rotund-funded organs of Empah, still easily detect that admirable expression of solidarity: ‘Hip ! Hip ! Horatio’.
(Defense de Je Suis, ici).
It must be pointed out that Nelson has done the stateens on both sides of the Black Pig’s Dyke some service.
For focusing on the GAA where the brouhaahaa surrounding Casement Park is concerned. Down here in the FSS such was the texture of the reaction that one might have concluded the same stadium was one where the egg-shaped balls and the vowel movements of an ovoid configuration held sway.
The only concern here was how the Outspan Plan Ban would affect our tigerish Oirish bid for the huge Rugga World Cup sometime in the middle-distant future.
As one has not been privy to the entire, erm, roll out of the soft-tissue paper upon which Nelson committed the latest outpourings of his ginormous mind, one is compelled to speculate as to the reasons, valid and varied, for his opposition to the naming rights of Roger.
So kindly bear with one, Esteemed Blogmeister, as one attempts, feebly thought it might be, to construct a causeway between McCausland’s giant intellect and one’s own basalt-thick column.
Could it have been based on Casement’s partiality to the lingua franca of the leprechaun? Curry one’s yoghurt ! Surely not. For McCausland is derived, is it not, from ‘McAusalain’ or, in the leprechaun, ‘little one of the castle’.
Out ! Surely a suggestion for the bonedigger,bonedigger’s yard.
Maybe, just, maybe on account of Roger’s proclivities in, erm, taking up a defensive position on the field of play,not least in foreign countries overseas? But then, J. Keats put it more elegantly and in a way will surely be appreciated by Nelson’s inner nightingale:
‘Charmed magic casements, opening at the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’
To conclude: looking at the photo of Nelson which embellishes today’s blography it strikes one that he is just the sort of rugged-featured, stout-hearted chap to have around whenever the boom might be in immediate danger of being lowered.
Indeed, should he ever lose his column through – Dia idir sinn agus an Hulk ! – censorship (there are alas, precedents for those of his name – see above) there is one square peg in Windsor in which ‘the little one of the castle’ could neatly fit a leg.
His letter of application writes itself:
If I can be your bodyguard
You can be my long lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty you can call me –
What else? – Nelse.
As always, Perkie, nimble-footed and delightful – and such a pleasure to find another Paul Simon fan. Btw, the other one-eyed Nelson went up when I was teaching in St Pat’s Drumcondra – and I remember the English department head tut-tutting at some length about the ruffians who had done this vile deed to a notable landmark. I bit my tongue – I didn’t want to disrupt the good relations I’d established by ferrying down from the north copies of ex-Pat’s man John McGahern’s ‘The Dark’, which was banned in the south at the time. My efforts to curry favour were in vain – my one year of employment was all I got. Now when I drive past I shake my fist and regret my smut express…
at the end of this post there’s video of when nelson’s column went up together with a song about the event that want very popular at the time! may even have got to No 1! Irish hit parade, of course. never on top of the pops!
https://eurofree3.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/edward-carson-1854-1935/
PS there’s also a lot about Oscar Wilde in the post, if anyone is interested – not just carson
Nelson is someone who believes a} Unionism is always right and b) Nationalism is always wrong, well Irish Nationalism. As long as we realise that, we will be ok.
That wouldn’t have been, Esteemed Blogmeister, the same Eng Dept Head who was delighted to receive ‘a rub of the rubble’ from the same lowering of the Nelsonian boom?
Which he was chuffed take home and have mounted in his Clontarf pied a terre?
That a DNA test (not, alas, available at the time) might have revealed the same morsel to have been retrieved from the skip of a building site adjacent to the College in question, is probably neither here, there or elsewhere at this remove.
Ag bailt suilt as do chnuasach scealta, EB. Ith do chroi amach, J. McGahern !
Haahhhaaaaaaaaaa! You’re a laff and then some, Perkie. Ah, the dear dead days of long, long ago…
Well Jude,
It is a pity that the IRA Stopped at Admiral Nelson, should they have continued on that path, there would be little left in Dublin of any beauty.
That beautiful hotel at the side of St Stephens green belonged to a BRITISH Officer. Then there is all those beautiful Georgian houses, Dublin castle Phoenix PK.
As a gesture of good will, and to show your fellow brother and sisters. I think it should be named after the queen HRH Elizabeth 11 or the first, both fabulous Queens.
If Nelson is sensitive about names perhaps he should take a close look at his own. In time-honoured Scottish tradition Mr. McCausland’s parents chose a surname as a Christian name for their beautiful son. There is no doubt in my tiny mind that the child was named after Lord Admiral Horatio Nelson. The old ‘one-eyed one-armed adulterer’ was a dubious role model for any innocent child. Known for his harshness to the (often press-ganged ) conscripts who served under him, many who would have been Irish, Horatio plumbed the nadir of iniquity when he was complicit in the betrayal and mass execution of Neapolitan Republican prisoners who had surrendered to Royalist forces under a promise of amnesty. Add to that his personal intervention to ensure the judicial lynching of Duke Carraciola (hope I got the spelling right) who was duly hanged from the and his body dumped in the Barbour while Nelson copulated below deck with his odious and profligate mistress, Lady Caroline. Perhaps Mr.McCausland could change his ‘Christian’ name to something less gratuitously offensive like ‘Shell’, Sainsbury or even Slobadan. Alternatively he could add the sobriquet Mandela to simultaneously distance himself from the little war criminal and atone for loyalist support for and complicity in the former Apartheid regime of South Africa.
‘Hanged from the yardarm’
Are there any insurance companies called W****er because that would be a good name change for Nelson
The Ghost of Roger Casement
But this is not the old sea/Nor this the old seashore.
The ghost of Roger Casement/Is beating on the door.
Yeats was compelled to write this poem to draw attention to the fact that the Irish were no longer a subject people. Perhaps Yeats was inspired by a red sky the night the sun set on the British Empire?
Maybe the name should be dropped for a week, say, then the park can be re-named Roger Casement Park after a great international civil servant – to commemorate his work in the sardonically-named Congo Free State (Leopold von Coburg’s private property) and in the rubber plantations of Peru.
Surely Nelson couldn’t object to such a procedure?
Every so often I stop reading, watching and listening any Northern news. I do for this for several weeks for the sake of my sanity. Then I will tune back in to find the Unionist politicians are as small minded & pathetic as ever – just as I expected.
The sooner that circus at Stormont collapses the better, There is no point in power sharing with Unionists they are incapable of embracing it. The best you can get out of them is the odd Alliance/ni21 type saying ‘one sides as bad the other’ what ever the hell that means
Oh my Antonio, is that not the definition of insanity?
You keep repeating the same procedure and keep expecting a different result!
where did I say I expect a different result
Jurassic park and put Nelson and the rest of the DUP in it…..
That actually made me laugh out loud 🙂
That would be a culture shock for them – Creationists don’t do jurassic!
I agree with Nelson on this one, Casement Park could do with a new name. What about Bobby Sands Park or Brendan Hughes Park? I’m sure Nelson would agree with one of those suggestions?……