Picture by annakovilina
I’m listening to RTÉ radio as I write this and I have to hold myself back from picking up my portable radio and aiming it at the opposite wall. Why?
1. They say that U2 has recorded a track on their new album called ‘Raised By Wolves’. They’ve played a bit of it and it’s a very direct comment on the brutality of the Dublin and Monaghan bombs. The people assembled in the RTÉ studio, including campaigners for the truth, are saying “Isn’t it very decent of U2?” and they mean it. Can I swear? I can and will, but not in writing. Dublin-Monaghan was in 1974. Forty and more years later U2 get round to writing a song about it. Fingers in ears, Virginia, but Jaysus. It’s almost as decent/brave as Enda Kenny criticising the Catholic Church when he knows no bishop has any longer the strength to lift a crozier, let alone hit him a belt with it.
2. There is general agreement in the RTÉ studio that the reason the truth hasn’t been laid bare about the Dublin and Monaghan bombs is that collusion was involved. They talk of the Glenanne gang that killed so many innocent Catholics, and how the British secret service will not cough up information because it would reveal too much. EH? We allow foreign agents to kill our innocent citizens, and yet we accept that well, that’s the way, the Brits won’t just tell. Hey-ho, dear me, there y’are now. No wonder the Brits think of the paddies the way they do.
3. One commentator has made the point that the truth won’t come out until quite a long time from now, because if it did it would destabilise relations between Britain and the south, and that would have an impact on the north. “And?” you say, Virginia? And nothing. That’s it. It’s not going to happen. The Brits have the info, but they’re not going to share it because it would be too “sensitive”. So now. And you thought you lived in a democracy, next door to another bigger democracy. Where the politicians are the servants of the people. Mother of Divine Mercy. When did it happen that truth was openly, brazenly pushed into second place behind expediency? And nobody stood up and shouted “I’m mad as hell and I’m not taking it any more!”?
4. The south are having a referendum about gay marriage and people are jumping up and down about gays being denied the same rights as everyone else. How about a referendum on having our employees – yes, Virginia, we do pay politicians’ salaries – bloody big ones, too – on people being denied the truth about who killed their loved ones? Or governments telling the truth? Personally, I’d put gay marriage behind that in the queue of urgency.
5. I don’t know who’s sitting in for Marian Finucane, but she managed to smuggle into the conversation about Dublin and Monaghan a reference to Eamonn Mallie, and how Eamonn was sitting in a room of republicans after the ceasefire and thinking to himself “These guys know more than I do about a lot of things but they’re not saying”. Nice one, Ms Sitter-inner. Show that secrecy about violence extends to ‘both sides’. Except that in one case you’re talking about an outlawed group which people like yourself, Ms Sitter-inner, would call terrorists, whereas the other side of which you speak is the government, the people who are paid fat salaries to, among other things, protect citizens, not arrange for them to be blown to bits. So in the name of Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the wee grey donkey, would you stop making comparisons like that?
No, I didn’t get out of the bed on the wrong side this morning. I’m just sick to my back teeth of people accepting what should be the totally unacceptable. But then, I suppose I always was a dreamer.
As a proud innumerate who has only been able to summon the courage to come out of the closet of calculation in recent times, one is quite happy to announce that he cannot either add nor subtract. This is not merely a lifestyle choice: one was born an innumerate.
We Warbecks have always been to sums what the sidewalks of Singapore have been to gums, both bubble and chewing. One used to put an ‘alas’ in there somewhere; but never no moire. The last of the ‘alases’ has been and gone, in this context, for this lad in the newly mature and generous FSS..
Therefore, Esteemed Blogmeister, one has nothing to add or to subtract to what you’ve had to write about the programme in question. The one which made you want to throw your radio at the wall. There would be a dent in one’s own wall indeed except that the walls of Warbeck Towers have a medieval identity, set in stone and not at all susceptible of dents.
Except to, erm, add, the identity of the Sitter-Inner: that would be the awesome Aine Lawlor, She first made her’ mark on the bark’ as it were on, (gulp) Mawnin Ireland, no less. Where he and her colleague, Cathal Mac Coille’s pas de deux version of the Woodchoppers’ Ball became a thing of broadcasting legend.
No yawnin’ when Aine Lawlor was on Mawnin’ Ireland !
One can safely surmise that you did not catch the matriarchal show which immediately preceded the Marian Finucane Show (for which AL was the Sitter Inner). That show, of course, was the Mimsy O Call Again Show whose guest of honour this morning was the truly honourable Baron Kinnock of Bedwellty in the County of Gwent.
Perkie himself only caught the last marshy moments of that programme as a moist-voiced Mimsy thanked her g. of h. through the dank means of reading out a whole litany of gushy phone-ins from limp with admiration listeners,mainly from females (of both genders).
Which led one to believe – though Perkie of course is always open to correction – that Mimsy very possibly did not quizz the Welsh Wizard about this statement he made in 1979 when he was merely Neil (long before kneeling to become Baron) Kinnock, Labour Party MP.
He was campaigning against Welsh Devolution at the time:and pooh-poohed the whole idea of ‘a Welsh identity’:
-Between the Sixteenth Century and the mid-Eighteenth Century Wales had practically no history at all. and even before that it had been merely a history of rural brigands who have been enobled by being called princes.
Could not see the Collinsean radio surviving a q.on that topic. But then, Mimsy, whose long term career option incorporates both a drop in income and a rise to the Broadcasting House of Arus an Uachtarain, must be wary of what q. are asked.
Off now to watch Donegal v Tyrone on the telly.
Ca bhfuil mo scath fearthainne, a Sheosaimh ? / Where’s me brolly, Joe ?
I’m truly grateful I didn’t hear that, Perkie. Miriam and the Welsh wan – I mean Wizard would be too much. The man who thought the miners’ strike was a bad idea – and he leader of the Labour Party. The man who said ‘We’re aaaaalllll riggggghhht! We’re allllll riiiiiigght!’ shortly before being defeated in a General Election. The man who with his lady wife took more money out of Europe than all the farmers of Ireland…
Jude, it wasn’t that the miners’ strike was a bad idea – it was the timing of it.
Arthur called the strike in the springtime when the coal stocks were at record high levels.
That meant the miners would have had to not be producing coal until about December (nine months on strike) of that year before there could have been any shortage.
So it was doomed from the start.
Sherdy – can you imagine Neil Kinnock, in any month at any time, giving his backing to a miners’ strike? My God – how would he make progress if he did? He’d be down there with the despised like Arthur Scargill. No thanks – not clever Neill. He’s allllll riiiiiiiggghght….
Somehow, Esteemed Blogmeister, one doubts that you reached the final segment of the show in q. having already hit the wall, as it were.
But if you had, Radio Collins would surely have tested the durability of the Great Wall of China itself, no less. For, what followed was – and pardon one’s Mandarin – that which Chairman Mao would have called: A Road of Borrocks.
Assuming you had already dropped out for perfectly understandable reasons from the unendurable endurance test that was/ always is The Marian Finucane Show you will nonetheless,one suspects, be curious to hear what followed.Especially as someone who has, erm, a passing interest in English Literature.
The final topic was the upchucking, oops, upcoming production called, modestly, DruidShakepeare. In which four (1,2,3,4) of the history plays by The Great Shakes will be soldered together as one play. Featuring veritable regiments of courageous, erm, Oirish ac-tors soldiering through Elizabethan English.
Actually,that latter part is a lie, albeit a little white one.For the lingua franca will be – put your hands together, folks……Hiberno English.
This will be but the latest in a long, long list of much acclaimed thespian atrocities inflicted by the Druidess of Druid on the willing masochistic masses, ranging from the dramatic abominations’ of McDonagh, Martin to the bombastic boorishness of Murphy,Thomas.
It has taken Garry Hynes (for it is she !) globally decorated decades in thespian circles to finally face up to the,erm, Issues which The Great Shakes poses for understandably unreceptive Oirish audiences.
The 800 years of Them and Us, the Oirish/English thingy don’t you know.
At which point, one of the Sitter In’s guests, an Alison creature from the Irish Dependent (imagine !) helpfully chimed in with an incisive observation.
That DruidShakespeare is the thespian acknowledgement of the New Maturity which now exists in relationships between the two sovereign states/ stateens of the UK and the Free Southern.
But because of the essential foreigness of the Elizabethan English of the original text, not to mention the inherent,(gasp), racial superiority contained within its DNA, the Druidess of the Druid has found it necessary to hire (at no liltle expense to the public purse) an OIrish writher,oops,writer to give it a must-do make over. And morph/Murph it into Hiberno English.
Actually, The Great Shakes had foreseen such thin-skinned fatuousness, in the oft-quoted, misquotation:
‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily
To throw perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice
Or add another hue to the rainbow’
Will you tell us, Will, what does all that add up to, going forward ?
‘Is wasteful and ridiculous excess’.
Or, to put in the Hiberno-English of a colleague of the Allison creature in the Irish Dependent, one Dec ‘The Neck’ Lynch: Eejitry. Sheer, unmitigated Eeejistry.
On a par, indeed, with the s.u. Eejitry last witnessed on the grand scale when the ovoid accented OIrish Egg Chasers hosted the Ould Enemy in (gulp) Croke Park, home of the Paddy Stinks and Mickey Mudds.
Talk about wrestling with age old issues, the still open sores, the on-going tensions yet associated with the Site of the Original B-Sunday !
Why, it was not till that momentously mature occasion that the Hard Yards were finally travelled and the Realisation finally Dawned. That the competition which the Dublin and Tipperary football teams had actually been engaged in back in 1920 when mowed down by the Auxies and the Black and Tans was……the Pro-12.
Betcha yiz didn’t know that, then.
But, back to DruidShakespeare.
The ‘racial’ take of The Grating Shakes on the Welsh accent as put into the gob of the Fluellen boyo will be rectified by being rendered into the ….yellow-bellowed billowing .Wexford accent.
This would no doubt have caused joy unconfined to the heart of a Wexford writer who once wrote of his dear frined in thespian circles and without a hint of one tongue in either cheek: ‘Garry Hynes atrracts criticism on two counts: 1. she is a woman; and 2. she does not suffer fools gladly.
(Which shows that Norn Iron is not the sole repository for irony on the I.of Ireland especially of the unintended variety. For reason 2 is, is it not, authentic Hiberno English for the ultimate obituary euphemism. What the Chinese call: a: comprete borrocks).
Colm Toibin (for it is he !) is also not backward in coming forward to add ‘another hue to the rainbow’ in the Referendum de dum to come.
To conclude: what really tickled the Sitter In’s fancy (aka Chuckle ar Lawlor ) was the Ten-Minute Out-take from DruidShakespeare which will be especially performed for (gasp) Camilla the Chameleon during the course of her upchucking, oops, upcoming private Stateen Visit.
Personally, Perkie would have opted for an Out-take from a,perhaps, more appropriate choice of play entirely.
That would be the famous Victorian farce: Charley’s Aunt.
Just to put you in better form Jude; there is a 45 minute programme on RTE tonight about the Mullaghmore bomb and later on in the week there will be the usual forelock tugging when the heir to the British crown, the very same crown whose forces were behind the Dublin/Monaghan bombings , comes a calling all in the name of good neighbourliness and let’s forget the past. A wee bit contradictory wouldn’t you say!
BelfastDan
That will hardly cheer Jude up, when he notes that Sinn Fein are sending representatives to attend those events and presumably there will be handshakes, if not forelock tugging.
I’m thinking of doing a blog on it, gio – bet you’ll love that…
Jude
I will read it with a mixture of sadness and schadenfreude.
Don’t kick Jude when he is down, it would be wrong.
Kick away, guys – I’ll bite your ankles…
Now don’t be to hard on Jude Gio he has had a tough week or so SF lost FST Gerry Kelly didn’t win North Belfast in fact he went backwards good old Marty didn’t win South Belfast and the Tories won the election surprised Jude hasn’t taken to the drink!
TAKEN to, neill? I’m outraged. I never left it…
“Face down on a broken street…”
There was no mention of a bomb in Belturbet Co Cavan which killed two teenagers and injured eight citizens on 28 December 1972. There was no mention of a bomb on the same evening in Clones. There was no mention of the fact that cars used in the attacks had been stolen in the north of Ireland. Bombs in Dublin and Monaghan killed 33 citizens, a full-term unborn baby and injured 300 civilians.
There was no mention of a Yorkshire Television documentary, ‘Hidden Hand – The Forgotten Massacre’ which claimed that British security service personnel resourced and assisted loyalists in the attacks. There was no mention of the fact that the attacks were carried out in the context of the Ulster Workers’ Strike and debates in Dáil Éireann concerning the Offences Against the State Act. There was no mention of the fact that investigations were conducted with indecent haste. There was no mention of the fact that forensic evidence was sent to England.
As Thomas Jefferson once remarked,
“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.”
Wolves are patient and do not quit.
I completely understand your feelings Jude but I don’t think throwing your radio at the wall will change a thing. What COULD change things is being pro-active, like in writing this blog today for example, highlighting the denial of the British Government to release files on an atrocity that killed 33 people, one of them a pregnant woman with twins. If more and more people were proactive then we would get somewhere and the families of the victims of this atrocity (and other atrocities and massacres) would get some form of Justice, Truth and Closure, not to mention name and shame those responsible for the atrocities in the first place.
The British Government obviously has something to hide when it comes to the Dublin-Monaghan Bombings. Two no warning bombs that were planted to do one thing and that was massacre as many innocent people as possible. As I mentioned a heavily pregnant woman with twins and children were murdered in this attack, not counting the other innocent people and the 300 injured.
Its important just to be blunt and honest. We all know the British Government was behind the Dublin/Monaghan bombings. The UVF wouldn’t have the brains to carry out such an attack alone. The Irish Government by sitting on their hands for the past 4 decades have allowed their own citizens to be murdered by another government and not pursue Justice. Its time this all came to an end and the Irish people demanded the Irish Government to hold the British Government to account on the numerous other atrocities they were involved in, such as Bloody Sunday, the Ballymurphy Massacre, the murder of Pat Finucane, the MRF, the FRU, etc.
Forget about “British and Irish relations”. There wont be genuine friendly British- Irish relations until the British Government comes clean on all the collusion and murder it was involved in and, of course, they stop occupying the North Eastern part of our country.
I have always held the view that the best way to put pressure on the British Government is by appealing to our Irish American cousins in the USA. It wasn’t until the likes of Bill Clinton became involved in the conflict here that peace of some sorts was finally achieved, its not perfect but its still something. I have relatives in the USA who are very proud of their Irish roots and would put many an Irish man to shame when it comes to knowing Irish history and the Irish language.
The Irish Government, along with the US Government and the European Union, should put as much pressure on the British Government as possible in order for them to be open about their role in the troubles here and its up to the Irish people, north and south, to get the process going.
Ambitious, I know, but I believe nothing is impossible. I don’t know if its a genuine Michael Collins quote but I always remember Liam Neeson in the 1996 film saying to a crowd: “Our greatest weapon is our refusal, our refusal bow to any order but our own”. Lets use our refusal, to reject injustice and get what we want.
Much more productive than throwing a radio at the wall, eh? 😉
Can I not do both, Ryan? Please?
Poor old Ryan the British are always the bad guys arnt they? You could have mentioned how the Irish Govt armed the IRA which led to many more deaths than the two bombs across the border and the Irish Police giving information to the IRA and yet you didn’t mention this wonder why?
As for the British leaving why should they the majority of the population want to remain part of the union its tough you don’t like that however that is the way it is.
As for the truth here is an idea you get your side to cough up the truth before you demand the same of others
And on the anniversary of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, what do RTÉ show? A documentary about ‘Lord’ Mountbatten. Absolutely shameful behaviour from the state broadcaster. Beyond insensitive.
@neill I doubt very much that the majority of the people of Ireland want partition to continue, except for the descendants of the planters in north east Ulster,
To quote another great Irishman,Tom Barry, he said there will never be peace in Ireland till the occupying british forces are gone forever,then maybe we can have some kind of ‘normal’ relationship with Britain , the UK as we know it is on it’s last legs anyway.
Well you see if they were to highlight the Dublin/Monaghan bombings, that would mean talking about ‘the war’ British/loyalist violence collusion etc and spoil there neat little Republicans/IRA violence solely responsible for the troubles agenda and use it for their anti shinners agenda, that just won’t wash with the West Brits and Dublin 4 blue shirts brigade, now will it?