Picture by Fionn2006
OK, a quick starter for ten: what do Jeremy Corbyn and Gerry Adams have in common? Answer: they both lead (or in Corbyn’s case, is about to lead) a political party that is giving the screaming jib-jabs to the cosy establishment. We saw how fearful Corbyn makes the Labour Party establishment when we watched New Labour’s head honchos being resurrected to tell the party faithful not to vote Corbyn: Blair, Brown, Kinnock – the list stretches out to the crack of doom. We saw how desperate the south of Ireland’s political establishment (aka Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, aka Tweedledum and Tweedleomg) on RTÉ’s The Claire Byrne Show a couple of nights ago, when who should get an extended interview but the only man in Ireland never to have had a bank account, Bertie Ahern.
He was looking well – a little overweight maybe, but happy in his own skin. And his topic of choice was? Why, Sinn Féin and the IRA. Bertie talked of the need for this here to be all cleared up and Sinn Féin to be a normal party. Couldn’t be having criminality of all kinds going on by people with links to Sinn Féin. That’s why he, Bertie, and others of course, had created the Good Friday Agreement. Claire politely didn’t mention what Bertie and his party had done to the Irish people.
And then a funny thing happened. Bertie started talking about the IRA as an old soldiers’ club, meeting in comradeship, commemorating significant events in their history, “just as we’ll be doing next year with 1916”. Whaaaaat? Did he check that out with Micheál Martin first? Because it wasn’t just a slip of the tongue from Bertie – he said the same thing several times. Linked the violence of 1916 to the violence of the Troubles. Now everybody knows that that is the one thing that must not happen. All right-thinking people are agreed that the old IRA, as my mother-in-law God be good to her used to say, were “nice”, unlike the shower of psychopaths that operated in the north during the 1970s and 1980s. But here’s Bertie saying they were pretty much the same thing!
Is Bertie off-message? Or is he fulfilling Charlie Haughey’s description of him as the cutest hoor of them all: trying to shoot Sinn Féin’s fox before they get to use it at the polls next year? Answers on a post-card and please be brief.
Meanwhile, given his ability to say he’s agin the IRA and that he also sees it as part of a long tradition of resistance – to wit, talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time: would it make sense for Bertie to apply for the post of Chief Constable of the PSNI? Should a vacancy occur, of course.
bertie saying they were pretty much the same thing,then martin calling them traitors confusing innit,
George, one drone strike will not satisfy the arms manufacturers now will it ?
it’s all about the money… and oil course
so their drones can take out 2 people from 10,000 feet, but they can’t avoid a school full of children
Mention in the same blog today, Esteemed Blogmeister, of B. Ahern and T. Blair, whose spells as PM of the FSS and Taoiseach of the UK respectively, ran, like a good prison sentence, concurrently, reminded one of a story told to one once by a friend.
This friend (yes, amazingly enough, Perkie does have one) and indeed, not just a friend but one ‘whose judgment one values’ (to borrow from the hack’s stock of cliches) found himself one Sunday morning out at Dublin Airport, long after it had ceased to be called Collinstown.
When he spotted this familiar flat-footed figure of destiny shuffling his way, sort of purposefully across the tarmac in his ill-fitting pin-striped suit from the House of Louis Copeland.. To a private jet which was waiting with engine apurr to fly him to the poltroon-strewn corporate box in Old Trafford.
For the PM of the FSS to roar on his beloved Merchandise United in the local derby against Mercenary City. El Classico, don’t you know, Coronation Street-style.
-Could you just imagine Tony Blair flying in the opposite direction in an adoring yes-man’s Cessna to bellow his support for his beloved Dubs in Croker ?
It was a real Epiphany (to hack in on a Joycism) for one’s friend. Up to then he had been a less than snaking regarder of the Fianna Failures, probably down to his father before him being an old style shoulder to shoulder Soldier of Destiny.
Speaking of fathers, Mr.Ahern Snr was a countryman from the Reb-el County of Cork who was imported to run the farm attached to the All Hallows Seminary in Dublin 9. It was in this cactus atmospheric Dude Ranch in Drumcondra that the future Deputy Ahern was reared in Dublin of the Rare Oul Times.
In short, a real rus in urbe upbringing. (Some unkind critics might prefer ‘a real cattle rustling in urbe upbringing’). This might go some way towards plumbing the depths of the duality of the Bertie person’s psychology. Indeed, Bertie hints at ‘beirt’ which is leprechaun for ‘two persons’.
One thing is sure: the pilot in the cockpit of the private jet in question was NOT one, Gentleman Jim Gavin, former footballer and current Bainisteoir of the Bertie person’s Beloved Dubs. At that time, Air Corps Pilot Gavin used to fly the PM of the FSS hither, tither and yon. But that was out of Casement Aerodrome and in the Government Gulfstream Jet.
Btw, Me Dual and Darling Bertie was not the only Dub to be reared in a rural setting to make it big, and in the second case, very big indeed, in the Corridors of Power. One is referring to former Deputy Prime Minister M.Harney whose paw was the farmer in situ at the Peamount Sanitorium in-house farm in the Wild West of County Dublin.
(Indeed, Perkie’s inner poetaster was once prompted to pen a love-struck parody at the time of her stellar career in the House of Lards on Kildare Street: ‘Even Cowgirls get the Blueshirts’).
Not having had the joy unconfined of watching the TV prog in question the other night one wonders whether de man wid de authentic Dubalin accent had his contribution dubbed?
Some years ago, Perkie’s outer pedagogue found himself outreaching and teaching the German Queen’s English south of the border down Mexico way. A country which still contains the remnants of a German farming colony up north near the Tex Mex border. A Teutonic cohort which was responsible for the introduction of the button accordion and brass instrumentation into the local musical culture, perhaps the most exuberant anywhere.
And found himself, to his surprise, namechecking the bould Bertie not infrequently during class. Such as whenever una estudiente might suddenly burst into what can only be described as Anorak Anglo-Saxon, most famously represented in the ‘I done’ and ‘I seen’ of El Berto.
Rather than embarrassing the muchacha or muchacho in quesition Perkie’s inner gringo would always let the air out of the correctional balloon by adding, even while marking the, erm, correct forms on the whiteboard.
-No need to worry, amiga: we in La Republica de Irlanda recently had a Primer Ministero who never dreamed of using any other form of the those verbs. And see the (boqueda) heights he scaled !
Which invariably resulted in bemused and misbelieving smiles all round.
(Note: boqueda is the Mexican Spanish for – gasp).
Mind you, one stopped short of describing Bertie as d’Emerald’s Isles’s answer to El Chapo Guzman (the OTR drug cartel jefe still loose since his latest prison breakout).
Even though both shared a very distinctive characteristic: neither was in the habit of finishing his sentences. Ever.
“‘Even Cowgirls get the Blueshirts’” – Oh Perkin, stop, wud yah. I’m dying here…
Perhaps he did not wish to end a sentence with a proposition?
Absolutely on the toppermost of the poppermost today El Perkin…..boqueda!
1. Touche ! eagle-eyed Iolar.
Beir gach bua.
2. Barter-system Bertie appeared in front of the Banking Tribunal recently, Paddykool. Not sure if you had the masochistic yet oddly delicious misfortune to catch his performance.
After first making his mandatory, erm, Bank Statement the former PM of the FSS was subjected to an ordeal of very cross-questioning by a hard-ball panel of Parliamentarians.
Now, as the Castlereagh option was not available to the hummer and hawer in the hot seat (i.e, it is an optical impossibility for the Shifty Eyed One to focus on the arbitrary Dot on the Wall) he, true to form, went immediately into chloroform mode.
This, of course, involved the seemingly hesitant spraying of his immediate vicinity with one of the most effective brands of incapacitating agency known to 21st Century mankind: Bertiespeak.
Its effect was gradual rather than instantaneous: first, one or two of the parboiled panel were seen to rub their eyes. Secondly, another two or three of the hammer and tongs merchants were subsequently observed, suppressing insistent yawns. Thirdly, some time later, the remaining four or five, were witnessed stretching their arms while almost simultaneously rubbing their eyes and suppressing their increasinly insistent yawns.
Exactly eight hours and twenty three minutes, and five or six seconds later, satisfied that he had given a bleedin’ greattt account of himself, Bertie, the Mutli-tasking Maestro of Mental Arithmetic from Low Babies days, was seen to make his shambling exit,doffing his Wideawake Hat while winking at the night porter..
Leaving the zed-heads of the panel,all inter-party rivalries put aside, their eyes shut fast, their faces flat on their desks, engaged in an already legendary rendition of the Snore Chorus from the hit snoozical, Zzzzzzz.
Meanwhile, the Bertie Person, aka the Drumcondra Hypochondriac, was last seen climbing out of a cab outside Fagan’s Pub on the banks of his beloved Tolka, and stuffing a ticket for the Red Devil’s next home game in Old Trafford into the top pocket of the Dunstable Utd supporting driver.
Whose full response, alas, is unprintable in this above board forum:
-*### short+***&### changed again !
Adh mor.
Another candidate for talking out of both sides of mouth at same time.Step forward Gerry Adams
“My thoughts are with the Mc Kee and Wright families and those other families whose loved ones were killed(!!) and secretly buried during the conflict “.Who was responsible for disappearing these poor people?Why,the very Republican movement with which Mr Adams was associated but allegedly never a member!!
Of course the IRA of the Troubles was the same as the IRA of 1916 or a continuation, if you know what I mean, we didn’t need Bertie to tell us that. Is the RIRA/CIRA the same IRA of 1916? Well Dan Keating, the last survivor of the Irish War of Independence who died aged 106 in 2007 certainly would’ve agreed that what we call the “dissidents” certainly are the true successors of the men/women of 1916, Keating was even a Patron of Republican Sinn Fein. Keating throughout his life refused to recognize the Southern Government, he refused to take a state pension and when he turned 100 he rejected the South’s gift of 2,500 euros and told them where to stuff it. In 2006 (when Bertie was Taoiseach) during the 90th anniversary celebration of 1916 Keating was on radio (video is on youtube) and informed listeners that the men/women of 1916 would be ashamed of the “celebrations” and called it nothing more than a charade. He then stated that the Free State Army were even worse than the British Army and did everything to defeat the principles of the 1916.
If there’s two men I would love to have met one would’ve be Dan Keating and the other Billy McKee, who is 97 years old. Two very interesting men.