As Thomas Paine said, these are the times that try men’s souls. And women’s. And states.
Theresa May has been to Europe (no one had the nerve to tell her she was already in it) to tell the European leaders how Britain would be looking for access to the single market. The other European leaders were putting on their coats at the time, so they more or less shouted over their shoulders “Maybe you should have a rethink about Brexiting, then” and “Brexit away, but remember you’ll be landing on hard British cobblestones, not a soft European mattress”. Mrs May may posture, but as the screw tightens she’s going to find that 27 v 1 are scary odds.
In all this the south of Ireland has been concerned, for the good reason that if Britain’s economy goes pearshaped post-Brexit, it’ll be very difficult for the south of Ireland’s economy to stay buxom. In today’s Guardian, Fintan O’Toole has fun talking about how the Irish question which so perplexed Britain over so many centuries has now become the British question, and Ireland should be helping Britain find the answer and a soft landing.
Mr O’Toole was so fixed on Britain, in fact, he appeared to have forgotten about his fellow Irishmen and women north of the border. Wasn’t their unique position worth taking into account? Wasn’t the fact that Brexit will affect Ireland north a south a matter worth detailed attention? And isn’t Mr O’Toole even a teensy bit annoyed about the way Arlene Foster and the DUP are refusing to accept that all parties in Ireland should get down to seeing how they can best cope with the mayhem produced by May and her colleagues?
It’s also noteworthy that the French President, Francois Hollande, thinks the Calais ‘jungle’ of refugees should be dismantled and Britain should take care of the admission or refusal of immigrants on its side of the Channel. The French leader has a point: why should France do the work of immigration control for Britain?
And while we in Ireland don’t have a ‘jungle’ (yet), the idea that the south of Ireland should be responsible for patrolling the border to stop immigrants entering the north of Ireland, all for Britain’s convenience, is equally absurd.
Finally, have you noticed how big companies in Ireland like Guinness are beginning to warn of the cost of a hard border? No unionist disputes their figures, and what a hard border would mean to the tens of thousands if Guinness and Co face delay and duty with a hard border.
The fact is, for business the border works best when it isn’t there; even the DUP appear to have noticed that. Given that plain fact, wouldn’t it make equal sense to scrap the absurd duplication of services between north and south? Business says a border is a financial shin-breaker. Anyone not an economic illiterate should appreciate that duplication of services throughout Ireland is a very, very dumb way to arrange government investment.
One of these days the clever Mr O’Toole is going to notice that. The British may be wrestling with their own question, but the Irish question hasn’t gone away.
Jude, I don’t know why you get yourself into an intellectual tizzy over these corner boys. They get paid to be controversial. They all have axes to grind and money to make. A good columnist is one who presents new information or a new way of looking at a problem. They are untouchable as long as they stay on the right side of the editor. Let them stray and they are, as Perkin would say, a trouser cough. Take Myers for an example. He manages to insert his anti republican (in the true sense) rubbish into every piece he does in the British Sunday Times (Free State edition). If he does a well researched piece on dog dirt in Bray he will have Adams and the Provos included by the second paragraph. Look at the power I have! People in their thousands read me every Sunday. They are best ignored as self opioniated gobshites. Take the dog for a walk and try to put him and his ilk from your mind. If you don’t read them you will be no worse off. The unfortunate thing is that some people take them seriously.
Yes fiosrach , Mr Myers looks like the kind of fellow who has inadvertantly swallowed a late -summer wasp and most times writes with another one right up his arse.Yes ..no matter that the “armed struggle” is long gone and that a majority of Nationalists have mad Sinn fein the largest nationalist party in Ireland and are attempting to mould a nationalist party which might just re-unite the country, Myers insists in writing as though it were 1975.. He never mentions, or seems to be aware, what actually went down in the north of Ireland and what calumnies unionism wrought legally and illegally .To him , it all comes down to Gerry Adams.When Adams eventually retires, as he no doubt will do soon enough, I wonder what whipping boy he’ll replace him with in his columns.
“…Is regrexit beginning?”
Polly Toynbee posed the question given the results of the latest Ipsos Mori poll which shows a sudden plunge in public confidence over the economy associated with falling standards of living. Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister made the following comment in relation to Brexit :
“Before they were in, they had many opt-outs. Now they want to be out, with many opt-ins.”
Bombardier, the Canadian plane maker, a major employer in this part of the world, is to shed jobs for the second time this year.
South of the border, down Mediterranean way, the LÉ James Joyce, has rescued 2,500 migrants adrift on a variety of boats and rafts.
A more accurate definition of Brexit is emerging associated with the fall in the value of sterling, job losses, not to mention the flotsam and jetsam now associated with the Mediterranean Sea.
probably a good chance there will be a jungle at the border.englands hardly going to waste money holding economic illegals when they can just drop them at the nearest eu country;the south;..the south is going to come of worse out of this than their thinking.
No bother, Billy. We’ll just help those people cross fields and hedges and they’ll soon be galavanting around Britain in no time.
sure there will be no place to go.the benefits will have stopped,illegal to house them employ them ect.why do you think england are pulling out of eu human rights law.their a step ahead of enda.
Who cares, Billy. Hard border will equal friendly Nationalists, guiding the way towards Britain for those unfortunate enough to want to go there after Brexit. They’ll still want to go.
Seriously though, Britain had control over immigration – over half is from outside the EU. Stopping a few Poles or Romanians from travelling is not going to lead to the nirvana you think might happen.
By the way, it’s not just England pulling out.
one way their doing us a favour stopping the hordes overtaking the towns and villages in the north.on the other hand who will vote to join a united ireland that resembles the congo with all the associated trouble open borders bring with it.
picture the south in ten yrs time if this open border policy is allowed to continue you only need to look at the north of england for guidance.being greeted as you arrive in connolly station with.mr livingstone i presume is not the ireland people want.
“…hordes overtaking the towns and villages in the north…”
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Seriously, Billy, wise up.
lolol..serious but.go on utube and you will see huge swathes of no go areas in londonistan,manchester,b/ham ect.how do you think this came about,do you want the same for ireland.what good is it us getting rid of one oppressor (england)to take on another(europe)with its unelected quangos making laws telling us how we should live.the children mentioned in the proclamation to be cherished arnt them bearded 25yr old kids by the way.we have enough of our own to be getting on with to enrich our lives.
Still no good, Billy. You stated “stopping the hordes overtaking the towns and villages in the north” and then, as evidence, mention London, Manchester & Birmingham – all major British cities and then talk about what might be.
There are no hordes taking over the north. Don’t be so frightened all the time, Billy; it’s not good for you.
If there’s one quack-like hack, Esteemed Blogmeister, with his finger on the pulse of Ireland it is none other than (gulp) Dr. Fintan O’Toole.
That would be the same medicine man of the regurgitating surgery attached to The Unionist Times which has the sign M.P.S.I. basket-hanging outside its front door.
Now, M.P.S.I. stands for Member of the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland but for those who cannot stand T.U.T. it is colloquially known as Monkey’s Pee Sold Inside.
Not for nothing is Dr. O Toole known as the Primate of Ireland as distinct from the Primate of All-Ireland, which latter office displays a certain cavalier attitude towards frontiers, by which it is seemingly affronted, eternally.
T.U.T. of course is the Irish Branch of the biggest Chemical Warfare Retailers on the Mainland: call T.U.T, to wit, . its Boots on the ground policy in the Free Southern Stateen.
While most of its products require a prescription the panaceas which its in-house Doctor prescribes are of such a patently harmless nature that they can be purchased over the counter, sans a written prescription. Or just picked up in the Remainder Bin, on the way out.
T.U.T. specializes in mind-altering drugs and amongst its proudest boasts as the Boots on the Gaelic ground is that is the originator of the Loyalty Card Programme on the off-shore Western Island.
Not for naught neither is Dr. O’Toole known as the Nostradamus of the Nostrums for a New Ireland.
The ever-so- slight problem , however, with his having his walking-out finger on the pulse of Ireland is that the Ireland of Dr. Fintan O’Toole, unlike that of All-Ireland , has not registered a pulse for yonks, no more than the P.U.L.S.E. is registering as of today.
This would be the computer system used by An Garda Siochana in the F.S.S. As they are (illegally) on strike today they have adopted a hands off policy. (Not unlike, say, their hands-off policy towards the representatives of the Glennane Pharmaceutical Company when the latter decided to put their, erm, Boots on the ground in the Dublin of the early 1970s).
P.U.L.S.E. is an acronym known only to hacks such as Paul ‘Wor and Peace’ Williams of Newstalk fm:
-Police Using Leading System Effectively.
Eh?
It may be seen why they opted to anacronyse the title. The quack-like hack who is Dr. O’Toole approves of this groovy anachronism for the computer system of An Garda Siochana as he has long since issued the death certificate for the last surviving Leprechaun. Indeed, it is framed in a prominent position on the wall of his regurgitating surgery. It says simply:
-The D.O.G. it was who died.
As well as being a quack-like hack Dr. O Toole is also a qualified hack-like vet of the veterinary wars, having being the only one to cover the Beef Tribunal from Day One to Day One Thousand and One. For which faithful attendance the fateful contraction of Mad John Bull Disease was a possible corollary.
D.O.G. of course is his hack-like anorak-wearing anack for Darby O Gill. He has a knack for same.
(Rumours are rife that the Carabinieri of the Lago di Garda region of Northern Italy are monitoring the strike force of the Forza south of the Black Sow’s Dyke, with a view to taking similar non-action. To be known locally as : Flu Azzurri ).
Incidentally, just as Dulse and Yellowman are synonymous with the Fair in Ballycastle-o, so also are Pulse and Fellowman apposite in the context of An Garda Siochanaj, the fair-haired boyos of Castle Catholicism,. Long ago, oops, back in the day, the first ever protest meeting convened (illegally) by the junior ranks of the guardians of the peace was held in the (gasp) Macushla Ballroom.
This was the palais du danse / halla rince contagious to Connolly Railway station which was resounding to the jungle war-cries in the falsetto yodeling style of Karl Denver of Wimoweh infamy at the time.
-In the jungle, the mighty urban jungle
The thin Blue Line sleeps today.
Macushla, of course, as Gregory Crooked-mouth, MP, the straight-talking linguist, will testily attest is the Leprechaun for (gulp) My Pulse.
Dr. O’Toole has a morbid dread of any more Leprechaun names being attached to the institutions of his beloved Free Southern Stateeen. And in a way which recalls a scene from a novel by Dostoevsky. That would be ‘The Idiot’ and the relevant scene involves the snipping with a scissors of the gold tassels attached to the coffin of the father of the character called Rogojin.
This trouble was gone to, because:
-They would fetch a pile of roubles.
For the sensitive nostrils of Dr. O’Toole the nonsensical and ill-advised attempt by Omadawns to revive a moribund Leprechaun has always had the deathly smell of filthy lucre.
Which is not to say, that he is, erm, not best pleased with existing terms of antiquity such as Arus an Uachtarain, Bord na Mona, Bus Eireann, Dail Eireann, Garda Siochana, that sort of thingy. After all, they give him, as the, erm, Guardian Angel of Anglo-Ireland, the ever so slightly exotic cachet of (gulp) a foreign correspondent !
There be roubles in dem dar troublesome Gold Tassels of Gaelic on the coffin of the Leprechaun, surely..
To conclude: there were two, erm, strands of the Good, but not great, Friday Agreement: the East-West and the North-South.
Which, curiously, recalls a couple of, erm, gold tassels in an old Leprechaun phrase:
-Ni thig leis an ngobadan an da thra a fhreastail.
Carleton translated this wise old saw as:
-The sandpiper cannot attend to the two ebb-tides.
Meaning, of course:
-One cannot serve two masters.
FoT ?
But then, Carleton never had the honour of encountering Dr. Fintan O’Toole. For whom, of course, the East/West strand was, by far, the best.
Fintan O’Toole’s piece in the Guardian is perfectly sensible and mature.
He is primarily addressing how the Irish government ought to approach Brexit but he does indeed touch on the Northern Ireland angle,
“Brexit threatens the Northern Ireland peace process, undermining the Belfast (Good Friday) agreement. It poses the real risk of the imposition of an external European Union border across the fields of Fermanagh and Tyrone.”
He also says
” Keeping Britain within the single market is a vital Irish national interest,”
That is the main thrust of the piece and I haven’t heard anyone disagree.
Here is a helpful link:
/www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/oct/21/brexit-ireland-dublin-britain.
I was leafing through the Seamus Heaney HomePlace brochure this evening and came across this quote by Seamus on Fintan O’Toole
“Good journalists like Fintan O’Toole are the ones to look to if you want your lifelines to the contemporary reopened or the jump leads to your ethical sense connected up”
Could this be the same person demonised by so many of our contributors on this blogspot because he doesn’t follow the current Sinn Fein view of the world?!!
Mention of Seamus Heaney and Fintan O Toole in the one sentence brings one back to the year of Our Laird , 1995. When one found oneself in the same large room as both, a few days after the former’s triumphant return from his holiers in Greece where he had got one Hellenic of a shock (alleged).
The occasion was an exclusive dinner in Dublin 2 to celebrate the poet’s winning of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The spreadsheet spread was funded from the deep pockets of the wealthiest man in the Free Southern Stateen, Midas Mac Taxpayer.
It was so exclusive that not only was attendance by special invitation only – one contained in a sealed, Harp-stamped envelope – but even Midas Mac himself did not know anything about it at the time.
Indeed, he only got wind of the word many years later as a result of a Freedom of Information request by a malcontented member of the decommissioned and disarming -wing of General Public.
In 1995 the Free Southern Stateen was still the flowing land of Milk and Funny Money and the place was awash with dubious dosh. Hence the lavish nosh provided for the pernickety palates of the Exclusivity at the celebratory dinner in q.
Only the very top echelons of the in-gang were there: thus, one found oneself , at table 7, in between, on one’s left, a clubbable Comrade Obnoxious O’Prig, the Democratic Left TD who had proved his worth as an Establishment lapdog by jumping nimbly through the hoops, all the way from the Officials to the WP to the DL itself: the Labour Camp Nirvana still lay some years ahead.
Curiously, he had brought along a Stick of salary which he surreptitiously chomped upon at regular intervals, and in between the seven courses. Old habits, one supposes, die hard.
On one’s right, one found oneself passing the salt in an upward trajectory to (gulp) Ireland’s Towering Intellect. As the table talk was proving distressingly upbeat and celebratory one felt that it needed a dollop of solemnity to be lobbed into the increasingly light-hearted proceedings.
So, out of pure divilment, somewhere between the hors d’oeuvre and the Von Soupe, oops, soup, one tossed into the deep blue c for conservation the ultimate clanger. But in a tone of faux naivety:
-Did anybody happen to read what Desmond Fennell had to read last Sunday?
The stunned silence which ensued was broken finally by this finely tuned harrumph, accompanied by a dismissive wave of a grandiose hand, from the fine-minded Fintan O Toole (for it was he !) on one’s righeousness:
-Pshawwwwwwwwwwww !
Now, one at first naively thought that he might well be referring to a previous Irish winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature but no, the Towering Intellect of John Bull’s Other Island really and truly meant what he had indicated with his articulate harrumph.
(Incidentally, George Bernard Pshaw has at last been joined by Bob Zimmerman-Dylan as the only joint winner of an Oscar and a Nobel).
For the record, the a la carte conversation reverted to trivial type after that, with the relative poetic merits of Yeats and Keats been playfully compared and contrasted by the seated meat-eaters and non-meat eaters alike.
Also, for the record, in 1991 Desmond Fennell had published a pamphlet entitled :
-‘Whatever you say, say nothing: why Seamus Heaney is Number 1’.
To say this pamphlet provoked a Himalayan avalanche of literary criticism and other dog’s abuse down upon the head of The Desmond from the massed and miffed ranks of the group-thinking groupies of famously Famous Seamas in The Unionist Times is akin to opining that the treatment of The Donald by the monominded Minnies of the American media is one of mild, ladylike rebuke.
This Anglicised avalanche led, one understands, the author of the unorthodox pamphlet to take up residence, ironically enough, in Coventry soon after. For not only his own physical welfare but also the mental welfare of the (gasp) free-thinking Free Southern Stateen.
Desmond Who ? one might well ask. One will allow the Chris Bonnington of cultural commentary to supply the appropriate assessment:
-In purely mountaineering terms, to compare the intellects of Desmond Fennell and Fintan O’Toole is like contrasting Everest with Carrauntoole.
Later on, as the last of the brandy and cigars had been systematically murdered and puffed, the seated guests had become upstanding . To upstand in line to shake the hand of the new Nobel Prize Winner. Things went smoothly, as in turn each lady curtsied and every gentleman genuflected, till a road block of sorts was unexpectedly reached. The Light –hearted Cavalry of cossetted congratulators was halted in its tracks.
This occurred when Ireland’s Towering Intellect’s turn came. In his case the ten seconds turn turned into a ten minute hiatus during which, erm, The Poet and the Peasant seemed to be making Overtures at each other, of the adoring variety.
(Point of Information, chairman: Peasant in the Proletarian sense as the Urbane Fintan O Toole is urban to his bleedin’ bovver boy boots:
-Being born a Bourbon in the suburban corpo estate of Crumblin, Dublin 12 does not mean I cannot still stroll as a superior Prole over the manholes in which the trolls of traditional Gaelic Ireland deep down do dwell.)
Incidentally, earlier this month Ireland’s Towering Intellect voluntarily subjected himself to an excruciating cross-examination by his cross (very) colleague Hugh Linehan. The topic was vintage T.U.T:
-What it means to be male in today’s Ireland (sic)?
In a miraculous display of man-upmanship Fintan O’Toole (for it is still he !) confessed to being guilty of the crime of:
-Maleness.
Considering his chosen surname, this was no mean thing.
Re-spect.
He could, after all, have opted for the original Leprechaun:
-O Tuathail.
Meaning (gulp) ‘ a turn to the left, withershins, Auntie Clockwise’. Any of these not inappropriate forms would have made his intellectual life so much easier and less thorny. But no: Ireland’s Towering Intellect never opted for the easy ride.
Truly, is he the Fireman’s Helmet which snugly fits the Crown of the Family Jewels of the Free Southern Stateen.
Re-spect (2).
Focal scoir / Conclusion: Is there a copy, perchance, even a shredded one, of Desmond Fennell’s pamphlet on display in the new Heaney Heritage Centre ? And if not, pourquoi non/ cen fath?
D. Fennell is, after all, Belfast born (no relation) and is the grandson of a Leprechaun -speaker from the Sperrin Mountains.
As one understands it, these broad uplands are named after the suburban Sperrin Road in Dublin 12.
Another brilliantly witty and erudite piece from the mercurial pen of the incomparable Perkin.
GRMA, a Ghearoid, a chara.
In fairness, going backward, the Enema doesn’t exactly made it difficult.
An Namhaid abu !
Beir bua.
Perkie W, I much appreciate and I am much relieved to learn there are other intellectuals who didn’t gush about Heaney. Perhaps it’s because I come from simple peasantry, but I never took to any of Heaneys written work and took even less to his public utterances. I am reddened that I had never heard of Desmond Fennell but I will endeavour to learn more of him, after reading your words. Maith thú.
I would not bet the family jewels on the bold Fintan waking up any time soon!!