The year that was
Declan Lynch looks back on a bonkers 2017
JANUARY
In the year of its first reprint since World War II, Mein Kampf sold more than 80,000 copies — spare a thought for author Adolf Hitler, who endured so many bad reviews and critical feedback in general during his lifetime, but whose message still resonates enough to get him into the German bestsellers list almost a century after he wrote the book.
He must be kicking himself, to be missing out on all this success due to being dead, and yet he would be quietly pleased that, in 2017, so many civilised countries seemed determined to given themselves over to some form of ‘nationalism’ — to them, he remains an inspiration.
Yet the eurozone economy kicked off the year robustly, which was but a slightly inconvenient fact for the various loopers determined to make their countries great again. And the bull goose of them started 2017 in the White House, albeit with more stories emerging of his national security advisor Mike Flynn having been in regular contact with the Russian ambassador to the US, and of a dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer, alleging that Russia had compromising material, or
kompromat, on the new president. This allegedly included stories of prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room urinating on a bed once occupied by the Obamas. Or perhaps the prostitutes were being urinated on — the precise dynamic of the urination deal hardly mattered. It wasn’t looking great for the Trumper, until Putin declared: “Those behind the dossier are worse than prostitutes.” At which point, it was looking even worse. And then Putin added in his most sincere tone of incredulity: “Is someone really thinking that our intelligence agencies are chasing every American billionaire or what?”
At which point, it was case closed. But Trump still enjoyed his inauguration ceremony — both the real one, and the one in his head, in which he imagined about a million more people in attendance than had actually been there; “alternative facts” as Kellyanne Conway called it, to the consternation of the mainstream media, many of whom still thought they could bring down Trump by fact-checking him.
FEBRUARY
They were as wrong about that, as Trump was about everything. And no one had been more wrong than Meryl Streep, attacking him at the Golden Globes, looking down her nose at “football and mixed martial arts, which are not “the arts”.
But ‘the arts’ were not of much use to Donal Ryan, one of the most successful fiction writers of recent times, who returned to his day job in the Workplace Relations Commission because he found it too hard to make a living as a full-time author — thus we discovered that in this land which boasts of its literary prowess, there are perhaps 10 writers who can make a living by books alone. There are actually more people driving around in cars they won by entering a Late Late Show competition which required them to be at home to receive a call from Ryan Tubridy, than there are writers in Ireland able to pay the rent just by writing their books.
Trumper, of course, has ‘written’ books without even reading them, and he brought all that lack of effort to his response when a judge (a “so-called judge”) blocked his executive order to keep people from seven “Muslim” countries out of the US. “See You In Court,” Trump tweeted, which, to some, sounded exactly like something Gene Wilder might say to the judge in a Mel Brooks film, who has just thrown out his case.
Enda Kenny was in mesmerising form too, saying that in the McCabe Garda whistleblower scandal, he “wants to find the best way of finding the truth”. So it wasn’t entirely clear from this if he wanted to find the truth, or just the best way of finding it. Which is not quite the same thing.
In Azerbaijan, they were simplifying matters somewhat when the president named his wife as vice-president, a move which was denounced as “medieval” and “feudal”; almost as bad as America, where most of the president’s relations were now in high office. Meanwhile, in modern Ireland, the expensively educated Simon Coveney and Leo Varadkar prepared to joust for the leadership of the country, having clawed their way to the top all the way from... from a position quite close to the top, to be fair.
But if there was one issue of inequality above all that preoccupied us, it concerned the decision-making in RTE’s Dancing With The Stars, which, at its most disturbing, could involve the elimination of the impressive Des Bishop after the paso doble, leading to a sense that the judges were going easy on Dancing Des Cahill.
One issue at least was cleanly resolved when a Spanish nun claimed that Mary and Joseph had been a “normal married couple” and that “having sex is a normal thing”, only to be informed by a bishop that Mary’s virginity had been an article of faith since the Church’s inception, and had indeed been “proclaimed by the Second Council of Constantinople”.
At which point, once again, it was case closed.
MARCH
“There will be no Brexit,” I proclaimed a few weeks after the 2016 referendum on the 14th page of the Sunday
Independent. And that case, if not quite closed, was now looking much more like a 50/50 proposition, even after the nonsensical ‘triggering’ of Article 50 by Theresa May, giving formal notice of Britain’s intention to leave the EU. All that remained now, was to figure out how Britain might leave the EU without destroying itself completely, and taking poor Paddy down, too.
Untroubled by the nit-picking Eurocrats, Britain will be seeing more of companies like Subway, looking for ‘sandwich-artists’, who were being offered 14-month ‘apprenticeships’ at £3.50 an hour. Because it really takes 14 months to learn how to make a sandwich in an artistic manner.
Even England’s glorious cyclists were being confronted with awkward truths, revealed by the Fancy Bears (ah, those Russians again, nothing better to be doing than chasing British millionaires) who leaked documents showing that Sir Bradley Wiggins had received therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) to take drugs to treat what is described on the form as “a lifelong allergy to pollen nasal congestion/rhinorrhoea, known allergy to grass pollen, sneezing throat irritation, wheezing leading to dysnopnoea eye watering runny nose.” Even with punctuation, it would have been hard to win the Tour de France with such disabilities to contend with, which, in retrospect, only makes the achievement of Sir Bradley all the more remarkable.
By now, Trump was revealing so much of himself, the work of the Russians was nearly done. On St Patrick’s Day, he said to Enda Kenny: “As we stand together with our Irish friends, I’m reminded of a proverb — and this is a good one, this is one I like, I’ve heard it many, many years and I love it — always remember to forget the friends that proved untrue, but never forget to remember those that have stuck with you...”
Turned out it was a Nigerian poem, but then it seemed churlish to be correcting him for such peccadilloes when we learned that the gardai had somehow recorded over a million breath tests that never happened.
Now it seemed that Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman could no longer be regarded as an impossibly strange vision of the author’s imagining, but as a kind of unofficial guidebook to the workings of the Irish police force in real life, in real time, in the present day.
Underneath the barracks in The Third Policeman, there is this large chamber called Eternity in which “time stands still, mysterious numbers are devoutly recorded and worried about by the policemen, and a box from which anything you desire can be produced”.
Case closed, I would say one more time, but you’re probably there before me.
APRIL
It came to our attention around now that the property game has kicked off again, and sure, what can we do about it? The last time this happened, as we know, it had certain unintended consequences, such as the ruination of the country and the arrival of those serious people from the IMF, the sort who would speak in paternalistic tones of how the Irish insist on calling property a ‘game’ not the ‘property business’. To Paddy, it is the ‘property game’.
So it’s game-on again, and we may now set our watches and wait for the next visit from AJ Chopra and friends.
It seemed that another grand old Irish custom was being honoured with the news that the Sisters of Charity were giving land for the building of the National Maternity Hospital, but that they would retain ultimate ownership of the facility — which naturally caused much disquiet on the part of those who felt that a hospital owned by nuns is hardly going to be in the vanguard of progress in the gynaecological department in general, given that they are still bound by edicts which were proclaimed at the Second Council of Constantinople.
After a primal roar of indignation from all right-thinking people, eventually the nuns announced that they were completely relinquishing involvement in the site. So it looks like the Catholic thing is all over then, no more mad referendums or any of that stuff... for a few months, anyway.
Rory McIlroy — or, in Trumpian terms, “the failing Rory McIlroy” — had to answer profound moral questions of his own with regards to his decision to proceed with a game of golf at Mar-a-Lago with the demonstrably insane president. After the shellacking he got, he would “think twice” about doing it again, he said, with all the conviction he could muster. Perhaps he was saving the rest of his conviction for his wedding in Ashford Castle to Erica Stoll, with Stevie Wonder playing at the reception, making it humanly impossible for wiseguys to restrain themselves from pointing out that Stevie would also be giving Rory a putting lesson.
Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, who was on record encouraging Trump to play even more golf than he already does, was fired amid allegations of sexual harassment — at the time, this seemed like a surprising development, perhaps even unique to the twisted culture which prevails in such a ‘conservative’ environment.
We did not know then what October would bring...
It began with the inauguration of Donald Trump and ended with women changing the world after an October Revolution. Declan Lynch looks back at an extraordinary year, and wonders what will become of us all
MAY
It was sort of handy that Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen to become president of France, because if it had gone the other way, we would have ‘nationalists’ running France and Britain and Russia and America, ‘nationalists’ on the march in Hungary and Poland and Austria and Spain, and, by the way, some of it in Germany, too. And as we have pointed out on a few occasions, when our old friend ‘nationalism’ is on the rise, we tend to see a great deal of eejitry taken to such extremes that it becomes a form of evil.
Our own nationalists, Sinn Fein, who until recently had their own fully functioning army, were causing mysterious headlines such as ‘Thousands call for Irish language act in Belfast rally’.
Mysterious, because of course nobody had called for such a thing before, nor had it even crossed anybody’s mind until Sinn Fein devised their latest wrecking strategy, which has this spark of brilliance — since Irish governments have, for decades, been creating great mountains of bullshit around the Irish language, they can hardly turn around now and start calling bullshit on Gerry Adams for his own best efforts in this domain.
In this spirit of self-determination, Trump would announce that America was leaving the Paris climate accord, that he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris”. That climate-change stuff was unfriendly to business and Trump is trying to run America “like a business” — to which end, he fired James Comey as head of the FBI because Comey wouldn’t agree to stop investigating these stories about Russia helping Trump to steal the election, and the money and the prostitutes and the urination and all that.
With Comey, this president must have felt like a thrusting entrepreneur being tied down with a load of ‘red tape’, or, as the FBI might call it, ‘the Constitution’.
And this Republic was in ferment, too, at the start of a struggle between two men, Coveney and Varadkar, heading out on the hustings to decide for a generation one of the oldest and most bitter conflicts in Irish politics
— should the country be run by an old Clongowes boy, or one from The King’s Hospital?
JUNE
So now we had a youngish, openly gay Taoiseach, who went to 10 Downing Street and started talking about modern films — “it’s my first time in this building, so there’s a little thrill in it as well,” he confessed. He was “reminded of that famous scene in Love Actually where Hugh Grant was dancing down the stairs”. And though he was attacked for his descent into “trivia” by reporters who have spent the best years of their lives getting excited about Cabinet reshuffles, in truth, Varadkar did not seem like a natural-born eejit. The true eejit would not have declared his awe at his surroundings in Number 10 without adding some little ‘Irish’ quip — “sure, this place is big enough for a game of hurling”.
He does not have the wild native gift of his predecessor in that department, and yet, even if it’s not in one’s nature, eejitry can be learned, too. And Leo was showing himself to be quite a keen learner, a bit like the politician who has all his own hair but who is training it to look like a toupee out of some deference to the falseness and, indeed, the trivia of the culture in which he finds himself.
Meanwhile the old property game was now “sparking fears that the market is in danger of overheating again”, but we remained calm, for reasons best known to ourselves.
Anyway, the lowliest Irish deputies were starting to look strangely statesmanlike next to their equivalent in Britain, where the eejits were now effectively running the show, the nationalist dream of Brexit having more or less lobotomised all who partook of it.
So, naturally, a general election called by Theresa May to give her a bigger majority, ended up with her losing the majority that she had, and putting her in thrall to the DUP, the party perhaps best characterised as “Fianna Fail without the drink”.
“Oh... Jeremy Corbyn... Oh... Jeremy Corbyn,” they sang at Glastonbury as Corbs, who was once rightly thought to be utterly unelectable, became the voice of the young people dispossessed by Brexit, most of whom seemed unaware that Corbs was not really against Brexit, as such, and that his failure to engage with the matter during the referendum campaign was probably the decisive factor in getting the Brexiteers over the hump.
JULY
Leo wore novelty socks for his meeting with Justin Trudeau, perhaps a riposte to Trudeau’s wearing of novelty socks during his meeting with Enda Kenny
— again, we see Leo flirting dangerously with the symbols of eejitry here. The true eejit can never resist the novelty sock — yet, if it was indeed a riposte, it might charitably be regarded as one display of eejitry cancelling out the other.
But then to put it all in perspective, reports from the White House were suggesting that Trump was enquiring about the option of pardoning himself — and, of course, anyone else he wanted to pardon. But mainly himself. And there is consistency here, as he has undoubtedly been pardoning himself for everything else he has done in his life until now.
Then again, he had nothing to be pardoned for, if you believe Vladimir Putin, who told the president that Russia had not meddled in any way with the US election, an assertion which was accepted by Donald Trump. And Putin would repeat these assurances later in the year, with Trump again announcing that he was satisfied that Putin was telling him the truth.
To clarify: Putin is telling Trump here that he didn’t conspire with Trump to steal the election, nor did he blackmail him with all that kompromat — and Trump is saying: “I believe you Putin, I think you mean it.”
Eventually the challenge of working in such an environment was all too much for the White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci — here, ‘eventually’ meaning the period of 10 days in which he held that post, during which The Mooch, in a phone call with a reporter, described his chief of staff Reince Priebus, as “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic”.
He had also nicknamed him ‘Reince Penis’, suggesting to some that The Mooch was not quite the solid citizen you might be looking for in that role.
But even the finest of spin-monkeys could find no excuses for the fact that Sharon Ni Bheolain was getting paid roughly 80 grand a year less than her fellow newsreader, Bryan Dobson. Nor was there the slightest doubt about the appropriate solution — take that 80 grand off Dobbo, immediately.
AUGUST
Another man who’s taken a bit of a pay cut, Sean Quinn, was getting into the online gambling business with the launch of QuinnBet. Amusingly for some, it had the big Q logo, which was broadly similar to the one for Quinn Insurance. It reminded us that, for Sean Quinn, the gambling game is not really new — indeed, some commentators felt that he had finally found his area of expertise in its purest form.
Yet it was noted that the online gambling business in general is increasingly associated with unpleasantness, such as the Athlone Town betting scandal, which involved large amounts of money being punted on the Asian markets in anticipation of certain outcomes in the ‘Midlands Classico’ between Athlone Town and Longford Town — yes, it’s our old friend, ‘unusual betting patterns’.
The FAI seemed quite angry about this, but then the same FAI sold the international online viewing rights of the League of Ireland to a company called TrackChamp, with the deal structured in such a way that to watch a game, you needed to have a betting account. Though, of course, the Asian syndicates would be watching Athlone playing Longford for the love of the football, too.
SEPTEMBER
In America, even the weather was becoming part of the cultural civil war. Hurricane Irma was viewed by environmentalists as proof of climate change, and by deniers as just a very big wind.
George Hook was blown out of his Newstalk radio show for remarks on the subject of rape, in which he asked: “Is there no blame now to the person who puts themselves in danger?” To some, it was case closed; to others, it was one of those things that are happening ‘in the current climate’ that they feel might not have happened in a former climate. And there was unrest in RTE too, with the arrival of the Twitter account of the secret RTE producer, which, within a few days, had acquired more than 25,000 followers.
The account told of many things that we knew already but that we were still happy to be told about — tales of executive indolence and incompetence; of a culture in which the only talent that gets you anywhere is the talent for cynical manoeuvring. So naturally the response to this constructive criticism was for various RTE people to denounce the whistleblower, who became concerned that the best energies of the organisation will now be devoted to finding him and or her, and to destroying him or her.
That great hater of public-service ineptitude, Michael O’Leary, was unable to enjoy all this, because somehow he was now running an airline which seemed to be increasingly short of pilots. While the punters still love a bargain and would agree with O’Leary that pilots have a very easy job, it was felt by market analysis that most of them would still prefer, on the whole, to have a pilot flying the plane.
Even in the current climate.
OCTOBER
And then came October and Harvey Weinstein, who in any climate, at any time, would have been regarded as a very disturbed and disturbing man — though it was only in the current climate that the full extent of his sexual depredations became widely known. Only in the current climate did enough women feel emboldened to tell their stories of what Harvey had done to them, just because he could.
So it was strange that in a year full of the ominous sounds of marching men, with much of the civilised world seemingly surrendering to the dumbest of crypto-fascist fantasies, with eejitry turning to evil in many places, with the weather itself apparently determined to blow us all out of existence, the most influential and far-reaching events that happened didn’t even happen this year.
They happened over many years to many women, and not just the ones who encountered Harvey Weinstein. They even happened to a few men, too — not least the ones who spoke darkly of Kevin Spacey — but they were only laid out in their full jaw-dropping variety when the Weinstein story blew away all those decades of denial.
A hundred years after the October Revolution in Russia, this felt like another October Revolution, as a result of which, the way in which men relate to women in this world will never be quite the same again. But there may even be more to it than that — at some subconscious level, it seemed that women were responding to all the dangerous madness that has been building for some time, madness that derives largely from male rage and male incompetence and male narcissism and male eejitry.
It seemed that these things were connected somehow; that by finding their voice against Weinstein and his ilk, women were also seeking to divert the course of history at a broader level, to shake these power structures to their foundations. To change the world, if you like. And, of course, apart from any subconscious connections between sexual harrassment and political hooliganism, there is a direct connection, in the sense that Trump the global delinquent is also Trump the pussy grabber.
So assuming that he doesn’t get us all annihilated by the end of the year, you get the feeling that this October Revolution will also be remembered in a hundred years time, and celebrated, too.
Now, a day hardly goes by without a Dustin Hoffman or a Louis CK or even old George Bush Snr being confronted with some long-lost episode of asshole behaviour. Michael Colgan apologised to “anyone who was made to feel upset” by his “misjudged behaviour”, though he added “we are living in a climate where to be accused is now enough to be deemed guilty”.
Frankly, whatever about the current climate, there’s not much to be said any more for the former climate, the one in which Michael was misjudging his behaviour.
That is gone now; gone, but definitely not forgotten.
NOVEMBER
But he said one true thing, did Trump. He didn’t mean it the right way, of course, but it was still searingly true. As he tried to say something appropriate after the killings at the church service in Texas, he spoke of “a mental health problem at the highest level”.
In Ireland, too, we continued to drift into disturbing patterns of behaviour. With the tracker mortgages scandal still rambling along, it seemed that the banks were truly back in business, doing all the smart stuff they used to do when they were kings. Taken in conjunction with the still-rising property prices, we were reminded again of our old friends from the Troika — what must they be thinking when they see that Paddy has broken out again?
Ah, but this time it will be different. Thanks to Brexit, this time we’ll be able to blame the Brits.
DECEMBER
The World Cup draw took place, and we were not in it. We consoled ourselves with the thought that nobody will enjoy it without us. And that there may not be a World Cup anyway, because there may not be a world.
So it’s fine, really.