2019: the year that was
Declan Lynch looks back, slightly in anger
JANUARY
It was Veganuary, of course, so a vegan sausage roll was launched by Greggs, the biggest bakery chain in the UK. It drew this characteristically graceful tweet from Piers Morgan: ‘Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage roll, you PC-ravaged clowns!’ To which Greggs replied: ‘Oh hello Piers, we’ve been expecting you.’
By end of year, Greggs was reporting a surge in sales. But raw anger at the choices made by high-street outlets, was not invented in 2019. According to the State Papers of 1938, the poet Patrick Kavanagh had been causing disturbances in Dublin bookshops that were not displaying his book The Green Fool to his satisfaction. In Hodges Figgis and Fred Hanna’s, he had threated to “wreck the joint”, speaking loudly of a fascist state, while “appearing to have drink taken”.
This is probably not the sort of positive engagement with the retail sector they’d be recommending in today’s books’ market — though it shows that even when deeply drunk, Kavanagh was doing things that all writers would love to be able to do.
In 2019, Larry Gogan, who by a lovely coincidence was actually born in the year of 1938 when Kavanagh was rightly calling out the fascist state, announced his retirement from 2FM. Stepping down when only 80 years old, perhaps Larry had looked at the elderly giants of pop who are still making albums and doing world tours and felt that, unlike them, he needed to get out while he was still able to rock, still able to roll.
But if Larry came into a world endangered by the armies of the Right, they were going strong again in 2019, with broadcaster Melissa Chan writing: “Reporters should now be covering the White House the way that a foreign correspondent in China covers the regime in Beijing. A big part of American media has failed. Many journalists cannot bring themselves to realise that their country has changed.”
The same could be said of the UK and its media, which had little to offer but endless hackery, up against the likes of Dominic Cummings, whose leadership of the Vote Leave campaign was celebrated in Uncivil War ,aTV drama in which Cummings was played by Benedict Cumberbatch. Soon Cummings would be running the actual UK, with Boris Johnson out front.
But Piers Morgan still had hope in his heart, again setting the standard to which all ridiculous old men would aspire, with this message to his mate Trump: ‘Happy
New Year Mr President. Be a force for good in 2019’ — a tweet embellished with a thumbs-up emoji and a clenched fist.
Hard to know how that one was going to pan out...
FEBRUARY
Gordon Banks became the latest of the Boys of 1966 to check out of the proverbial team hotel, making us sigh for dear old England, which once sent out men such as Banks and Bobby Charlton to bring back the World Cup — and which is now represented on the world stage by men such as Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg and Michael Gove, buggering up everything for everybody.
There was a bit of a nurses’ strike here, which caused a certain amount of disruption in the health service, but not enough to stop loads of people sounding their horns at the nurses on the picket lines to declare their support. Yes, the people have formed the view over time that on any list of problems affecting the health service, nurses would be so far down and in such small print you couldn’t even see it with the most powerful microscope in the most exclusive private hospital.
Much higher up on that list is the cost of the Children’s Hospital, which was reaching extra-terrestrial levels, even by the most extravagant standards of State-sponsored ineptitude and cynicism and worse, much worse. Here was the burning of public money on a scale comparable to those Californian wildfires, except in Ireland it looks like the fires will be burning forever.
For some strange reason, to the connoisseurs, the devouring of public money seems to taste more sweet than any other kind of money. Ah, they just love it.
But the Trumper, to be fair, will take it wherever he finds it. To distract the people from his incessant looting, he decided to ‘Do National Emergency’ about problems which he claimed were affecting the southern border, problems which of course did not exist in any meaningful sense. Still, he ‘Did National Emergency’, with National Emergency being the title of an episode of this TV series he is running, in which, at the end of every day, he has to be the winner — even when he’s the loser.
No doubt Trump’s black heart would have been warmed by the €157m in free money won in the Euromillions by some folks in The Naul, and especially by the huge coverage it received on RTE. It made the lead item on Morning Ireland and on Today with Sean O’Rourke, and on the main RTE TV news, with one commentator reminding us that “the Lottery, with its weekly payout of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the people paid serious attention.”
Actually, that was George Orwell in 1984.
MARCH
John Delaney resigned as chief executive of the FAI and was re-assigned to the role of executive vice-president, a move which only really made sense when you recalled our description of the FAI as “the dysfunctional sporting body that other dysfunctional sporting bodies call ‘the galacticos.’”
In that light too, Delaney’s loaning of €100,000 to the organisation would have come as no surprise.
There was no Brexit at the end of March, which surprised quite a few people, but not our readers, who have been urged to believe that the UK may choose some path other than total self-destruction.
Yeah, in 2016 you could have got astronomical odds against the No Brexit, when, alone in the entire universe, we first alerted you to the possibility — indeed your only
problem there was getting any kind of odds, since not even Paddy Power was offering prices on that one.
But they were busy all the same, securing their place in the hearts of the nation with their by-now traditional role as the official betting partner of The Ryan Tubridy Show
— yes at Cheltenham, ‘our friends’ at PP run a quiz competition with Tubs in which the winners get a trip to the festival. And so do the losers!
Ah jaysus it’s great, but then so was the Leaving Neverland expose, which featured Wade Robson and Jimmy Safechuck confirming that Jacko was not as his album claimed, Bad in the sense of being good. He was bad in the sense of being very bad indeed.
“I have done bad things but I am not a bad man,” declared Michael Cohen, the latest of many Trump associates to go to jail. The President’s lawyer — or ‘fixer’ as such men were better known — one of whose grisly tasks was to fix whatever needed to be fixed with Stormy Daniels, clearly did not think that his old boss would be a force for good in 2019, or any other year. And he was openly stating that he was a force for bad, who had not only done bad things, but was a bad man.
There was a good man in Washington, though, Elijah Cummings, the chairman of the Oversight Committee, who said :“When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked: in 2019 what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?”
Come October, Cummings was himself dancing with the angels, one of the few who would be taking to the floor without fear.
Keith Flint of the Prodigy, by all accounts a good man who had done good things, checked out of the rock ’n’ roll hotel, sadly of his own volition. No doubt when he was dancing with the angels, he was doing it so crazily they didn’t bother with the hard questions.
APRIL
After all the hopes that good people had invested in the Mueller Report, they hadn’t realised that there is now a new normal. This new normal, which in its own way is most abnormal, is one where once Mueller might have published his report and people would read it and form conclusions based on its contents, now the Trumper just got his Attorney-General Bill Barr to issue a bullshit ‘summary’ which had gone 14 times around the world before the truth had even got out of bed.
There was more wisdom to be found in the book Commander in Cheat by golf writer Rick Reilly, the title of which might have been subtly different if they’d run it by Bill Barr: something like, Commander Totally Exonerated.
Tiger Woods never needed much bullshit on the golf course at least, and he astonished the world by winning the Masters one more time.
Of special interest to the Irish was the fact that one more time, Rory McIlroy didn’t win the Masters, the only Major he has yet to win — though fears are growing that he may never win another Major of any kind, despite the fact that he keeps winning loads of other tournaments.
Ah, but the fact that his talent is still so clearly evident, in a perverse way makes his failures at the Majors more profound — it’s not that he doesn’t have the ability, it’s that he doesn’t have... whatever it is.
But while we’re pitying the plight of the young multi-gazillionaire who has been blessed by the gods with genius of the rarest kind, we must spare a thought too for Greta Thunberg, who has drawn the mindless hatred of every ridiculous old man in the western world.
Most ridiculous of all was a notion that her mother’s status as a Eurovision star for Sweden, was somehow a bad thing in itself, or that it had unduly assisted Greta’s rise to fame. Willard Foxton Todd responded to this notion with a fine tweet: “If someone can explain why Greta’s mum being a Eurovision singer is in some way helpful to her I’d like to hear it. It’s not like Buck’s Fizz are on panels at Davos every year.”
From Scandinavia too came Ole Gunnar Solsjkaer, now installed as the permanent manager of Manchester United, a move which was broadly welcomed by the multitudes who are not fans of Manchester United.
Give him time, they say, give him time, because with every passing day it seemed that the troubles of United were becoming more terrible.
If it was any consolation for them at this time, it lay in the fact that modern television has made it possible to watch the cathedral of Notre Dame burning down on Sky News — and even then the charred remains of the home of the Hunchback seemed to be in somewhat better shape than the grand old club.
MAY
One night on Twitter, a bunch of people starting sending in suggestions to RTE about how the station might improve its programmes — or its ‘programming’ as TV executives would tend to put it, in their own peculiar way.
Imagine our surprise when there was a response to these tweets which went: “Some great ideas there... Thank you... We are listening.” It was from, “Dee Forbes and the team at RTE.”
At that moment I knew RTE was doomed, in its present form at least. Because I had always assumed, in my naivete, that ‘Dee Forbes and the team at RTE’ wouldn’t be listening to the ideas of people on Twitter — because they had their own great ideas.
And above all, the greatest of these ideas is that you don’t go around listening to what punters want, you try to give them what they should want, what they need
— that’s if you want to be any good. Personally, I never wanted any of the TV programmes which turned out to be great, essentially because I have other things to be doing, and therefore, unlike RTE executives, I am not being paid lavishly to do that particular job.
I never wanted The Sunday Game for example, and since most GAA folk are busy people too, probably very few of them wanted it either. But somebody in RTE thought it was a good idea, and here it was, celebrating its 40th year.
Nobody put it out on Twitter that they wanted a few
It began with vegan sausages and ended with the death of a broadcasting legend. Declan Lynch looks back on an extraordinary year
gaelic matches every Sunday night, with a James Last tune at the start, somebody just had a hunch about it. In fact, originally it might have been a programme about James Last to which somebody added a few gaelic matches, and 40 years later...
Maria Bailey, in her defence, said that “as somebody who grew up on the sideline of a GAA pitch, I play fair, I don’t play offside.” For her not to know that there is no offside in GAA was simply routine politics, but the unusual aspect of her notorious compo claim was that it was a strange form of compo for someone of her class to pursue.
The libel action is the traditional route for someone of her pay grade, while the lower orders tend to take their chances in the field of personal injuries, being unaware that they have reputations which can be damaged — so it was all too confusing.
If you were looking for personal injuries of a more meaningful kind, you’d find them on the hit TV drama Chernobyl, in which Jared Harris as a heroic nuclear scientist assessed the situation thus: “It means the core is open, it means the fire we are watching with our own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bombs in Hiroshima, and that’s every single hour, hour after hour, 20 hours since the explosion so 40 bombs worth by now, 48 more tomorrow, and it will not stop, not in a week, not in a month, it will burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead.”
Think of the compo in that one…
JUNE
Liverpool won the Champions League, which was good, and their manager Jurgen Klopp displayed the almost infinite range of his goodness in a Channel 4 News interview in which he was against Brexit and other such brutish phenomena: “A lot of politicians do what other politicians did in the past, they work at making people afraid.”
There stood Kloppo, a rare example of a strong leader who is not obviously a very bad person. Hell, even the Dalai Lama was off his game, saying that if his successor is female, “then she should be more attractive”.
He’s got a bit of previous, has the old Dalai when it comes to objectifying women, but he’ll probably be remembered a bit more fondly than, say Margaret Thatcher — at least by good people.
There wasn’t much for them in the BBC series Thatcher: A Very British Revolution, other than confirmation that many of the evils of 2019 can be traced back in a pretty direct line to 1979, the start of her regime.
In particular she never gave ‘Europe’ any credit for anything, perhaps because the darkest fear of her followers is to realise that whatever went right in Britain back then was in truth mainly down to ‘Europe’, not Thatcher.
And yet by comparison with today’s Europhobes, Thatcher seems like Donald Tusk in drag. Thanks to them, there will always be people worse than her in modern British history.
The utterly depraved 2019 version of the Tory Party was holding its leadership election, in which one Rory Stewart was the only candidate who recognises the existence of objective reality, while Boris Johnson was having great difficulty in even recognising the number of children he has.
And so inevitably to the Trumper, who was reported to be visiting Doonbeg in Ireland, though this was not true — Trump was visiting Trumpland. They had worked out that the only place in Europe he could feel at home was at one of his own golf courses, which happened to be situated on this island, but that doesn’t matter.
Down there he could but faintly hear Megan Rapinoe, or ‘Pinoe’, captain of the USA team which won the World Cup, refusing to go to “the fucking White House”.
We noted at the time that Trump now has a grudge against ‘Pinoe’ for this, what you’d call a Pinoe Grudgio.
JULY
It was 50 years since Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, but every indicator was suggesting that mankind has been walking backwards since then. With Boris about to take over the leadership of the Tory Party, thanks to the votes of the worst people in Britain, it seemed that British broadcasters — and a few Irish ones — were determined to speak to every asshole in the UK, and put them on the telly talking about why they wanted to get Brexit done.
A wise commentator called David Allen Green, not a man of the Left by any means, wrote: “Sometimes just calling something fascist is not enough. You have to show that it cannot be called anything else... Brexit is not fascist, but the accompanying destructive nationalistic trashing of domestic institutions in the name of ‘the People’ cannot really be called anything else.”
Yeah, we called that one too, but at least the fascists have Sir David Attenborough against them — he was acclaimed at Glastonbury for his goodness, with the slight downside that he is now 285 years old, so they won’t have long to wait until he’s done, too.
The upside is that the global warming against which Sir David has been campaigning will probably take out everybody, including the fascists. So it can’t be all bad.
Indeed one was reminded of a tweet by the filmmaker Jon Ronson, an Arsenal fan, who said that when his team loses, his one consolation is that the aforementioned Piers Morgan, who is himself an Arsenal fan, will also be unhappy.
There was consolation of a sort, too, for Rory McIlroy, who had an eight on the first hole of the British Open at lovely Portrush, but who saw his old buddy Shane Lowry lifting the claret jug in jubilation — and becoming the first winner to be seen openly drinking from the jug on the stage of the Boar’s Head pub in Capel Street.
There was glory too for Ireland’s Eoin Morgan, who captained England to win an unbelievably exciting final of the Cricket World Cup. You know it makes sense.
AUGUST
England was bereft too, after the end of Love Island, and its Irish stars Maura Higgins and Greg O’Shea. Indeed Ireland was also somewhat bereft, now that our summers largely consist of Love Island, and maybe a few hurling matches. Many of us are still finding it hard to accept that after decades in which the All-Ireland hurling final was always on the first Sunday in September, they have disturbed our ancient rhythms by having it in August. Nor are we used to seeing Kilkenny being slaughtered, yet that was their fate against Tipperary — or Tipp, as the experts would have it.
The online gambling epidemic usually gets a bit of a rattle in August too, with the start of the Premier League bringing a number of TV documentaries on it, including one by Ross Kemp — perhaps they’ll listen now.
The arrival of VAR [Video Assistant Referree] into the Premier League was not only going to decide a lot of bets one way or the other, there was a sense that the VAR was superior to real life, raising the most fundamental questions: what is reality? And why would anyone prefer reality in football when they don’t fancy it in any other part of their lives?