The apocalypse is over — we can reclaim our turf
Good times? Not if you liked racing
WELL, you had your chance Ireland... and you sure as hell missed it. Now that the country’s summer has returned to its old, infuriatingly schizophrenic self, the moment has passed. For three glorious weeks there was a golden opportunity, a sun-kissed opening for us to finally stand up and fight.
We’re pretty sure that the main reason Ireland hasn’t taken to the streets in protest and uprising as the country has gone down the pan is this: we simply wouldn’t know what the hell to wear. It j ust wouldn’t have worked as well as Egypt or Greece had we turned up to Government buildings in the middle of an Irish summer.
Make no mistake, the Anglo tapes and the bailouts and generally this Government doing their best impression of the last one has got us angry. We’re mad as all hell. It’s just that lathering yourself in Factor 50 and then putting a mac and wellies on doesn’t really get you in the mood for rebellion.
But for three glorious weeks, had we not been distracted by beer gardens and the general gloriousness of our land, nature provided us with a window in which we could have turned Merrion Square into our own Tahrir Square (just with more Supermac’s wrappers).
So we’re not good protesters, we prefer putting the kettle on, dialling 1850 715 815 and telling Joe how we always knew the country was being run by a shower of bastards.
But for all the perceived national ambivalence to our situation, the country does have one significant victory under its belt. We have risen up and reclaimed one of our most sacred festivals, taken it back from the pin-striped brigade who drove the country into the ground.
The Galway Races kick off this evening and the first day is going to be very different to what it was back in the middle part of the 2000s — or, as some would head- scratchingly still refer to it, the good times.
Back then the racing people who had been pitching up to Ballybrit for decades found their hallowed turf infested by the cash-rich cubs of the Celtic Tiger.
The skies became so peppered by helicopters ferrying property developers, politicians and bankers to the track that all we were missing was The Ride of The Valkyries blasting over the PA and Martin Sheen running around in combat gear looking for Marlon Brando.
Apocalypse Now? If only we’d know how close to the truth we were. The apocalypse wasn’t all that far away at all.
Bertie strutted around the betting ring like a rock star, stopping for photos and hearty handshakes.
His home for the week, Fianna Fáil’s white plastic marquee, took Lyndon B Johnson’s insistence that it was ‘better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in’ to the furthest excesses i maginable. In truth, those inside the tent were pissing on the entire country outside.
The Radisson Hotel Bar would be packed to the rafters on post-race nights but the clientele knew less about Paul Carberry flipping a whip from one hand into the other and powering a winner home in sinking ground and more about flipping an 18-unit estate on the outskirts of Cavan town into a €4million profit and banking it before the pyrite houses started sinking into the ground.
The audio on the Anglo tapes of two of the bank’s best and brightest talking about picking bailout figures ‘out of their arse’ came as no surprise to those of us who were at Ballybrit in those years. Because that’s where the pin- stripers usually picked their racing knowledge out of.
The good times? They weren’t good times. Not for those who went to the Galway Races for the racing.
THIS paper f eatured a superb i nterview with Dermot Weld on Saturday under a blurb headline that referred to the master trainer as ‘The Baron of Ballybrit’. Weld would undoubtedly shy away from honorifics but he deserves such a title because of all that he has achieved in Galway in over four decades of dominating the track. Weld has given Galway more than any other and still he gives more.
It wouldn’t be a surprise to discover that the first person to call Sean Dunne the Baron of Ballsbridge was in fact Sean Dunne. Self-honorification would probably not be such a stretch for him.
He apparently merited the title because he borrowed other people’s money and bought land in Dublin 4 at a rate of oh, about €197million an acre. Then he went bust and there is no sign of him giving any of the money back.
In the course of the interview, Weld celebrated the fact that ‘Galway has always been a meeting for the people... now it is back to being a meeting for the people’.
Weld will be there in Ballybrit today. Dunne and his like won’t be. There are much more important battles to be won but, for now, we’ll call that one 1-0 to Ireland.