FF & Bertie have that Friday feeling
Everyone from
Bill Clinton to John Hume to Martin McGuinness — and many others — have been credited with playing key roles.
Lately, we have heard plenty giving credit to Queen Elizabeth II too — seemingly because of her visit to Ireland in 2011.
That was 13 years after the Good Friday Agreement, and all of 17 years after the ceasefire.
If the Queen had any part in the peace process, it was a very minor one — it’s strange how Official
Ireland wants to talk it up.
IT’S really not a surprise that
● there’s talk of Bertie Ahern coming back into the Fianna Fail fold.
That’s because of the imminent 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.
And even his most trenchant
● critics acknowledge that Ahern did good work on the peace process, and has been impressive on Brexit too.
These are two issues that haven’t gone away, and Taoiseach Micheal
Martin is well aware of that.
It’s a decade since the Mahon
●
Tribunal found that Ahern, while not judged corrupt, had received money from developers.
And the tribunal didn’t believe Ahern’s explanations for the payments.
That is a big part of the Ahern
● story, as is the peace process. It seems that Fianna Fail have decided that the latter matters more.
HAVEN’T thought about The Housemartins in years. Been thinking about them a lot over the past few weeks.
It started when there was so much talk recently of anti-social behaviour in Dublin and it becoming a very dangerous city to walk around.
That was bewildering to many of us who remember times when Dublin was a much darker place.
A time when poor, damaged kids walked the streets out of their heads after sniffing glue.
Dublin has lost a lot of music venues but still has plenty — and gigs here are a highlight of living in the capital.
Ask yourself this question: when did you last feel in danger at a gig?
It doesn’t really happen now, but it was the norm for years.
On October 17, 1986, I went to see The Housemartins at the Olympic Ballroom, one of those venues that has long since disappeared.
Spit
Supporting the Hull quartet were The Proclaimers, two Scottish brothers that most weren’t familiar with.
All through their set, The Proclaimers were showered in spit from the audience.
Fights broke out all through the sets of both bands, and continued on the street outside after the gig.
The passing of Queen Elizabeth II was something else that brought The Housemartins to mind.
Their final album was The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death and the title song got them into hot water in Britain.
That was down to its criticism of the royal family, and the adulation of them.
“And even when their kids were starving, they all thought the Queen was charming.”
The extraordinary time since the
Queen’s death highlights just how broken Britain is — and how divided.
Ireland has problems, and lots of them, but the numbers queuing for food parcels here are relatively small.
In Britain, food banks are everywhere, and it was revealed last week that the poorest people there are 63 per cent worse off than the poorest here.
Official England — and the UK media is a big part of it — has tried to bully the poorest into buying into the weird performative mourning for the Queen.
Those who have dissented — Liverpool, Everton, Celtic, Hibs and Dundee United fans are among them — have been hammered. No surprise that some have pointed out the Irish links of all five football clubs.
To many, the royal family is a reminder of a toxic past and bitter present.
To them, it is not something to be honoured, but just look at the way dissent has been shouted down — and the arrests of protesters.
That should concern plenty — and not just in Britain.