Go away Bertie, like the Riordans your muck-spreading days are over

Sunday Tribune, 15 February

"Geddup the yard, there's a smell of Benjy off you." Remember that schoolyard insult? If you were a child in the 1970s, you probably will. It referred to farmer Benjy from popular RTÉ soap The Riordans and the fact that you smelled like him – ie of cow dung.
The soap was revisited last week in the excellent RTÉ documentary Tea, Taboos and Tractors. It brought back memories of Sunday evenings with tea and jam sponge, and no homework done, listening to Tom blathering on about "sarcoptic mangemites" and "worm drench". They were simpler days, when no one locked their front doors. The world was a happier place, wasn't it?
Of course it wasn't. The North was ablaze, there were oil shortages, strikes and no money. That's the great thing about nostalgia: it rinses the crappy bits off the past and hoses them down the slurry pit. Probably the kindest thing to say about Riordans' Ireland is that it was less pretentious. There was no micro-celebrity circuit inhabited by people like, say, Rosanna Davison.
Rosanna's face is everywhere. On the day The Riordans documentary was aired, one paper reported
that she would be announcing her plans for St Valentine's night at a photoshoot in Dublin.
Wow. Was the shoot for Vogue? Harpers? Elle? No, it was for… pizza. Rosanna and her boyfriend would recreate the iconic John and Yoko
'bed-in' to advertise pizza. 'Give pizza a chance' was the slogan.
Now I like pizza, but the sight of Rosanna and her boyfriend nibbling it in bed turned my stomach. They represent everything I disliked about the Celtic Tiger, which made "celebs" out of models and created a "social scene" out of PR launches.
Rosanna is queen of the celebrity/models and regularly gets to voice her opinions. Such as this one on Tuesday: "Photocalls are useful. They only last for an hour or two, then you're free for the rest of the day." (Sounds a bit like signing on.)
And this last July, when she 'revealed' she had taken a 'cheapo' flight to Marbella: "We came over on a whim. It was a particularly rainy day in Dublin when we decided… All the talk of the recession does make you more careful. We were very careful to get a good deal." Last Sunday, Rosanna
spoke about the economy again. I'm not going to tell
you what she thinks because, frankly, I don't care. She
spent last Christmas in Mauritius and has a daddy who's richer than Croesus (Croesus de Burgh). She doesn't need to worry about the recession.
Neither does former taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who has a nice fat pension. Like fellow Tiger celebrity Rosanna, he is omnipresent in the media. Last week, he was pictured at a launch in the Burlington Hotel, grinning like a man bursting to tell a private joke. He looks like
that all the time now as he smugly waits to be made president.
Bertie's joke was about the recession. He told guests at the hotel, "If the economy had kept going the way I had left it, this place [the Burlington] wouldn't be here because they [property developers] were going to knock it down." Ho, ho, ho. Burlington Bertie, what a card. "The way I had left it." If Bertie was at the helm, we'd still be afloat.
Many people hanker for the Bertie days. Like The Riordans, he reminds them of happier times. That's if you forget that he led us into a property boom which has now imploded, causing misery to hundreds of thousands of people.
A boom that saw the reckless over-development of land for the benefit of his party's friends and where fortunes were squandered. The economy he "left behind" was a time-bomb, primed by him and the man currently trying to douse the flames that followed its explosion, Brian Cowen.
Bertie obviously still hurts over his demotion and consoles himself by thinking that we, secretly, want him back.
We don't, Bertie. Your Ireland is dead. If Rosanna Davison represents the superficial celebrity of the Tiger years, then you represent the avarice and cronyism. Your comments on the economy are as irrelevant to most of us as hers are.
Things are bad enough for the country without a has-been taoiseach hanging around making snide comments. Like The Riordans, Bertie, your muck-spreading days are over. Now shut up.

Don't forget we're Irish – fighting The Gloom is in our genes

8 January 2009

Are you as sick of The Gloom as I am? Have you a pain in your gut hearing how doomed we are? Do you wish George would throw himself into the river Lee?
Last week, as the airwaves crackled with more bad news, I decided to try and write about something cheerful. So I looked around. And around. And around.
There's a stretch in the evening, I thought. Good, but I can't stretch that to a column.
Fuel prices are coming down. Great, but I'll wind up bashing the Greens (any excuse).
What about Mary Harney? She was photographed leaving a Dublin restaurant at 1.30am. She looked decidedly un-gloomy even though it was a school night. I could write about her fiddling while Rome burns but … more Gloom.
As I pondered this, The Gloom paid me a personal visit. I won't say what happened, but it made me more determined to be upbeat.
So I looked away from Ireland to the English papers, only to be rewarded with the downbeat headline, 'Children are unhappier than ever'. More bloody gloom.
According to the 'The Good Childhood Report', the UK is raising a generation of kids who have been "damaged" by parental "neglect".
It singled out "individualistic" women for choosing to work rather than stay at home. Well, that won't be a problem any more, will it? (Sorry, nearly spoke about The Gloom again.)
I wondered if Irish kids are unhappy. Our two societies, like our children, are much the same.
During the boom we raised a generation of latch-key children in designer clothes. This was a result of both parents having to work as everything was so expensive. Junior was bought off with guilt money, PC games, etc. According to the report, he's now "damaged" because he wasn't nurtured.
So much for something positive to write about: on top of adults feeling grim, our children are miserable too.
Want a pleasant surprise? It turns out, that despite everything, they aren't. Ireland has the happiest children in Europe.
Two months ago, the government published a study of childhood here, drawn from 22 data sources including the CSO and WHO. The 'State of the Nation's Children Report' concludes that our kids exercise more and are more likely to be happy compared to other EU children. Finally, some good news.
It sounds slushy, but there IS truth to the adage that happiness is infectious. This was confirmed on Monday when the nation woke to its first proper snowfall in 18 years. It was like a hug from an old friend and, instead of 'meltdown', the talk was suddenly of 'freeze-up'.
Ireland skittered to a halt, totally unprepared despite all the forecasts (sound familiar?). Roads were clogged and eejits had to be rescued from mountainsides after going to admire the view.
Then came the sound of Nintendos being flung aside as a generation of children and a lot of older teenagers experienced their first Irish snowfall.
On the hillside near me, trays became makeshift sleighs. The happiness spread as the snow whitewashed The Gloom. Children and adults flung snowballs at each other. Misshapen snowmen appeared. The Sixth Estate – the internet – spoke of nothing else. No economics, just snow.
Ireland wanted a distraction, anything to take its mind off The Gloom. We wanted to go outside and be children again. Or to stand at the pub door and – happily – grumble about it.
I realised that this is what makes us Irish. We're irrepressible. We're genetically programmed to fight glumness. It's why we've thrived on this dank little rock.
We're surrounded by greyness most of the year, so when a reprieve comes in the form of a glowing snowfall, we squeeze it dry. We celebrate it as a boisterous day out.
My memory skidded back to the snow of 1991 and my friends and I spinning down a frozen road on metal bin lids.
Our footballers had conquered Italia 90 the previous year and, lifted by their example, we believed that everything was possible.
"You'll never beat the Irish." We were on our way to Tiger land. We were emerging from The Gloom.
We'll emerge again. Besides, we still have each other, whatever the forecast.


February 8, 2009

Bend the rules, minister – everybody loves a maverick

Sunday Tribune, 1 February

Everybody loves a maverick cop. You know, the kind that's normally described like this: "In a world without rules… he made his own rules…" The kind that will beat the bejaysus out of the bad guy, crash dozens of cars, be shouted at by his captain, surrender his badge, and then solve the case while on suspension. This will, inevitably, mean shooting the crook with his last bullet.
Back in the 1970s, the US had Dirty Harry, while Britain had Regan from The Sweeney.
In Ireland, we had… Lugs Brannigan.
Sergeant James 'Lugs' Brannigan didn't need a gun. He had hands the size of dinner plates which he used to keep Dublin's gougers in line. Last week, Justice Paul Carney recalled how Lugs's techniques made the city safer. He also said that the garda "heavy gang" of that era, who specialised in eliciting confessions, were more misguided than bad. The media picked up the thread and, by Wednesday, Ireland was fondly recounting stories of coppers clattering skangers into submission.
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't want to see a return to that type of heavy-handed policing. If Nicky Kelly is reading this, I'm sure he'll agree. In 1978, he was wrongly convicted for his alleged part in the Sallins mail train robbery. He had 'confessed' after being tortured by the 'heavy gang' and, in 1992, was given a presidential pardon.
That said, with all the genuine crime we have, it's understandable why people hanker for Lugs's methods. He broke the rules to mete out natural justice. He believed that, sometimes, it's okay to go above the law to serve a greater good.
That's a sentiment that should be echoed by another lawman who was in the news last week – Justice minister Dermot Ahern.
On Tuesday, Nigerian woman Pamela Izevbekhai lost a High Court challenge to the minister's order to deport her. She says her girls, Jemima and Naomi, will be subjected to genital mutilation by their father's family if they are repatriated. Her other little girl, Elizabeth, died after undergoing the procedure in 1994. The European Court of Human Rights has now intervened and Pamela has been given a temporary reprieve.
Rules are rules. The Minister for Justice has done everything by the book in this case. He's upheld his duty to protect our borders. He needn't feel guilty about Pamela's case. Neither should we as a nation feel any guilt towards Africa. We didn't colonise it. So the state should fight on to deport Pamela's girls. Rules are rules, right?
In short, no. Jemima and Naomi were aged three and four when their deportation was ordered in 2005. Four years is a long time in a little girl's life. Sligo is now their home. The overwhelming desire of their Irish friends to keep them here confirms that. It's now a case of, simply, making an exception.
We are used to bending the rules in this country – politicians do it for developers all the time. We're also a very compassionate race, and I don't believe minister Ahern, who has children of his own, can be unmoved by Jemima and Naomi's situation.
He is a man of strong convictions. Last month, he defended forwarding a complaint from reviled terror chief Michael McKevitt to a previous justice minister. "It would be a dereliction of duty," Ahern said, "if I was to ignore families when they come to me indicating that there is, perhaps, in some way, some infringement of someone's human rights."
Are the rights of two vulnerable children not as important as those of a prisoner?
Ahern has the power to bend the rules and let them stay. It won't, as some say, open the floodgates to mass immigration. It's about doing the right thing.
Just two weeks have passed since the Roscommon incest case came to light. The state failed in that instance to protect children from the barbarism of a parent. Will it now fail to protect Naomi and Jemima from relatives who want to mutilate them?
Bend the rules, minister. Administer natural justice. Everybody loves a maverick.