Crimble ...

There’s a cruel myth making the rounds that Christmas is a time of cheer, hope and quiet contemplation of the year we’ve had. No Christmas is likely to be as unrecognisable compared to this description than the miserable holiday season we’re facing in Irlande sur mer for 2009. Santy doesn’t own a pair of waders, Rudolf can’t swim and parking a sleigh will be a pain in his sack if the jolly old man hasn’t got the right change for the pay and display system.

I’m not enamoured with Irish Christmases and yes, I’m going to be Grinch-like about it. The holly and ivy drinkers in their awful sweaters drinking Smithwicks Shandies in my local, roaring on about golf and how much their wives cost to renovate; The inevitable futility of avoiding family for 364 days of the year, only to be trapped in the same place for a day of overindulging on cold turkey, colder ham and positively Baltic Merlot, with side helpings of a vegetable which resembles decomposing rabbits tails and tastes as much. The inevitable Christmas row is all that keeps me going. In our house it’s a two day, bilingual extravaganza, and sure the craic is mighty.

It’s the one aspect of the Christmas on this island which is true to the real character of the Irish. We don’t get on with each other. If we did, we’d be as interesting a Mormon stag night in Brussels. We’re noisy, we’re cranky, and without the safety valve of Christmas, there’d be civil war, I’m telling you.
The thing is, that the Christmas sold in Ireland , snow, red Coke trucks, Gemütlichkeit, are only likely to be part of our actual Christmas experience, if Ireland were taken piece by piece to Bavaria to be a ride in a negative equity horror theme park. Christmas, in other words, is consumer fraud with a Bing Crosby soundtrack. It’s the chance for RTE to run The Wizard of Oz during the Six-One slot, when Brian Dobson has to be taken to hospital due to a mince pie overdose. Will anyone notice the difference between footage from Co. Godknowswhere and Kansas? I have my doubts. There are plenty of people out there with green faces and stripy stockings who’d pop up in your average vox pop, anyway, normally on Nationwide selling organic marmalade.

To make things worse, this year we’re likely to get the full wrath of Aidan Nulty – cloudy with a chance of everything falling out of the sky – accompanied by a winds not seen since Ian paisley’s unplugged gigs in Belfast some decades ago. It’s hard to get into the festive spirit when walking upright is hard enough anyway with a vat of mulled wine in your veins and shopping bags ready to burst. By the end of your foolhardy trip to town, you’re standing in the pissing rain, your assorted presents at your feet as your bags finally give up: a sodden Santa watching the cardboard box of a Fisher-Price trike serve as a rescue raft for your town’s rodent population.



Some things though, are definitely true. People have been complaining for years that Christmas comes earlier every year. In November, the decorations went up. Two weeks later, they came down, thanks to some force 30 gusts. Methinks it’s time to batten down the hatches. It’s beginning to look a lot like carnage out there.

Age and Reason

"What people don't realise is that for our generation, nothing was normal." Rudolf Garmatz, my grandfather, is of the generation born at the same time as the ill-fated Weimar Republic. He knows all about the simple strangeness of life. His life began in what's now Poland, formerly the province of Pommern,from which he left, as one friend pointed out, as if predestined. His life was not bound to the earth of the east. Berlin, the front, north Africa and all the awfulness of the Ardennes, to Hamburg, where his first home was as simple as it was strange. An old map room in a school, he received a letter from my grandmother that they had been allocated it by a school comptroller who took pity on them. No electricity, he wired it with with old power lines he gathered up from the rubble of early 1950's Hamburg.

Nothing was normal. This thought came to mind again when I went to see Robert Fisk in the National Concert Hall, thanks to my wife who thought I'd like it. She was spellbound. I was distracted by the inordinate number of know alls using the opportunity to ask Fisk questions in order to make inane, crass and stupid statements in the deluded belief that he, the great Fisk, would reveal them as a true prophet. Any hope for intelligent discourse was hardly going to come from this audience, surely.

Towards the front, an elderly lady sat with her hand up, the only woman who asked question. When she was finally brought a microphone, she asked question which was staggering in its simplicity, honesty and genuine curiousity.

"I'm 78 years old" - she can talk as long as she wishes to, whispered my wife - "and you may find my questions silly."
"They are not!" Fisk assured her, as if he'd been impugned himself. It was charming. "Well, I was wondering, where do the israeli's get their oil from? And, How's Mordechai Vanunu? Is he dead?"

Fisk seemed startled and took a brief moment to bring himself back to her question. He answered her questions with as much detail and clarity as he could. She seemed satisfied. Older people can sometimes see through the world, that we younger people can't. If we're to have any hope of progress as a society, then our discourse needs to be both simple and inspired. No joy yet, though some hope exists.

Yes

I am voting yes. I have every reason to vote no, but none of them have to do with the treaty. The treaty has to do with how the EU is run. Not poverty, divorce, abortion, neutrality, the colour of Angela Merkel's trouser suits.

It's as simple as it is necessary, and sooner or later, we'd better face up to the fact the the EU saved us when we needed the cash, kept pumping it in when things were picking up and saved us again...from ourselves and our greedy coven of bankers, who colluded with the government in a conspiracy of stupidity to bring us to the brink of disaster.

This has nothing to do at all with the Lisbon Treaty, and for what it's worth, a strong European Parliament is no bad idea.Which is in the Lisbon Treaty. Well, stronger. A good start.

And we have a population the size of Berlin.


And the economic management skills of a drunk teen minding a baby. which again has nothing to do with the Lisbon treaty, which is about reforming the internal structures of the EU. Which we need.

Questions?

Ryan Confidential 2

The focus is still on the religious orders in the abuse scandal that is to us what the stolen Generations are to the Australians. Like the ozzies, we're unlikely to embrace the full truth, which would require looking at how we were complicit. As some suggest that any visit by the current pope would be unthinkable, given the scandal, how many people embraced the previous pontiff in 1979 when he was here? where was their outrage? Or did they not know?

The Religious need to be taken to task, and also to the cleaners, that's fine. but consider this: does the obsession with financial compensation, and the studied ignoring of the state's role, of the role of our population in a particular complicity really do anything but cheapen the suffering of children, for whom nobody spoke up.

Ryan Condfidential

The story of 150, 000 boys and girls abused in the care of the church, supervised by the state, has been described as a holocaust of sorts. I find the notion distasteful, but they do share a common bond. The cowardice of ordinary people to do the right thing.

Whilst some will demand pots of money from religious orders, and whilst Diarmuid Martin does his best say what needs to be said, much of the outcry over the report ignores the fact, that we, our elected officials and our civil servants failed to hold the church to account, as was our duty. We failed to get beyond parochial defensiveness when the failings of our industrial schools was exposed by outsiders, irrespective of their pre-eminence in the field of childcare. We failed every child and woman and man who was ever sent to places that Dickens would have lambasted a century before.

Ireland is at a low ebb. The economy is in tatters, our morale is rock bottom. People are scared and leaders are doing nothing but grin offensively from posters or fast tracking passports. In the midst of that, you can be guaranteed we will be told not to dwell on the past, not to examine who we are and who we were, to repress what cannot be repressed.

We have never defined ourselves beyond crude caricatures, a reaction to the London Illustraed News showing us to be dressed monkeys. We never came to terms with the famine, with colonialism, with the Great War or with our movement from the apron strings of Britain to those of Rome.

It's more than just about money. It's about looking at our true selves and the ugliness of our national soul, gnarled by decades of self deception and complacency.

Liverpool and why I hate my football club

I'm a Liverpool fan. have been since I made the decision in 1985 that, according to the copy of Shoot from 1974 that we had, that Steve William' kit was just a little to stupid looking for my liking. that said, it was still a close call. I think I regret the decision, and I'm going to tell you why.

Since before Michael Thomas buried Liverpool's ominous 1989 season, I have had my heart broken more times by my football club than all the humiliations of asking girls out in my teens ever could. First it was John Aldridge having his penalty saved by Hans Segers, the first penalty to be saved in an FA Cup final, then it was Souness replacing Kenny Dalgliesh, and replacing a team of genuine beauty with one as pretty as the face on Paul Stewart's head.

if you're married to a club, then mine has been a loveless marriage, until those frilly tarts in Arseenal started pirouetting around Highbury to the tune of Thierr Henry's sexy football ethos, I didn't know how to get turned on about football at all.

And then last night it happened again. Goal after goal, they couldn't find the killer punch, or learn how to outwit ARashavin or the supply he had to the goal.

The bottom line is: I want the Premiership. I want to love my club again!

Budget - not just the sound a car makes when hitting a pothole

I spent the last few weeks paying a little game. The game was to try to predict what the government was going to do in the budget. I had to give up, unfortunately, due to one inalienable fact. The third generation Fianna Fail aristocracy running the country are SO incompetent that it's hard to know what they're going to do.

And so it was today. After the sideshow regarding locking everyone, including the members of the press, into the Dail chamber, Brian Lenihan (the second) set out his second budget, because his first one was, frankly, bollocks.

What was the aim of the new budget? What was its purpose? Mainly to look tough. They want to look serious and credible. Some things were interesting: the nod to social democracy in the shape of one year's free pre school for all children in other times could have been visionary, but it wasn't placed in the context of a broader social programme.

Setting up a toxic bank was interesting, but will it restore confidence in our banks, or will it be seen as a sop to developers who borrowed more than they could repay?

And did the government sufficiently grab the state's finances by the scruff of the neck and amend for how the government frittered away record tax receipts over the last decade, whilst doing nothing to stop banks from lending to any gobshite and pumping up a property market to the point of disaster.

George Lee said it didn't add up. They spoke of having a five year plan. I watched the whole thing and saw no such plan. I hope they're right and I'm wrong, but I'm gonna keep wearing my pre-browned recession trousers just in case.

Spamalot!

It says a lot when the spam in your email reflects the economic shlamozzel we live in. Spam during the boom years was all about cosmetic surgery. Have a nicer nose, bouncier boobs. Well, all booms go bust as badly as a doctored bust can go boom. Bubbles burst and now my spam folder today bore such cheery opportunities as 'foreclosed homes' and 'filing bankruptcy?'. It's like looking at the world through the eyes of the PM of Iceland, YongBron Coewenstottir.

Thanks to this junk everyone can make sense of the crisis in Lehmann's terms...

Waste Not want Not

Many people recycle. I do. Germans and people who are forcibly made to wear Birkenstocks do. Most American sitcom writers do but don't admit it. And yet there are two good reasons why it's bad for you. One, there's no value any more in rubbish as a commodity. Fact. The price of waste collapsed like Jabba the Hut in a marathon stair climbing contest. Second, it's bloody dangerous.

I destroyed myself this morning going into my back room to find things to stuff my car with. In the end, I nearly perished. My legs got trapped under three tons of jumbo sized milk cartons, and no one could hear me call for help, as Styrofoam became lodged in my mouth. After I was eventually rescued by a St.Bernard dog and a news crew, I nearly sliced my finger off, washing the inside of an empty tin of fruit salad.

Another great piece of recycling is Madonna, queen of the reinvention, who's apparently now a cougar. Our Lady of the Fishnet was snapped with Jesus de Luz, a 22-year old product of the model breeding program in operation Brazil, ever since Mengele visited there after the war. The world media savoured pictures of the pair. Not even The Sunday Times could resist the entitling their snap with the obvious 'Madonna and Child'.

Madonna is not Michael Douglas, nor is she the nonagenarian squillionaire peanut-in-a-wheelchair, who Anna Nicole Smith married. Perhaps, and I'm just putting it out there, there might be a double standard here. Madonna is a woman, but she has every right to a mid-life crisis as any man, including engaging in near comical flings with unfeasibly young people, who have none of the life experiences she might have.

Her right to a life notwithstanding, it won't stop people mocking her. Let's hope she never gets a comb-over and a Porsche!

This week, a video!

As an experiment, I'm going to try to not only blog in writing, but from time to time, I'm going to use the wonderful gadgets on my laptop in order to present my notions and ideas as they come out of my mouth, sometimes after gestating in my brain. Uploading pictures would take too long and take up too much memory, so instead, I'm going to do it this way. Sometimes writing on the internet is like shouting your name in a dark cave, where only bats and Facebook stalkers will here you, but I hope that even the bats will take notice and enjoy my stuff.

That's not to say I'm not going to let you away so easily. Enjoy my video, it's a bit of fun more than anything else.

I leave you with this thought. Can a man get by on less than €2 million a year in these hard times?

Winter of Discontent....

Our huskies are dead. That's right, I took a hatchet to the bastards. I had to look into their big, brown, vacant eyes and somehow detach myself as the grim deed was done. It was necessary and totally humane. For us. We were cold and hungry, and their meat and fur helped nurture what was left of my wife and I on our trip home at the end of an arduous week. We had been camped out on the M50 for much of the last three days, and before that, we were forced into the purchase of said huskies from a dodgy looking Eskimo following our near fatal expedition on the N7 out of Castledermot. Cars slid and slipped, vans hilariously got stuck head first into holes like Winnie the Pooh. Buying our snow-hounds seemed a good bet as a glacier formed rapidly from Carlow to Dublin. South Leinster looked like the Baring Straights, though we couldn't see Russia from our house. It turned out to be just another panic buy.

Instead of venturing forwards with our new dogs, however, we turned back and went home; took a mad, bad and definitely sad trip on public "transport" the next day and found that the weather was, like manflu, not so much bad as it was messy.

All because a few county councils couldn't have been arsed gritting the roads, thereby risking our already fairly peeky looking economy as 9% of us stayed at home (not including the near 400,000 who have nowhere to go in the morning anyway).

Maybe it's stay at home telemarketing for everyone. It's better than waiting for the powers that be to do up a recovery plan and grit the damn roads!

I'll get by....

This is the first time in about a week that I've had the time to post anything on my accursed blog, accursed, that is, because I use rude words in disbelief that I don't write enough on it. There's only so often you can get indignant enough about the country to write, without having to resort to a cocktail of Pepcid and gin to keep the show going. Ireland has been mentioned in the same breath as Iceland by Jose Manuel Barroso, and not because of our innovative music industries.

Iceland is run by corrupt inbred weirdies who look like they escaped from Royston Vasey, so being likened to them in any respect I don't think is a good thing in any way. did I mention they're also inept? Just saying....

Amid the current turmoil and Brian Cowen's grossly offensive, "It's my country and I'll fuck it up if I want to" rant, and the utter contempt shown to the our parliament in fixing the unfixable, Sebastian Barry went under the national radar, winning the Costa Book Prize, the old Whitbread prize. No fanfare to speak of. Yes, the Irish Times reported the win, duh! They would. No one else however saw fit to really mention it or its significance, beyond the fact that he won and the cash prize he received(quel surprise). Why?

We Irish have a contempt for success and particuarly for intellectual discourse. Successful writer? not interested. Don't read anyway. Why would you, sure? Reading won't soup up your Subaru Impreza, will it? This malaise is not limited to Barry's literary success. It's the very reason why the political classes are incapable of dealing with our current crises - they're ignorant, illiterate and arrogant. Cowen's abovementioned rant is just one example of this. There are plenty more that you can no doubt think of yourself.

So as writers go unaknowledged and tough decisions go unfaced, we get to sit quietly and watch the sun go down on our glory years, whilst being beaten over the head with a fraying Chloe Handbag and a copy of the Irish Times property Section.

Irregular Regulator

The Financial Regulator has decided to retire early. After doing the career equivalent of being Brezhnev's body double after the great man died, Paddy Neary finally jumped ship. An internal report gave his office a good kicking for its handling of the Anglo-Irish Bank "let's allow executives to hide loans from everyone, which is eeeerily like criminal activity (allegedly) but isn't, because they were going to give the money back, honest" scandal.

Well, that's about time he went, isn't it. He fell honourably on his sw...I mean, he put his hands up to his ultimate respons...Well, he saw it com...

...He took early retirement rather than risk being sacked and humiliated. How brave! His office did nothing to prevent bankers behaving recklessly with other people's money. Officials under his command instead alternated their activities between updating their Facebook pages and burying their heads up their arses. His office wasn't up to the job of regulating Neary's private sector buddies and the blame was placed not on him as the F.R., but on lower level types, who failed to pass on warnings of the Anglo shenanigans to the top dogs in the Financial Regulator's office. "I'm going, but it was the underling's fault" is the message of his departure: The buck stopped somewhere near reception.

He'll no doubt be rewarded for his essential negligence with a cosy state pension and without censure or reprimand officially blemishing his Resume. Wonderful that he had the foresight to avoid that disaster.

There is something even more galling to note about this. Aside from witnessing the cowardly sneaking off of an official who did some disservice to this state, not one thing will be learned from the sorry episode. The banking sector, now in free fall, will once again be allowed to behave like kids in a sweet shop the next time things are good. Which will again hamper efforts in the struggle with Ireland's underlying economic vulnerability and our essential greed.

If he fancies, Neary has one option to while away his newly found free time. He could get a part time job giving out dole money, though it might be stressful for him. The queues for his counter would be massive. Sure it'd be easier than winning the Lotto!