The End - a Kenny

It's truly a matter of some skill: the implosion of FG the face of the least popular government in the history of the state. Only the blueshirts could, like Ronnie Rosenthal, hoof the ball into the car park when all that's in their way is a lot of net. This is of course not the first time that FG lost its bottle in the face of flatline polls. The problem is, though, not the polls or Enda Kenny per se. It's their judgement to begin with.

Having lost the country's most famous economics commentator, having sidelined the young and restless in the FG family (Please, if anyone finds Lucinda Creighton, then contact the papers before she ends up on the side of a milk carton), after letting Leo Varadkar speak in public ever, it can only be said that they have neither the guts nor the guile to lead anyone, let alone themselves. So it's now a choice between Eamon Gilmore and a Labour front bench as familiar as the Angelus at tea time or Brian Cowen. Will it be whiskey or the gun?

Go on the real super eagles!!

Okay, so I'm biased. But like it or lump it, I'm rooting for Germany. Australians may find that comment funny, but this is just getting serious.

Germany have the youngest team since 1934, when the coach was a bespectacled Nazi called Otto Nerz. These days it's a dandy called Jogi, and the mentality is more attractive than in those dark days of the 1930's: is it typically German though? They want to win. Check. They have a focussed training program. Check. They wear snazzy white jerseys. Check. After that, it gets more interesting.

Contrary to the lazy assumptions of many people, the Germans aren't gong to win on the back of mythical eficiency. They'll be a glorious, romantic mess, and, yes, they'll get through the group stages demonstrating that they are resilient, resourceful and willing to give it their all. But they're not efficient and haven't been in two decades. It's going to be way more interesting than that.

This is just about as good as it gets for the world Cup, where every macth so far has been as dull as the drone of a Vuvuzela. A Young, hungry and slightly ramshackle German side against an Aussie selection of seasoned pros, who'll bring the game to them with guile and no little style. Thankfully Croatia aren't playing, so they have no obstacles but their own will to win.

In the end, I'll be shouting for the Germans. They need at least a couple of fans from our part of the world, so bring it on.     

Nachdenken ueber Rudolf G. With apologies to Christa Wolf

My uncle Paul put it best. We can't afford to lose any more gentlemen. So it was true of my grandfather, Rudolf Garmatz, nicknamed 'Apo', whose name I still haven't deleted from my phone, a thoroughly modern activity that people must perform when someone dies. I don't think I ever will, nor do I want to. Not out of melodrama, but because he should still be alive. It suited him so.

The man I was conscious of as my grandfather began quietly, and ended quietly. In actual fact he'd been born in the middle of a storm in 1919. To me, as a small child, he was the quiet one. The first phase of this perceived silence, was because he was so in awe of my grandmother, that he couldn't get a word in, if he wanted to at all. He worshipped her until she died in 1992, and then she left him unexpectedly, and with characteristic panache, alone. For the first time since 1946, the year he met her, he opened his mouth.

Anyone who met him was suitably impressed. Exceedingly well read, and clever enough to have processed his reading, he had the ability to talk to you about anything and always assume you knew what he was talking about, without that awful knack of lesser people, who rub your nose in the slightly less scant knowledge they possess. Perhaps it's because he never assumed to know as much as he actually did. I only ever saw it in one other person, Brian Jacob, a Geologist who, like Rudolf, the world could have done with for a few more years.

Rudolf was a man's - and woman's - man. He could speak as easily to Franconian Farmers as to Paul McGrath or Helmut Schmidt. He could say enough to be interesting but leave showing off to everyone else.

The sheer span of his life, his 90 years, a colleague commented, took in so much of what we call history. He called it his generation's "absence of normality". He remembered the hyperinflation as a small child in 1924, took in a lot more in the years after - the Hitler period, war, the everafter; Some things we knew about, other things, we found in envelopes, were curated over a lifetime: official letters from places no longer existing like Stettin, ending in "Heil Hitler" lie next to postcards from army comrades and drinking pals in Berlin in the early 40s. North Africa, medals, pictures of a dashing man in uniform - he was still regarded as something to look at until well on in his life; Postcards from his girlfriend, my grandmother, a pair of smart, emryonic hippies. Wirtschaftswunder, cars and work, the union work, "Scheiss GEW" as my grandmother thundered. Other stuff emerged from the envelopes - the secret life of a polymath, letters to the asking him demonstrate a slide rule he'd invented for the newly established West German Army. They didn't need it after all - neither did he need them as it happened. He wrote Maths books instead. He loved the creativity of Mathematics like no teacher I ever encountered in Ireland: games, a counting method using your hands like a rudimentary binary code: Leibniz for the playground.

Those yellowed photos and notes you dredge up from a box in the attic of your mind are in death, what you survey as the debris of a lifetime, partly in fascination, partly in horror, partly in joy. To every raised eyebrow, every 'wow', he sits in his chair saying, 'Oh that', or some Teutonic growl like that. No man ever rolled the letter R quite like him, nor did any man play down his own contribution to the world as effectively.

In the last decade of his life, we'd go to his birthdays because we knew - though we tried to ignore it, that not many more might come along. Not that we let on to him. Anyway, if he cared that there weren't, he hid it well. He had the dignity that allows a man to do what he likes, without the slightest hint of self consciousness. As if he didn't mind what people thought, but he'd wear a shirt and tie anyway. The man could drink without the affliction of looking like it was a dirty activity, and give you a great time without you noticing, always with ice cream soaked in Bailey's to sweeten the deal.

When a loved one lives in another country, it's hard to explain, especially to Irish people, how they can be close to you. I'd say in the last weeks of his life "My grandfather's 90, and he's not feeling so well", a look of sympathy would be replaced very soon with a blank stare, as understanding was replaced with 'who-gives a shit', when it turned out he lived several hundred miles away in Hamburg. He might as well have not existed as far as they were concerned. Sure wasn't he foreign?

That's why I was angry when he died, in the midst of a storm, as it happens, peacefully in a hospital in Klein Flottbek. The storm caused a rush of wind to blow the flagpole down outside his, now his son's, home.

It was hard to explain why I'd be upset - "sure wasn't he far away anyway, and you can't be close to just anybody?" For the misty-eyed Irish, not being able to understand the irrelevance of location is as maddening as it is perplexing. They of all people should have understood. To dwell on how the place of my birth let me down yet again, however, wouldn't have been Rudolf's style, which is another reason why I'm not half the man he was. And writing it in a blog would have drawn a whithering response from him anyway.

So as I think about him, I consider many things, some the self indulgent rubbish that bereaved people consider on the way from Miss Havisham to getting up for work: how I'd lost a father figure that no one, not even my own dad could have been - he was a daddy, not a patriarch like Rudolf. The latter outlived the former by twelve years to the hour, living exactly twice as many years.

Other things remembered are tangible. The every morning drive to the bakery, the iconoclasm of calling a bread roll a 'Schrippe' rather than the locally preferred term 'Rundstueck'; cutting up apples at the dinner table, eating cherries by a windmill next to local orchards, and spitting the stones out accross the levee towards the river Elbe and Hamburg. In silence.


After all, why ruin a good moment with chatter?

The evolution of Mary by Albert Einstein

From the online edition of the Irish Times: (about her!)

“Have I got this right? One of the wost ministers (ever) who was too lazy/stupid/unprofessional to do anything to stop the abuses in FAS - or to bring those officials in FAS to account - is now moved to a new department with FAS following her?
God help the children - the mind boggles at what calamities are coming their way.”


Even the ASTI should be able to kick her ass. Surely.





See more @ http://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/politics/2010/03/23/reshuffle-early-verdict/

Bon Anniversaire

Normally on days like this, I get a bit maudlin and ramble on about how much I miss my dad. It's true, to paraphrase Shakespeare, he was from this world untimely ripped, and we are the poorer for it. But the times of looking back with regret and sadness just aren't those of now. A man like that needs people to look ahead, the next plan, the next project and give it your all. What if he'd lived? As he would have said, 'if my aunty had balls she'd be my uncle'. So we've resumed the struggle. Mooney last week and an adventure in rural broadband next.

That's what I'm going to do to mark his 12th year of passing, of being my past, when I was someone else: I have a bag of ideas to open up,turn upside down and empty onto my living room floor. Make sense, make art make fun.

So to my dear departed da, happy anniversary. You'd have loved the future. D.

PS. if you want to see how good he was, just watch the video of him being Bertie and enjoy

Radio (is the ) One

Here's the link to my appearance today on the Mooney Show on RTE Radio One. About halfway through the show. Talking property and Tedfest. Some combination!

click here

Awwwh...George Ree

Mr. Lee went to Leinster House. He then went home. Irish Politics is two bit flea circus to the Funderland of, say, the Athens of Pericles. George Lee discovered that being successfully courted by FG was all that Enda Kenny had in him. Other than that single master stroke, Kenny has shown all the political nouse of a particularly careless dog in a manger.

It's not clear to me whether or not George Lee should have left or tough it out, or take any last minute front-bench buy off. FG really didn't handle him well. He was more than just a crowd puller, which is what he was being used as. Some media reports, however, suggested that some in FG didn't like his profile or his brain. They liked him like FHM likes Abi Titmuss: clearly for her editorial skills.

Irish politics is funerals and medical cards and all the guff that comes when national politicians have to deal with the minutiae of the village pump, the preserve of the Maurice Hickeys of this world. Our politics of clientelism brought us the construction boom, the very state of affairs that will lead us to be next week's Greece. Do they care? Possibly, but Lee's assertion of an 'institutionalized' body politic seems too accurate to dismiss.

In the End Mr. Ree was in a very very ronery place. Maybe one day he could have made it, but he wanted to help in the here and now, in a situation he felt he could solve. In fact, that's not what politicians do. They fudge and cajole and gladhand. Are these the acts of statesmen? Nope, but then again, name me any figures in Irish politics who'd fit that moniker. There's more of a chance of Stephen Hawking moonwalking than managing to count such figures more than one hand.

Life in Leinster House, you see, has all the dynamism of an over 90's swingers' party, it's purring old boys and the mock solemnity of the parliament's hallowed halls: Floors as shiny as Jacky Healy-Rae's cowlick. Even the very foyer is emblematic of the republic's stagnation. For every Free State turncoat, there's some Anti Treaty gunman gawping at you. They should replace them with the most disturbing works by Francis Bacon they can muster overnight and shake them out of their cosy slumber. Meanwhile big farmers made good and teachers with no other promotion prospects strut around as if being there equates great intelligence or achievement. It doesn't. For many, getting elected involves getting enough yahoos down your local to put a number next to your name and hope that the maths does the rest. Then hold on for dear life so the Taoiseach's aide-de-camp can come wave you bye-bye one your way to the great Dail bar in the sky, whilst the least dimwitted of your offspring assumes what he thinks is rightfully his, which is all bullshit anyway.

George Lee knew this, though maybe not explicitly. Hanging on for dear life, is not about shaking up the system to which you cling. Reforming the banking system is not going to happen. Changing our dependency on construction and manual labour is never going to happen when the decisions politicians are happiest with are ponying up the cash for a John F Kennedy visitors centre or some such parochial nonsense. Two words prove my point: Digital Hub. Nuff said.

You may as well be straight with the electorate and shove off. It was the wrong place to go to, but the right place for him.

Football, the Brits, the War

I go away thinking that the Second World War had become a thing not of memory but of Sunday afternoon war movies that, interestingly, aren't part of the Sunday schedules anymore. That's because they're from my childhood, when there were still enough war veterans around who needed a reminder of their brush with awfulness as they dozed off after their Sunday roast.

They're mostly dead now, and the war is now just a set of cliches that get trotted out when needed. As happened the other day with the German Football teams away strip. You know it's a World Cup year when...

It's black, you see. It's interspersed with bits of gold that to me were redolent of the flag of the liberal German movement of 1848, and of the Urburschenschaft, the first nationalist college fraternity, founded in Jena, whose colours formed the basis of the flag, now used by the democratic Federal Republic. They, on the other hand, thought that the new jersey looked like the uniform of the SS!



I forget that I can read. I forget that I, unlike some yobs the British media pander to, am reasonably historically literate.

One, the SS never trotted around in airtex shorts being told your glory days are behind you. Two, the guys wearing the kit at best had grandparents who were kids during the war. Why trot out this shit? Because there's a world cup, and it's what you do.

A friend of mine asked, what have England and the English media got out of this episode? Getting to annoy the Springer media in Germany, whose title Bild and Die Welt went to town on this story is certainly one significant but not very difficult achievement.

What puzzles me, though, is that this didn't happen when people who remember the war are extremely old. Stranger still, it's only really been going on with the English media since the 1996 European Championship. That time, it lead to the death of a Russian, mistaken for a German in Southampton after England crashed out to the old enemy.

Even still, that was 14 years ago, and little has deviated from this cycle of behaviour in the English press. Given that it's only January, more is set to come.

Martin Cullen cries rape

Martin Cullen. See also: crass, petty, vainglorious, hyperbolic, stupid, bombastic, insulting, egocentric, incompetent, blathering, attention seeking, childish.

Is media intrusion a bad thing? Sometimes. Is it invasive? Yes. Did Minister Cullen feel violated? Maybe. Is it rape? No. Cullen used a word which, frankly, should cost him his job, so obscenely inappropriate and insulting to actual rape victims, was his choice of words. In the meantime, his credibility will just have to do. He managed to demean victims of sex crimes whilst simultaneously creating a sideshow that will divert attention what he claims to champion, namely privacy. He has successfuly scuppered any attempt at reasoned and intelligent debate about privacy, the media, and how to legislate without going all "Spiegel Affair" in the process.

Gobshite.