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.