Tag: Ireland

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Politics

Queen’s Greatest Hats

World's constitutional monarchies coloured by ...
These Countries Have A Special Magic Person

It’s not that I didn’t care about the royal visit. I had really strong feelings. It’s just that they were so contradictory, they averaged out somewhere near ‘Meh’.

So it was a good thing mostly. I was irritated by commentators who gushed like it was the second coming of Elizabeth Christ, beginning of the end of all our troubles. (Slightly disorientating that this coincided with America’s latest rapture attack.) I’m sure that it will be good for our image abroad and for tourism especially, will demonstrate that the Irish still know how to entertain even – perhaps especially – when times are tough. If everything goes well with the Obama visit too, I think this whole summer will be remembered as one brilliant PR coup.

But like all true democrats, I’m a republican (try explaining that in the US), and find the idea of ‘constitutional monarchy‘ bizarre. Genuine monarchy at least has the excuse that it’s what happens when someone wins a fight. But for a self-proclaimed democracy to maintain the post of hereditary pretend-ruler… Well basically it’s just silly, a sort of national charade. This may look like a nice little old lady, but we’re all pretending she’s magic. I resent being required to play along.

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Politics

The Pain In Spain

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn (...
So I said "How about this for fiscal rectitude"'

So protestors march by, chanting that Ireland is in solidarity with Spain against the EU-IMF bailout. Wait – don’t you usually express solidarity with someone in their troubles, not your own? That’s a bit like shaking hands with a mourner at a funeral and telling them your car needs a new clutch.

But I am qibbling over a choice of words. It is good that people are at least protesting, whether it be against the Spanish government’s cuts, our own bailout conditions, or – to go for the common thread – the destructive role that the financial industry now plays in western economies. Perhaps it will even make the news. Second or third item after after the nation waving a tearful goodbye to her majesty Queen Elizabeth.

Wouldn’t want to spoil that image of us quietly taking the fiscal punishment we deserve.

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Politics

And That Completes The Set

garret-fitzgerald1
The Way We Were

And that completes the set. Now there are no honest politicians left at all.

Maybe I exaggerate a trifle, but Garret Fitzgerald did seem different. Even though he led a right-of-centre party, even though he could give the impression of being confused and ineffectual, even though he didn’t achieve much of what he set out to, he was the greatest leader that Ireland has had in my memory. There was never any doubt that Garret’s motivation was not personal power, status or wealth. He wasn’t there to be liked by his coterie or cheered by the the masses. He was there to do something about the mess the country was in.

He did that, and he was still liked anyway. Though the sobriquet ‘Garret The Good’ was intended to lampoon his earnestness, no one doubted that it was true. This was a good man in politics. A man who did more than anyone to free Ireland from religious domination, who first dared to attempt what finally bore fruit as the Peace Process. That rarest of things, an intellectual in a leadership role.

And in 1987, the voters of Ireland decided that they would actually prefer to be ruled by Charles Haughey. So perhaps we deserve all that has come since.

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Humour Politics

Delicious


Government Wants Historic Building

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Technology

Good Morning, Afternoon

A nice spot to have breakfast. Admittedly it’s the time of day when most people are having Sunday dinner, but I was up until 8.00. Thwarted just when I thought I was finished by a hard disk error. I’ll spare you the gory details.

(Edited to add: That there by the way is Neachtains, my local pub, and a view down Quay Street. Just out of shot is the river and Galway Bay.)

Categories
Politics

Royal Pain

Royal standard of members of the British Royal...
At Least The Royals Have Standards

A woman on the radio is going to Britain for their royal wedding, so she can see all the best people there decked out in fine clothes and jewellery, and get away from all the doom and gloom here that was brought about by greed.

Can she not make mental connections?

I shouldn’t listen to Liveline¹, it’s a form of masochism. It’s obvious that the producers choose the most irritating callers deliberately. Royalty fans now. Even leaving aside the whole problem of the stealth recolonization of Ireland via television,  how can anyone, anywhere in the current universe be a fan of royalty? Its entire basis is the idea that some people are born innately superior to others, that they inherit the necessary qualities – or even the God-given right – to rule us. That idea is anathema. How exactly does it differ from racism?

The British royal family may be an amusing burlesque these days, but when you think about it what it stands for is actually shocking. So no, though it does represent a mostly positive change in relations between our countries, I won’t be out to look at the Queen of England when she comes to visit here. A nice old lady she may be perhaps, but she is also a symbol of – to speak plainly – evil.

  1. The most popular phone-in radio show in Ireland.
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Cosmography Technology

Fish and The Blues – Both Better Raw

I’m sorry, I begin so many of these posts by describing where I’m eating. It seems like the only opportunity to write I get these days. Today particularly – I was working flat out from ten-thirty till seven, with only one brief break for a coffee and a banana.

But I’m making up for it now. A plate of sushi in Wa Café, the other Japanese place in my neighbourhood. Excellent nigiri here. I’m no connoisseur of Japanese cuisine, but sometimes it just tastes better than others. I particularly love the mackerel. I don’t think I’ve ever had raw mackerel in sushi before – or indeed, in any circumstances – and so perhaps it’s not traditional, but it was exquisite. There was salmon and tuna too. No squid, octopus or prawn, but that’s perhaps as well. I think I enjoy the idea of eating those more than the actual experience.
So tired…
Anyway, my new project. I am rescuing a net café. Yeah I’ve fixed computers before. This weekend, while other folks go about their religious observances, I must try to raise a whole roomful of the beggars from the dead. I will be Computer Christ.
It’s a biggie. Basically this net café started out with a healhy stock of twenty computers. Inattention over the quiet winter months has seen this dwindle to just eight… And as I mentioned, tourism has picked up of a sudden. They need functioning machines to coin money with. So twelve computers in one weekend. Can it be done? Well I got four done today and it’s a long weekend, so if I can keep up that pace…

Fuck what a sound! Sorry. Since I started writing I’ve drifted down to the new blues bar in Wood Quay, Muddy Maher’s (where the Stage Door used to be) because I heard some friends were playing. The Prodigal Blues band: Niceol Blue, Mark Molloy et al. I just heard them warm up there, and was impressed. Reminded more of Led Zeppelin than anything else. Niceol is sexy like Robert Plant was sexy, but with the considerable added advantage of being a girl.
This will keep me awake until bedtime.

Categories
Technology

Thumbs Up

QWERTY keyboard layout - homes keys - Start po...
WRONG

So let’s see can I do this and cross the street at the same time… OK, no collisions thus far. Bicycles are the worst. Silent and deadly. Like woodlice.

Yes I’m blogging while walking again, using my phone’s thumboard – that is, a keyboard the right size for typing with your thumbs. This time though I’m in an urban environment, which is even more stupid. (Please do not try this at home. Richard is a trained stuntgeek.) Of course we’ve all entered text while walking, on our phones. Some of us have also tried it using the handwriting recognition on a tablet PC, which works pretty well. In terms of speed though the thumboard beats both hollow. It takes two hands, but if you’re texting on an ordinary phone the other hand is idle anyway. Or should be.

So though thumboards may be perceived as unfeasibly cramped they’re actually more useful than the larger keyboards you’ll find on things like netbooks, which are still too small for touch typing but too wide to be used like this. They’re a great invention and deserve a bit more respect.

But back to the local colour. I’m walking via the campus, site of my undistinguished but enjoyable academic career. Those four years seemed to go on forever, yet somehow I could still never find time to study. The place has expanded almost out of recognition since then, and hoardings up now promise that when complete it will be the largest school of engineering in Ireland. Shame, I preferred it as a university.

He may be a geek folks, but he’s still an arts grad.

Categories
Humour Politics

Keep The Profit, Share The Blame

We All PartiedSo the Nyberg report into our banking industry says that borrowers as well as lenders were to blame for the crisis. Fair enough I suppose. After all, it’s not like the banks lent money to people who didn’t ask for it.

Oh wait. They did.

A tramp living in a sherry bottle could borrow money in that market. Hell, they offered a ‘pre-approved’ loan to me. While many borrowed foolishly or even greedily, the greater part of the blame must surely fall on the professionals. Your bank was traditionally expected to advise you on your financial interests. It was not supposed to push debt on you, take your indebtedness and repackage it as an asset, use that to raise money, declare this a profit and pay themselves enormous bonuses. A basic trust was broken there. Not to mention a law of thermodynamics.

A proportion too has to belong to the institutions overseeing the industry – the regulators of course, but ultimately the Department of Finance. They were astonishingly lax while all this was going on, and we still aren’t being told why. (The role of government was beyond Nyberg’s remit, strangely.)

Do we really need to ask though, when politicians party with and parties are funded by people who were making enormous profits  from all this? The nod and the wink is the Morse code of Irish governance, messages flew back and forth across the wealth-to-power hotline. You’ll go a bit easy there on the regulation. Wouldn’t want to kill the golden goose, or look a gift horse in the mouth, or whatever stupid aphorism they used.

When you get a gift horse as mysteriously generous as this you shouldn’t look it in the mouth, no. You should shove a telescope right up its bum. Nobody rocked the boat because the boat was full of money.

Categories
Humour

God, The Sun!

Toasted Heretic Point Out The Profound Lack of Iberian Influence

At a Spanish café near the Spanish Arch, eating… scrambled eggs. I could have had an omelette but things were already getting out of hand. A tourist had come up to me and asked directions to Galway’s ‘Iberian style’ cathedral. He did mean the modern 60s one, I checked. His guidebook must be Europe On Drugs, I’m not seeing aything remotely Iberian about it. Frankly I don’t think it’s in any consistent taste whatever, except Questionable Irish-American. No seriously, the thing has what to every appearance is a shrine to John F. Kennedy.

Today though is for worshipping that most primal of gods, the sun. The best kept secret about the Irish climate is that it is frequently much better in April than it is in August. At this time of year it either rains or it’s hot. Of course, it can rain a lot… Last Monday we had cloudbursts – of hail, even. Including one right in the middle of my mother’s driving test, which didn’t help.

But this is infinitely preferable in my book to the overcast that can last throughout the ‘summer’ proper. It’s to be expected I suppose in a country that sits in a bowl of Atlantic. The summer sun on that water drives off so much vapour that it blocks the heat and light from us. So infuriating to be cold in mid-July, knowing that just beyond the great grey shell there’s a solar furnace at maximum. Nature can be a curse.

I call it a secret, but someone seems to have been blabbing. It’s thick with tourists around here already. Cúirt is on of course, but you don’t expect literary festivals to bring the horde down on you. Maybe there are more domestic holidaymakers than usual, what with The Economy.

Certainly seemed to be a lot of people out clubbing last night. Even though I picked the quietest route back from Salthill I still had to walk around two broken Bucky bottles. Buckfast tonic wine – the party drink made by monks. Maybe people drink it for the irony. Or possibly the sulphury. Must be something like that anyway; it tastes bloody awful.

Irony, and caffeine. The Bucky in a brown bottle, which for some reason is unique to Ireland, actually contains more caffeine by volume than Red Bull. And remember people dilute Red Bull, by adding vodka to it. So that’s why you see broken bottles everywhere. It’s not the 15% alcohol content that makes people clumsy. It’s the caffeine shakes.