Yes it works quite well in the American sense of the term too (Photo credit: Slugger O’Toole)
The jokes write themselves. Or maybe jokes isn’t the term I’m looking for. Depressing ironies, that’s it. If his grandfather had been a little more flexible about treaties limiting sovereignty, there wouldn’t be a Fianna Fáil for him to not leave.
I have mixed feelings about this. My admiration for the man would have shot up enormously if he had kept campaigning against the Fiscal Compact, within FF or without. So I see this as a sad caving in to party machine politics, the antithesis of democracy.
But on the other hand, I think it’s good that Fianna Fáil are supporting the Fiscal Compact. Wait! I don’t mean that supporting the Compact is right. I mean that it was probably tempting for them to take a popular stand against it. (It would also have been unforgivably cynical of course, but they have done unforgivably cynical things in the past.) I’m glad they resisted that anyway.
Mainly though, it’s a good thing because it keeps all the bastards on the same side of the fence. I’d hate to find them on mine.
Can you count all the things in this picture that make me angry?
Dropped off the radar again there, sorry. Thanks to some amazing weather for March – I think it reached 20C (68F) today – I’ve been held prisoner in the garden. At least it’s an opportunity to grow a skin. Technically, I don’t have a skin by the time winter ends. More a film.
It’s been a great day too in another sense – former leader Bertie Ahern has resigned from the Fianna Fáil party, on foot of the findings of the tribunal into planning corruption. This is huge, really. If it’s not literally an admission of guilt, it’s at least the admission of guilt he can sue you for calling an admission of guilt.
Too wrecked to go into this right now though, didn’t get any sleep last night to speak of. I’d gone shopping for a phone case online, and naturally I’d noticed small things here and there that would be useful too – a spare battery, a spare charger for the spare battery, a spare spare spare battery charger, so forth. The whole thing had rolled into a pleasant shopping safari, and it was about 4 a.m. by the time I was finally ready to proceed to the checkout. All that remained was to enter my credit card – done – and confirm my shipping address – done – and… Wait.
Of the five things I’d decided to buy, through five different sellers, not one of them would ship to Ireland. Actually it didn’t even tell me this. It just said for each item that there was a problem with my address, so possibly it was five different problems. Messages that vague and unhelpful only qualify as information in the theoretical sense, like yelling in an unknown foreign language. You know that it conveys meaning, but not what or to whom.
So what could I do about it? As mad as it may seem, Amazon.co.uk offers no system for filtering search results by where the seller will ship too. The process of separating the exporters from the non-exporters is essentially trial and error. Which is ludicrous for an online seller, and kept me up until well past dawn. And yet when you go to Amazon from Ireland, they tell you to use Amazon.co.uk. In the end I just bought almost everything elsewhere; a policy I may stick with from now on, at least until the day we finally get an Amazon.ie.
And now it is 4 a.m. all over again. Tomorrow I must go to toil in the fields once more, so farewell.
I don’t know what Bertie Ahern‘s balls are made of, but perhaps we should be using it to generate nuclear energy. For they are massive. He told us today that not preventing the national economic collapse was the fault of the media, because they were too preoccupied with investigating his wrongdoing.
No that’s just awesome. Even Berlusconi must have gasped.
It’s utter nonsense of course. The media were full of voices shouting stop – certainly more so than government. Mr. Ahern is living out a self-justifying fantasy, and his words are as relevant now as, well, pretty much anything else said by a member of Fianna Fáil. With the obvious exception of course of Seán Gallagher. Yes, I think we can regard him as a member still. Though it appears he did resign both from his cumainn¹ and the party’s national executive, he hasn’t exactly distanced himself from the organisation, launching the campaigns of FF party candidates – presumably for a fee – as recently as six months ago.
It looks very likely therefore that his split with the party was not moral or ideological, but pragmatic. He wanted to be elected. To have any chance, he had to lose the stinking albatross-corpse of a Fianna Fáil ticket. And the ruse seems to have worked. People say they will vote for the honestly-really-not-Fianna-Fáil candidate. I don’t know what to say, you’re all mad. Mad, or masochists.
Rather like McGuinness², he’s building foundations for his party’s eventual rehabilitation. Unlike McGuinness though, he might actually win. And if he does, what are the odds of him returning to the party – in a greatly enhanced role – just as soon as his term is over? If not sooner.
