Yearly Archives: 2017

Earlier today.

In the Dáil.

In light of the Jobstown verdict two weeks ago.

Solidarity TD Paul Murphy said:

“It started with politicians. It started with a Labour minister a few hours after the protest, saying it was false imprisonment. It was followed by the Taoiseach saying that it was kidnapping. It was followed by the now Taoiseach saying it was thuggery. It was followed by our lost colleague Noel Coonan describing it as the same as Isis, and it was echoed by large sections of the media.”

“Now Taoiseach, politicians, not courts, politicians have to deal with the consequences. If you believe it’s serious chance, as there is, that the gardai gave false evidence on the stand, will you accept that we have to have an independent, public inquiry.”

In response, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar says:

“Deputy, you had a fair trial. It went on for nine weeks. Your peers heard both sides of the case, the prosecution and the defence and they reviewed the evidence and they acquitted you of false imprisonment. You’re not a victim here…”

Via RTE News

Meanwhile…

Again?

Noel Whelan 

Noel Whelan’s article “Far left’s high profile contrasts sharply with modest electoral reach” describes the Solidarity-PBP grouping as minnows.

The Labour Party has seven seats to Solidarity-PBP’s six. If we combine, as Mr Whelan does in his article, Solidarity-PBP’s seats with those of the Independents 4 Change grouping and other left-wing TDs, the left comfortably outnumbers Labour.

Yet Noel Whelan does not call Labour small fish or “fringe deputies”.

The thuddingly dull comparison between Donald Trump and the left, as constant in your newspaper as the Angelus, on the basis of criticism of the mainstream media, is fatuous.

It should not need to be said that the basis and method of the left’s critique of certain sections of the media differs ever so slightly from Mr Trump’s lying, egomaniacal Twitter outbursts against CNN.

Your columnist manages class snobbery and reverse class snobbery in the one paragraph, suggesting that the kind of people who vote left are not natural Irish Times readers and, heaven forbid, that some left-wing TDs have the temerity to have been born to middle-class backgrounds.

I can assure him that many supporters of the left of all classes read this newspaper, either as its de facto status as the paper of record or as a means to keep abreast of the latest fashionable delusions of the bourgeois hive-mind, of which Noel Whelan is such a stalwart proponent.

Jill Bryson,
Walthamstow,
London.

Yikes.

The Irish left and fringe deputies (The Irish Times letters page)

Related: Far left’s high profile contrasts sharply with modest electoral reach (Noel Whelan, Irish Times, July, 2017)

Rollingnews

This morning.

National Library of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2

Director of the National Library of Ireland Dr Sandra Collins (top left) and Minister for Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Heather Humphreys Tat the announcement of a major redevelopment of the NLI main building to “create storage and preservation conditions necessary to keep the National Collections safe for the long term”.

The project is expected to take four years to complete.

National Library of Ireland

Sam Boal/Rollinngews.ie

To A Troll Who Loves Me

More than the hard luck stories
you hold dearer than the mildewed pillow
you’ve clutched at every night since your teddy bear
escaped on a train bound for Luton or Mallow;

more than your favourite team
hitting first the post, then the bar
in the F.A. Cup final which defined
your shit childhood, you love me more even

than the no one who pays attention to your
poems; more than the land your father
didn’t leave you in his will; more

than the mediocre grades you got despite
having been sufficiently flexible
to sleep with your teacher;

more than all the little people
who, despite your fat
advantages, turned out far better
than you, more than all of these
rolled into one, you want me.

So tonight
you’re a giant sexless toddler throwing
dead animals out of its play pen
in the hope someone
will throw one back;

your mind a no bedroom basement flat
(with kitchenette) which you fill with manic ferrets
and badgers with psychiatric issues
to make the place smell better.

Each time you message me
I kill you by never
having heard of you,
or anyone who’s ever
heard of you

Kevin Higgins

Previously: Kevin Higgins on broadsheet