From top: Afghanis inside a US Air Force transport aircraft in Kabul airport last week; Eamonn Kelly

The week that was.

The Taliban started the week like recovering addicts, promising changed ways and mended fences. But by Wednesday they succumbed to cravings and were back killing innocent people again.

What appears to have happened is that they acquainted themselves with a few broad PR concepts, with the leadership, beards brushed, finally appearing on the world stage as statesmen, talking up tolerance and fair play.

Reporters on BBC and Sky were aghast at what they suspected was a new false front being sported by the Taliban, despite the fact that all political personages wear false fronts as a matter of course. Boris Johnson has such contempt for his own false front that he barely bothers wearing it at all.

Same game, different hairdos. If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.

The Taliban however, simply couldn’t stay on the wagon, falling off in spectacular style, with reports of one woman being murdered for failing to produce a satisfying meal for the men, while protesters were being shot in the streets for attempting to hoist the Afghan national flag.

Taliban spokespersons were suddenly not available for comment. No doubt they have yet to tackle the intricacies of spin units.

The Taliban return must be horrific for families of veterans who died in the attempt to stabilise Afghanistan as a democracy, to see that effort now abandoned like some kind of fad.

No one’s happy with Joe Biden, except maybe Donald Trump, while critics of the US as international policeman must be as perplexed as everyone else by the spectacle of what occurs when they step back from that role.

Music and Sport

In other news, the musicians of Ireland are mightily fed up with apparently being the only remaining cohort to be still subject to covid restrictions, while sports events are being allowed tens of thousands of spectators.

Steve Wall of the Stunning told the IT that musicians need to take to the streets, by which he meant a march on the Dáil, I’m guessing, and not busking. He was facing into the prospect of playing a stadium but only being allowed an audience of 200 people. At that rate the audience and band would be on first name terms by the end of the gig.

Caroline Downey. Director of MCD promotions, told Newstalk that government leaders had basically passed the buck to Nphet. She went on to make the interesting point that the hospitals, due to funding cuts before the pandemic, have been struggling to cope, with the result that Nphet, in the absence of government assertion, are actually reinforcing restrictions to protect the hospitals. It’s a kind of double-whammy of government passivity and neglect.

Covid Confusion

While officials warn of misinformation, Ryan Tubridy, speaking to the Indo and looking forward to the first Late Late Show with an audience, is clearly under the impression that vaccinated people can’t spread the virus, which doesn’t appear to be the case.

Then the IT did a survey asking unvaccinated people their reasons for abstaining, with reassuring answers provided by two medical experts, the oddest being the answer to a man who said he disliked being a guinea pig, to be told that the vaccine had been tested on millions of people, the medical expert apparently not realising that these people had unwittingly acted as guinea pigs too.

To further complicate matters, news from the UK claims that the AstraZeneca vaccine may be only good for 90 days against the Delta variant, but no one is quite sure, while schools now plan to allow kids to attend class without masks or social distancing.

Are athletes and their supporters and schoolkids immune to Covid, while musicians, thespians and their audiences are susceptible to infection? What a discerning virus. It’s almost anti-intellectual.

Tents and Hostels

Dublin city council chief exec, Owen Keegan opined that tents on the streets of Dublin give a poor impression of the city. They certainly do. Who’s creating all these homeless people? Are they creating themselves?

Keegan suggested that there was plenty of homeless accommodation. The real question is, what is wrong with the homeless services that people would choose the street instead?

Most likely it’s because homeless hostels are managed by private companies, and private companies care less about people and more about profit. In an ideal world they’d prefer the profit without the people.

Apparently, Owen Keegan brought this focus onto homeless people when asked about the assault on Olympian Jack Wooley, unfairly linking homelessness to the assault.

It would be so much easier to just build some social housing.

Eamonn Kelly is a Galway-based  freelance Writer and Playwright. His weekly round-up appears here every Monday.

Previously: Eamonn Kelly on Broadsheet

PA/MoD