Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week May 23, 2010
Posted by Garibaldy in media.trackback
A much improved range of stupid statements this week, leading to the exclusion of several very silly pieces that probably merited a mention. I found Harris’ childish column entertaining in parts though. And the ghosts of Harrises past were certainly raised by his concluding remark about the need to talk about banks less and factories more.
Apparently the way to solve the ills of Irish history is for “Paddy” to support England in the World Cup. I thought sport had already rescued poor Paddy from the traumas of his past when the England rugby team played at Croke Park, but apparently not.
Because I believe there is that deeper happiness out there for Paddy, if he chooses to seize it. A happiness that comes from liberating himself from old grievances, real or imaginary, from giving generous support rather than taking sickly pleasure in the misfortunes of others — with that attitude, how could we have any luck?
As for myself, I’ll be supporting the team of a real republic. France.
Eamon Delaney criticises people for concentrating on trinkets and meaningless gestures to exaggerate our cultural differences with the British. Rejoining the Commonwealth would not of course be a meaningless gesture, but a major move to remove partition, heal the divisions on the island, and show what a mature independent state the Free State has grown up to become in the last 90 years. Just like not booing the Queen when it was played at Croke Park.
The Reform Group will probably be ridiculed for their suggestion and it is hard to have a rational discussion on the topic, without bar-stool nationalists getting roused. But for many others it’s a no-brainer: Ireland has never been as harmoniously close as to the UK as it is now, and we should never have left the loose association of the Commonwealth, especially since we helped to design the actual thing with Kevin O’Higgins, way back after our independence — and in tandem with it.
My jaw dropped when I read this from Marc Coleman, part of a column complaining about too heavy a reliance on economists with Phds. I haven’t been able to close it yet.
Academia must also change. The obsession with producing only PhDs is the main reason the crisis happened.
Stupid Statement of the Millenium?
It’s ironic that Harris gets worked up about fellatio in a column that also concentrates (once again) on one Bertie Ahern… People will start to talk.
Apparently the way to solve the ills of Irish history is for “Paddy” to support England in the World Cup. Shite – the Sindo are gonna scupper my entrepreneurial initiaves once again. I was gonna ship a couple of containerloads of knocked-off replica Algeria jerseys from Marseille in time for the group matches.
Have to divert them to Scotland now.
As for myself, I’ll be supporting the team of a real republic. France. assez de la provocation Garibaldy. Think of all my efforts over here – spitting in their faces every time they offer me some shite Les bleus card in the supermarkets…
I guess there might be a natural affinity with Algeria given the amount of mixing of religion and politics there too.
As for Les Bleus. I’m a republican in the French tradition. I believe in the guillotine. (to steal a joke from a comrade).
I guess there might be a natural affinity with Algeria given the amount of mixing of religion and politics there too.
Yep – the Algerian War of Independance is often summed up by lazy Anglo-Saxon commentators as having been the ‘French Northern Ireland’… I suspect though that had the Crown Forces conducted themselves in NI as the French did in Algeria – we Paddies really would have something to whinge about :-<
I’m a republican in the French tradition. I believe in the guillotine As long as Thierry Henry gets his left hand seen to just after that feckin’ Swedish ref – with his whistle in his gob… Not like we Paddies tend to bear a grudge or anything.
Having read the Declan Lynch piece though – not too sure it’s ‘stupid statement’ material… didn’t find it all that poor an article. Mention of a head from Alan Mullery in 1966 may also be keeping the fellatio sub-theme going.
Correction – head by Alan Mullery in 1970 – not 1966…
Yep, there are a lot of overheated comparisons with NI. Palestine, South Africa, Nazi Germany. It’s like exaggerated comparison bingo.
As for the Lynch thing. The Paddy thing pissed me off. As does the idea that we should support England to prove how enlightened and modern etc we are. It’s not daring, or iconoclastic, or whatever else he and others think they are being. It is just, in my view, inane. These people (smug liberals for want of a better term) don’t realise they are the establishment now. It’s not the 1960s or 1970s anymore. And even back then, they were behind the times, with socialists saying pretty much everything they think they invented well in advance of them.
The Paddy thing pissed me off
It’s also terminology that Ruth Dudley Edwards like to use. One would think that it would have died out in the PC age, but…
Lynch, I don’t think, has much to do with liberalism in any form. He strikes me as a committed Anglophile, pining for Empire, of the Myers sort.
Anybody on here who is criticising Declan Lynch is talking horseshit. Lynch is the reason I bought the Sindo for years. Him and Eamon Sweeney.
Lynch on football, alcoholism, gambling, and little oul’ lads and their pints and fags is an excellent writer.
He has no place whatsoever in any Stupid Statement of the Week list. Anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t have a sense of humour or didn’t grow up in the Ireland me (and Declan) grew up in.
And finally, he is sound on the national question.
Delaney:
So, in a sense, it marries the twin poles of Irish culture in a way that the Reform Group wants to do politically.
Delaney was in Foreign Affairs, so cannot be unaware that rather than seeking to “marr[y] the twin poles of Irish culture” Reform are a motley collection of crypto-Unionists and English nationalists (look at their membership).
I would not be at all be surprised to find out in years to come that several of their members were active, willing agents of influence (as the term goes) for the British government here during the Troubles.
Actually I think Declan Lynch has a point (ie about supporting England). Not that I think Irish people should neccessarily support England, but I’ve never been impressed by the lazy patriotism of those who booed England at soccer. I was wondering what concrete efforts such people had made in the name of Mother Ireland.
The Commonwealth piece is vintage Sindo. A collection of half-arsed cliches and non-sequiters from beginning to end.
The Reform movement is “plucky”? It is essentially the Dublin and Wicklow Orange Lodge, is it not?
Why not just rejoin the United Kingdon if Ireland and Britain are so similar. You really get the feeling with Reform and their supporters that they would have preferred the Empire to have won the War of Independence. I wish they would just say so.
One other thing – since when do cultural similarities with an entity mean you have to have political allegiances? If I am a celtic fan I should favour some kind of union with the UK should I?
I happen to like American TV series – should I therefore give unequivoval backing to the American war in Afghanistan?
I like Shish Kebabs – should I therefore become some kind of crazed Turkish nationalist, denying the Armenian holocaust etc etc
It’s fun to cheer on whoever is playing England though. The Scots feel the same.
I like your description of a vintage Sindo piece. Bang on.
And btw, didn’t the British win the Anglo-Irish war anyway?
Yes, the Reform Movement is a front for the Dublin and Wicklow Orange Lodge. In fact the RM’s site used to be hosted on the latter’s website.
The guilotine could really do a lot of good in this country. I propose it be limited to 100 people and no more.
(Did any one every read the Don Camillo books – Pepone with his list for the wall. Dont know what that comes to mind but heh. )
I read a heap of them many years ago and really liked them. I wonder what I’d think of them now. Interesting experiment to get a copy.
I remember the one where they go to Russia. Don’t remember the list though.
Garibaldy – surely we have enough material at this point to compile a Top Ten of reasons the Sindo thinks the country is down the toilet? So far, I can think of:
1) The unions
2) “Negativity”
3) The public sector
4) “Eggheads”
I’m sure that there’s more (and better) out there.
thats good. But “Provos” should be in there too. By “Provos” I of course include anyone who disagrees with the notion that the Black and Tans were not the most enlightened counter-insurgency force of all time, and thinks that Daniel O’Connell was anything but a reactionary anti-protestant bigot.
Admittedly they’ve slacked off on that front recently, focussing instead on the hitherto unrecognised great evil of public sector workers.
Maybe environmental protestors too? Although I guess they could fall under “negativity”.
Well last week they were all too keen, indeed in Harris’s case explicitly to suggest that Éirígí were ‘Shinners’. To put the fear of God into ordinary decent folk. Those Shinners… even when they’re not… they are!
Environmental protestors certainly go on the list (as “tree huggers”). Shinners and “All of us” make up nos. 6 and 7… Brian Cowen (how did I miss him?) surely makes no. 8. Not sure about the bankers question – can anyone shed more light with a few quotes?
Those Shinners… even when they’re not… they are!
I’d say that only defence of Bertie Ahern and the chance to have a go at “shinners” (even makey-up ones) gets the Svengali of Talbot Street out of bed in the mornings.
It sure feels like that. I had the misfortune to read the ‘print’ version of the Sunday Independent from last week this weekend at a relatives. And that did seem to be the motive force.
I think, depending on what mood they are in, you can also add elements of the government, the bankers and “all of us”. Usually, the criticisms turn to praise the next week though.
Harris is a cunning linguist but yet reality-challenged:
“An excessive emphasis on the financial system, at the expense of the economy”-
So the financial system is not part of the economy. Laughable.
Probably quite a common view though, whereby speculators are considered parasites but business is something completely different which embodies efficiency and productivity.
Its one thing to claim the financial system is not productive; its quite another to claim its not part of the economy.
Not completely different, but different in important ways.
There are conflicts of interest between capital invested in making things and capital invested in every-increasingly baroque ways of extracting interest and speculative gains.
Does anyone here think that the German authorities may be for real in trying to spread restrictions on finance capital’s scope for profits into the wider European sphere? If so, do they have a snowballs?
They’re for real in trying. But Britain will never allow it, as any such European-wide restrictions would be restrictions on the City, and most such transactions take place there. Confining such restrictions to the eurozone, or to Germany would have little effect. Cameron comes from a long line of financiers, and many of his party have close City ties.
“I thought sport had already rescued poor Paddy from the traumas of his past when the England rugby team played at Croke Park, but apparently not.”
+1. And I say that as someone who will be cheering for England!
My jaw dropped when I read this from Marc Coleman, part of a column complaining about too heavy a reliance on economists with Phds.
Professor Karl Whelan is also gobsmacked.
Brian Lucey is also impressed:
Economists shouldn’t really lose count at “about five” though….
Generally, yeses. But this was five wrongs in a 13-word sentence.
When you are conferred with an economics Ph.D. in this country, as part of a mind-bending initiation ceremony, you are tattooed with a secret mark on your arm.
Press it and ….
Morgan Kelly appears!
As for myself, I’ll be supporting the team of a real republic. France.
You could always root for the US of A, who will open their World Cup with a win over England.
If you folks can’t root for America at this World Cup what was the point of us electing Obama?
DPRK anyone?
Has to be Italy for me.
Or France.
Or Cote d’Ivorie.
España, sin dudas.
A final between them and an African team would be a fitting climax.
Tengo muchas, muchas dudas.
The irony of all this self-congratulatory shoneenism in the Sunday (not so) Independent is the shameless hibernocentrism of it all. Although they repudiate the nationalist historiography, they still seem to see Ireland at the centre of the universe. Rejoining the Commonwealth would not bring Ireland ‘closer’ to Ulster unionists, much less Britain. It would viewed mostly with indifference. Even the most right-wing British Tories I know care nothing for Commonwealth; indeed Enoch Powell championed British withdrawal from the organization. If anything the Commonwealth is popularly associated with the hated mass immigration of the 60s and 70s, a result of allowing Commonwealth citizens freedom of entry to the UK. The Commonwealth that Ireland “helped to design” died in with 1950 with the re-admission of India as an independent Republic and the London Declaration. The so-called “New Commonwealth” is a very different entity from the “Old Commonwealth”. It’s even anticipated that after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the next monarch will not assume the role of nominal Head of the organization, which will go to a non-British president. The whole trend in Commonwealth circles is to actively show that the organization is a truly post-colonial organization, and how Britain’s role is steadily reducing while the Commonwealth is transformed into more an international fraternity than the residue of an Empire. A laudable aim, but we do not need another gravy train for politicians.
‘I found Harris’ childish column entertaining in parts though.’ Is a bit of ‘prole-iar than thou’ posturing still enough to win the master plaudits from WP members?
I’d doubt it.
Ah come on Garibaldy, how the fuck did you miss this? It’s got Trotsky, Provos, Kronstadt, Finland, Nick Cohan, Robert Service and John Paul McCarthy!
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/dail-protest-mob-channel-sinister-spirit-of-trotsky-2191159.html
Not to mention Gerry Healy…
J P McCarthy did a review of the TV show “Deadwood” for the
Dublin Review of Books. Not sure what to make of it (I hardly
ever watched it):
http://www.drb.ie/contribute.aspx?id=3b48423d-5a0c-4cbd-bf0e-1df85d3cb02b
Did Trotsky agree with killing people, Im shocked.
In my defence, there’s a thin line between Stupid Statement of the Week, and Totally Insane Statement of the Week. But there may have been an oblique reference to this in the first sentence of the piece.
I don’t know, perhaps we should have ‘Totally Insane Statement of the Week”
You couldn’t make it up:
The headline above also suggests some sort of seance was taking place at the Dáil two weeks ago
The headline above also suggests some sort of seance was taking place at the Dáil two weeks ago
Harris was saying that he’s been down to the Senate (for dinner), and someone in the Indo newsroom misheard him.