Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week September 18, 2011
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.72 comments
As expected, the Sindo is up in arms about the candidacy of Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness for the presidency of the southern state (and if it’s true that he was the Chief of Staff at a time when the Provos believed themselves to be the legitimate government of the whole island, would this be a second and reduced version of the presidency for him?) Jim Cusack gets in early with the following reference to the proxy bomb horrors which many believe McGuinness personally authorised.
The IRA’s human bomb, international experts believe, inspired the Islamist suicide bomb tactic — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the first group to use suicide bombers worked closely with the IRA.
It took me all of about 45 seconds using google to confirm that suicide bombings in the modern era predate the first proxy bomb attack. Errant nonsense, and even in Cusack’s own terms surely self-defeating as so patently untrue.
The speech of Eoghan Harris at the Liam Lynch commemoration is printed in the paper. For a man who claims to be rescuing Irish history from distortions, it’s an interesting version of republican history.
Like all republicans since 1916, Liam Lynch never faced the fact that the fundamental problem was not to break the connection with England, but to create a connection with Northern Protestants — who rightly feared a repressive Roman Catholic republic.
I take it this wasn’t the right time to wheel out his connections to Cathal Goulding and the reassessment of republicanism he led in the 1960s.
Jody Corcoran proves himself a master of understatement.
Since the property bubble burst, public sector workers have taken a relative hit to their incomes; numbers employed in the sector have also decreased. As a result, the total pay and pensions bill fell by 10 per cent between 2008 and 2010.
A relative hit? I wonder what he would consider a proper hit. Total expropriation maybe? I’d also like to know what percentage of their wages the Sindo journalists have lost on account of NAMA and the rest.
Finally, Daniel McConnell has an article discussing Fine Gael.
Worse than that, the failure to tackle the public sector unions is an abuse of the mandate given to them by a people who overwhelmingly rejected that policy, long espoused by Fianna Fail in the last decade.
Once again, the Sindo needs some help in distinguishing between a majority in parliament and being the largest party there without one. There was no overwhelming mandate for any attach on the public sector or the unions, no matter how much the Sindo likes to pretend there was. And these are the people from whom we get lectures about democracy every week.
Enough of our leftism… here’s the most worthwhile blog ever… September 17, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Crisps, Culture.11 comments
…seriously. I wish I’d thought up this idea. It’s crispy genius…
Ah crisps… crisps, of course, but crunchy snacks, tortillas, cheezels, onion rings… pretzels [indeed anything like pretzels is good] whatever…
There are health implications. Fats, various. And salts. Much.
My favourites would be these three… first up… these from Walkers. A low fat option, healthy you see. So although they’re a bit dry and the vinegar versions are a bit sharp they’re safer!
Then a great off license standby…[Bacon Fries are also good, but these are better]…
And then these…from Marks and Spencers…black pepper is good.
But there’s more, of course. If you want pop corn, Perri’s is your only man…it’s the pack on the extreme right nestled behind the Onion Rings which are also excellent – if you like that kind of thing…
Aldi have a good range in crunchy crisps but they only come in Cheese and Onion, but would be fantastic in salt and vinegar. Speaking of which, check out these Balance crisps which are also not bad either but particularly good in their Salt and Vinegar incarnation.
The best crisps I ever ate were in Crete back in the mid 1990s, they were Oregano flavoured which sounds challenging no doubt to some but worked out well. I don’t know if these are they, but they are Greek oregano crisps so that fits the bill…
And finally, for your basic good crisps Kings pub crisps are the way to go… a bit salty mind, but a real treat once in a while.
There’s more of course… and I’m not doing any justice to the subject, but read the Crisps blog and you will find many treasures.
This Weekend I’ll mostly be listening to… Ultrasound, Welfare State… September 17, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, This Weekend I'll Mostly Be Listening to....add a comment
Prog is such an… well… ugly word, isn’t it? And yet it covers a multitude. Rush, Porcupine Tree, Hawkwind … all these and more have been squashed with little enough discrimination between them into the category. But consider a somewhat less likely candidate… London based [though with some connection with Newscastle] outfit Ultrasound – appearing for a brief period in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Their debut album, ‘Everything Picture’ was notable for it’s length and reach. A sprawling beast of a thing, one part glam, two parts prog and various parts post-punk. The sound drenched in textures and depth, quite unlike many [perhaps most] of their contemporaries in English indie at the time but providing a link back to a multi-stranded musical heritage that made them a vastly more intriguing proposition. Originally planned as a triple album they somehow managed to compress ‘Everything Picture’ to a double, and if it was an – ahem – challenging listen due to length, intensity of vocals and melodies and whatever, at least it spoke of a certain degree of genuine ambition and with a ragged charm to back it up.
But if that were all there was to them, intensity, endurance, textures, charm and ambition, that might not be quite enough. But the thing about Ultrasound across their career was an ability to construct both long epics and short snappy, almost poppy, singles-like tracks. The songs while immediate often built up of layer upon layer of guitars and vocals but generally achieve a weightlessness – a tribute to Richard Green’s guitar work.
Though not too poppy… lead singer Tiny Wood, a man with a certain presence, has a voice that can be on occasion harsh – and reminiscent of nothing so much as a slowed down Tim Smith of the Cardiacs – a band ploughing a similar musical furrow.
And when I say poppy, I mean poppy in the way that the Pistols or the Damned were poppy, abrasive but catchy. The first thirty seconds of ‘Fame Thing’, with looped vocals, chugging riff and undulating bass line sum it up perfectly – as do the bells that see the song out. Speaking of glam note the samples of Rock’n'Roll on ‘Stay Young’ which positions this as 1999 – for Mr. Glitter’s transgressions were as yet unknown then, though the lyric ‘Gary Glitter’s gone to seed, so who will lead us now?’ seems remarkably prescient at this remove. Listen to ‘Same Band’ and it’s near impossible to see that being composed in the absence of Television or the Damned, and yet it sounds like neither of those bands. It’s more a matter of the dynamics at play and the unhinged quality of the vocals.
And there’s also an hint of folk here and there, as with the verse of ‘Suckle’, with the vocals shared with bassist and co-vocalist Vanessa Best. Throw in some sexual ambiguity, such as the lyric ‘I’d kiss you if you weren’t a girl’ and some sexual explicitness, as on ‘Fame Thing’, and there you have it.
Or not.
The reception to ‘Everything Picture’ was mixed, and the band was already in crisis over personal issues. So perhaps not entirely surprising that they collapsed early in the new century. In a way this made perfect sense. One album, one statement, none of the slow dissipation of myriad other bands.
And if the fact is that they’re back then it’s curiously satisfying that the new songs, on their single ‘Welfare State’ are of such an high standard. More or less the same line up… sans their original keyboardist. Although speaking of keyboardists there’s a most proggy keyboard in the background to the single ‘Welfare State’ a nice little deconstruction of the personal situation of some of them as well as a broader statement.
Anyhow, enjoy.
Welfare State
Floodlit World [Jools Holland]
Fame Thing
Stay Young
Suckle
Cross My Heart
Same Band
Sovereign [BBC session] [Double A-Side with Welfare State - 2011]
The McGuinness candidacy… all good for Sinn Féin…even if they lose… September 16, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics.67 comments
…which by my reckoning they’re quite likely to do. First up let’s accept that this is a bit of a coup. General thinking was that McGuinness wouldn’t run for fear of destabilising the Executive and Assembly. General thinking was wrong.
IELB has an excellent post here which pointed to some aspects of the contest for SF and he predicted that McGuinness would be the candidate. I won’t add much more and I’m echoing a fair bit of what he wrote.
Some consider that this is going to bring front and centre asepcts of the past which SF might be happier left back and to one side. I’m not sure. Given that McGuinness is in government with the DUP one suspects that for the bourgeois sensibilities of this state may be an easier challenge. Maybe not, admittedly, but…
… the man has a modicum of personal charm and in a field notably lacking in charisma, bar perhaps David Norris (and talking to one close enough to his campaign today there was a real sense that he may not make the numbers to become a candidate), that may count for a lot. I mean let’s put it this way, Gay Mitchell as a Chuckle Brother? It does not compute.
Which doesn’t mean he’ll win. An SF first preference vote of 9 per cent isn’t enough by a long shot. And even if we thrown in disenchanted Fianna Fáil voters and various others drawn from all corners of the state he’ll do well to get up into the high teens. But… on the other hand this is a volatile electorate as proven by the General election and this is a contest crying out for some serious political wattage.
And for SF this is proof of two things. Firstly they’re big enough to contest ahead of Fianna Fáil. There’ll be a lot of people watching this and drawing necessary lessons. Secondly that they’re willing to pull out all the stops to emphasise that fact. And a good Presidential campaign for McGuinness even if he loses is going to be a good election campaign for Sinn Féin.
It really is just beginning to get interesting.
ADDENDUM… one more thought. They really do have an enormous advantage being able to push their capable people around the island like this. As evidenced by Gerry Adams arriving in the Dáil it reaps dividends for them.
What a fragile flower liberalism is… September 16, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in British Politics.1 comment so far
…for evidence of same look no further than this comment in the most recent editorial of uber-liberal, albeit scampering rightwards as fast as its feet can carry it, Prospect magazine about the riots in the UK.
It has not been a good month for liberals. Britain’s riots brought calls for tougher policing and challenged tolerance of immigration.
‘challenged tolerance of immigration‘? Really? What had ‘immigration’ to do with them?
Seeing as we were talking about taxation… September 16, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, The Left.3 comments
… on foot of this piece here… I was interested in Simon Jenkins piece in the Guardian last Friday. Now let’s be clear, Jenkins is no man of the left, quite the opposite, and I’m not a fan, but he made in what was a reasonable enough article about taxation the following point:
When Margaret Thatcher’s government first cut the top rate from 83p to 60p in 1979, the rich thought they had gone to heaven. When in 1988 Nigel Lawson planned ot cut it to 40 p, Thatcher, according to her biographer, ‘privately had her doubts and would have settled for 50p’.
And he notes that ‘…while it is at the upper end of the European scale, most of Europe’s rich pay far higher local taxes than the British’.
If we need an example of how far we have fallen, how far the debate on these issues has fallen, and not merely in the Republic, but particularly here, then we need only consider the hesitation that Thatcher expressed at implementing a 40 p in the pound higher income tax rate.
It’s not that I have any illusion that she was wedded for ethical or social equity reasons to this, although the fact that something was staying her hand suggests that she was unsure that others wouldn’t resile at it, but that she recognized that were limits. Note too that this was in 1988, a full decade after she had come to power at the 1979 General Election.
It’s stunning to reflect how even after those ten years she still hesitated, still was concerned that a broad social consensus about taxes might stymie her and her Chancellor’s forward movement.
But as important the lesson to draw is this. If there was indeed a Thatcher revolution then it powered along for the vast number of her years in office on taxation rates that are anathema to orthodox opinion now. As indeed, as I noted on Saturday, did this society during the 1990s – and both at standard and higher rates of income tax.
If nothing else this suggests that there is a strongly fetishistic aspect to the discourse about taxation rates from the orthodoxy, again pointed up by Stephen Collins remarkably imaginative analysis and interpretation on Saturday, and one which is actually much much more open to being deconstructed usefully by the left.
This Week At The Irish Election Literature Blog September 16, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Irish Election Literature Blog.Tags: Irish Politics
2 comments
Starting off this week with some old Cumann na nGaedheal leaflets and posters, a sample of an exhibition currently on at Tiesan Cafe (46b Harrington st, Dublin 8).
From 1973 a leaflet from Labours Flor O’Mahony and Barry Desmond who were running in Dun Laoghaire. If you read the profile of O’Mahony it includes “…has also worked for itinerant settlement in the area” . I couldn’t imagine any candidate in Dun Laoghaire boasting of that now.
from the past to the future and another horror from Ogra FF
A leaflet concerning Connolly Hospital in Blanchardstown from Sinn Fein candidate in the forthcoming Dublin West by-election Paul Donnelly
and finally “Labour’s Shame” a leaflet from the SWP
and a late addition…. a 2011 Seanad flyer from Fianna Fails new ‘Independent’ Presidential aspirant Labhrás Ó Murchú
Sóivéidí na hÉireann September 15, 2011
Posted by irishelectionliterature in Irish Politics.Tags: Irish History
1 comment so far
Given the debate elsewhere on the site about the Soviets I thought this may be of interest.
This documentary was shown on TG4 a year or two back.
Sóivéidí na hÉireann – Soviet Ireland.
A programme about the ways in which the Russian Revolution influenced the working class of Ireland during the Tan War period. Workers took possession of factories and other workplaces around the country and soviets were declared, democratic councils under the workers’ control.
SLIGO – 100 YEARS OF STRUGGLE 17th September September 15, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.2 comments
A Public Meeting to mark the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Sligo branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (I.T. &.G.W.U.) will take place in the Glasshouse Hotel, Sligo on this Saturday the 17th September at 8.00.p.m.
Speakers at the event, which is being organised by the People First/United left Alliance will include Dr John Cunningham, (author and historian NUI Galway) Cllr Declan Bree, Sligo, and Mr Brian Scanlon (Sligo I.T.G.&W.U and SIPTU activist). Mr Ross Gildea, the general secretary of People First will preside at the meeting.
Speaking today Mr Gildea said “The meeting will cover matters relating to the foundation and growth of the branch, the 1913 Sligo Dock Strike and the development of the broad labour and trade union movement over the decades.”
“The Sligo branch of the I.T.G.&.W.U. was founded at a meeting organised by John Lynch and the Trades Council which was chaired by the Mayor of Sligo on the 17th of September 1911.” said Mr Gildea
“Jim Larkin’s colleague Walter Carpenter, who was an I.T.G.W.U. Organiser and Secretary of the Socialist Party of Ireland, was the main speaker at the founding meeting. The then Bishop of Elphin Dr Clancy, described Carpenter as “an imported mischief maker” in the course of a sermon on the dangers of Socialism.
“John Lynch, who worked closely with the founders of the union James Larkin and James Connolly, became Secretary of the Branch and within a short time he was elected to the I.T.G.&W.U. Executive for Connacht.
“The significant growth in membership and the establishment of additional branches of the Union throughout county Sligo reflected the growing militancy of working people who had been subjected to unacceptable treatment by employers and the state. Given the current economic and political climate in Ireland it’s clear that we have much to learn from those early pioneers of the labour movement.” Mr Gildea said.
And with one, or nineteen*, bounds – he may be back! David Norris, redux. September 15, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics.16 comments
I’d not put much store in reports of David Norris reentering the race, but so much for my powers of political prediction. For we learn that following his meeting this morning with the Independent TDs and Senators he may be on the point of reentering the Presidential contest.
It is understood that Senator David Norris told Independent TDs in Leinster House this afternoon that he is once again seeking their support to run for the Presidency.
Senator David Norris made no comment after his meeting with TDs in the Dáil Technical Group.
And the Irish Times noted that:
The surprise move comes ahead of an expected appearance on RTÉ’s Late Late Show tomorrow night where he will be asked about his presidential ambitions.
There’s a couple of points about this that are worth noting. Firstly that Norris believes that he has a whisper of a chance. He may well be right. There’s no question that his candidacy of all to date is the one which most caught at least some spark of imagination amongst the public. How else to explain his consistently high poll ratings both before, and most crucially after, the debacle of his campaign. But where do the numbers come from? His first bid fell asunder in part because three TDs withdrew support for his nomination. Hard to see them changing their minds I would have thought.
But, secondly, it would appear that the Independents, or at least some of them, believe that Norris also has a whisper of a chance. For some of those Independents there’s been a sense of Norris as their great lost opportunity…his candidacy and departure evinced statements from some of our more shy and retiring Independents where other issues haven’t. Finian McGrath’s position in all this is of particular interest. As the man who positioned himself front and centre of the original Norris campaign he had to backtrack sharply – in part due to pressure from members of his own political group in his constituency. I can’t see that pressure diminishing.
Actually looking at McGrath’s words this afternoon… well.. hmmm…
“David made a presentation and then there was a big discussion on the issues and the issues that happened,” Mr McGrath said. “David was very gracious and very magnanimous even with people like myself that he disagreed with. But he asked people for their support because he is considering entering the race again.”
Among the issues raised were the controversial letter Mr Norris wrote to an Israeli court seeking clemency for a former partner facing a charge of statutory rape which led to his withdrawal from the election last month.
….“I would say there would be some individuals in the room that will support her [Davis],” Mr McGrath said. He said some of the Independents could be faced with a dilemma if approached by an aspiring candidate who was just short of the required 20 signatures of Oireachtas members.
“They mightn’t necessarily agree with somebody but they might sign it to ensure that there is an inclusive election,” he said.
Thirdly one might wonder if the slow drumbeat in the Sunday Independent promoting a Norris candidacy has paid dividends. There’s little more depressing than to see one E. Harris championing Norris, and for obvious, frankly almost stereotypical reasons in terms of how Harris perceives is his signification as regards national issues.
But there are issues. Norris if he reenters the field is not coming back into the rather more congenial environment that he left. The other two independents, Gallagher and Davis, are now safely ensconced and ready to roll. Sinn Féin, playing an absolute blinder in terms of raising their profile by what in any other context would appear like almost heroic proportions of dithering over their candidate are most likely to present a real challenge [not in terms of likelihood of winning but in terms of vote getting] . Though they could square the circle by saying they’re willing to go for Norris – an outcome which I find enormously unlikely.
Obviously no one on this blog is in the slightest position to give advice that will be heeded by Norris, but if I had the opportunity for one thought it would be the following: if there are any skeletons remaining in the cupboard, any at all, get them out there immediately and get past them as best as is feasible.
If he does get back into the race this will present some interesting choices for people – oddly enough I was talking to someone from an LP background today who on hearing the news thought he had a good chance of running away with it. Who knows?
One oddity. Mary Davis, who already has the nod from four local authorities to run met the Independent TDs and Senators as well this morning. I presume that was simply to build more support for her bid, or perhaps a way to try to outflank a revived Norris candidacy. Clever whatever way one cuts it.
Anyhow, whatever else this Presidential campaign hasn’t been dull. And in truth it’s hardly even started yet.
Roll on the Late Late Show, words I have never thought to write or say before.
*Independent TDs [excluding the bould Naughton]… let’s not get into the various Independent Senators…
