Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week February 28, 2016
Posted by Garibaldy in Sunday Independent Stupid Statement of the Week.trackback
Clearly a lot of the Sindo stuff was written before the results came in, and so the real comedy/stupidity is likely to come next week. Having said that, there is this.
There’s no doubt Adams must have a certain intelligence, the kind that makes you a good strategist for a terrorist organisation and a peace process. But watching over the last few weeks, the only real conclusion you come to is that he is, in certain ways, a bit of a bimbo. So it was certainly an enormous mistake for Sinn Fein to pay along with the presidential-style campaign.
Whatever Gerry Adams is, this is ludicrous.
And Jody Corcoran has drawn the obvious conclusion from the results.
The origins of the divide between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are more profound than those which emerged after the civil war.
Historians have argued it goes back further than that, to the different traditions linked to the arrival in Ireland of Anglo-Norman and new English to clash with the ‘native’ Gaelic people.
Fianna Fail is the embodiment of that native spirit; it is entwined in the DNA of our people. In a way, Fianna Fail is Ireland and Ireland is Fianna Fail.
Mental.
I’m sure Corcoran can supply a reading list of `historians’ who have argued for this genetic division between FF and FG.
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There was something, years ago, about the mostly Gaelic origins of FF politician names and the mostly Old English origins of FG politicians.
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It’s an intriguing theory. Notice the huge difference between Eugene MURPHY of Fianna Fail and Dara MURPHY of Fine Gael, Catherine BYRNE of Fine Gael and Malcolm BYRNE of Fianna Fail, Aine COLLINS of Fine Gael and Niall COLLINS of Fianna Fail. Compromise between two such genetically diverse entities is obviously impossible. Nice to see the Civil War being recast as a scrap between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
Renua are presumably the Firbolgs, once warlike and now extinct.
And if Ireland is Fianna Fail you’d expect them to do a bit better than forty seats.
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If Renua were the Fir Bolg, then who takes the role of the Formorians?
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The Social Democrats, like Balor they’ve only got one I.
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The Healy-Raes are the Tuatha de Danann; 30,000 first preference votes. Magic is the only explanation.
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Which I guess makes Shorthall Breas the Beautiful – formerly of the Tuath (Labour) but having parted ways, now leading an attack against the fair gods with a band of monsters.
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“Irish Politics today are not politics; our two main parties are indistinguishable not because their political ideas are alike but because neither has any political idea at all – warriors of destiny and the race of the Gaels – silly romantic titles that confess a complete intellectual vacancy as far as the reality of political ideas are concerned”.
-Sean O’Faolain, 1945, Quoted by Ferriter, IT.
http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/there-should-be-no-dancing-on-the-labour-party-s-grave-1.2552543
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One folk – One faith? One Party – One brown envelope.
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According to Jody Corcoran FF und FG sind sehr ethnisch und stammen aus verschiedenen DNA. Dummkopf und Scheissenhausen. Mind you, a friend who once observed people turning up at the entrance to the RDS for a Fianna Fail national conference (ArdFheis oder Konferenz) came to an unstatistical conclusion that the party faithful from the rural parts tended to have a lot of wide wizened noses. The bioscientists should get their callipers out and do the research on skull thickness and hairstyle.
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Good to see Barry Murphy’s script get adopted by the party.
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Evidently Jody Corcoran is an unreconstructed Myersite. Here’s the bould Kevin writing in the Kingstown Gazette in 1996:
“The origins of Fianna Fail are tribal, certainly, and rise from the plain, Irish speaking indigenous Gaels. Fine Gael has different origins. They are people of the Old English and Norman Catholic stock who remained a distinctly different class within Irish life for centuries.”
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irishman-s-diary-1.60833
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Could this be the original source of that story about Fianna Fail= Irish DNA?
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The article is copyrighted (2012), so it comes well after the Myers article.
Do we have time for a “Vintage” (for want of a better word) Sindo
Stupid Statement? In January 2000 a man wrote in to point out to Mary Ellen Synon that the deaths during the famime
were caused by “The infamous Trevelyan and his British overlords justified their lack of action on the pretext that to intervene even in a humanitarian crisis would run counter to capitalist market ideology and interfere unduly with “Economic Freedom”! What a price we paid for “Economic Freedom” a century and a half ago.”
Mrs. Synon’s polite and thoughtful response:
“As for your comments on the Famine: your ignorance of the economic history of that period appears to be complete.”
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/letters/diversity-and-denial-26253119.html
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thanks for noticing the date starkadder – my mistake – i wonder if there was anything similar published in the early 1990s?
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Can the Norman grandees of Fine Gael and the fior Gael of Fianna Fail put aside tribal, genetically-based animosities and coalesce in the interest of international capital?
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Don’t you know that it’s different for Gaels?
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Heh.
Speaking of stupid statements, this editorial from the “Irish Examiner” is an absolutely sickening piece of red-baiting.
The two old parties of power must work out how they can form an effective partnership to take this country forward or we can surrender this country to socialist extremists whose policies would set us back decades, wreck our economy, and the social fabric it sustains.
http://www.irishexaminer.com/viewpoints/ourview/its-time-for-a-new-kind-of-coalition–the-country-has-decided-384540.html
Disgusting. It was capitalist parties who introduced the bank guarantee and bent over backwards to the Troika.
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That’s demented. But interesting in that it is a pretty good synopsis of the detachment of the upper middle classes from the mainstream of Irish society. This grouping are congenitally incapable of fostering any kind of what the Tories used to call ‘One Nation’ consciousness. They want those on lower and middle incomes to keep their heads down and their mouths shut and not get in the way of the people making money in this country. Risible but good to see such class contempt expressed so openly.
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This is the paper whose editor told the Banking Inquiry that the media are “reliant on agents of the State to be competent, professional, open, honest and reliable in what they do and say, and then we report on that” and that there was “little or no reason to believe that key figures in our financial regulatory infrastructure were not functioning in the best interest of the State, and its citizens”. The Irish media are completely blinded by the class interests they represent and utterly incapable of giving any kind of “impartial” comment on anything. It’s actually good when they’re this crass about it as it exposes them for what they are.
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“Risible but good to see such class contempt expressed so openly.”
And don’t forget the “Irish Examiner” always sells itself as the “moderate”, outside non-Dublin paper (remember the “There are no political agendas in the “Irish Examiner” ads some years back)?
Seeing this far-right nonsense in the paper’s editorial is quite revealing about the paper’s real agenda. It’s also another
sigh of how desperately this country needs more left-wing opinion-newspapers, websites, and more space for left-wing commentators on television and radio.
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In the “surprising absolutely not stupid” category, I read this in the Guardian from Eoghon Harris:
“The very fact that Fine Gael thought Tory advisers could help showed how totally out of touch with Irish people they are”
I presume it was a quote from somewhere else
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