13 November 2025
By voting that bill through, those 8 Dems have thrown away the last chance to halt the fascist juggernaut. If the shutdown had continued and sabotaged Thanksgiving, the GOP would have been destroyed.
Picture of the Week
This week’s image is The Bangor Trail by Pat Harris. The trail that inspired this painting is in the North West and not the North East as you might assume. It’s an old drover’s path between Bangor-Erris and Newport - requiring sturdy boots and fitness. Pat Harris is one of a number of prominent artists that are drawn to North Mayo - Hughie O’Donoghue and Donald Teskey are others. Harris has his own unique take - mostly looking seaward to the rocks and stacks and the swirling mist around them. The title of his current show at Taylor Galleries is Niks - the Dutch word for nothing. A word that befits the desolation and famine-scarred wildness of the region, on the edge of the vast and implacable Atlantic . The soft, muted tones of his paintings remove the drama and replace it with a tranquil, meditative feel - oceanic even.
Stalin My Áras
I was delighted and surprised that we ended up with a genuinely socialist President. To an extent she owes her elevation to the sheer incompetence, if not stupidity, of her FFG opponents. We know that they can’t run a country (health, housing, delivery of infrastructure etc.), but now we realise that they can’t even organise a Presidential Election strategy. While Catherine Connolly benefitted from this, she faced a barrage of negative press from the mainstream Irish media: RTE, the Irish Times, and most hysterically from the Indo and the Sindo. The latter’s blanket negative coverage reached such a pitch that only by disinterring Eoin Harris could it have got more extreme. Even its more moderate commentators were pushing the “reds under the bed” line and warning of “constitutional crises”. The election exposed the fact that this new young electorate can think for themselves and won’t be guided by an establishment press that has been comfortable and complicit with the ongoing failures of FFG.
I like Connolly’s “Gan teanga, gan tir” slogan and I hope it encourages more people to take up the language. People forget that it is a dead language that we’ve been trying to revive for over a hundred years - wasted years of appallingly bad teaching methods, and the spurious accumulation of unread government documents. It will never be our mother tongue, or a business language, again - sad but true. But it can become something that any civilised Irish man or woman will take pride in being able to speak with a degree of fluency. Connolly’s example, and the fact that groups like Kneecap are making it fashionable amongst the young, suggest that there’s a serious revival of interest in motion.
And by the way, I hope Connolly invites Mick Wallace and Claire Daly to afternoon tea in the Aras one of these days. A gesture of compensation for the mountain of bile heaped on two of our more idealistic (if occasionally misguided) politicians. The media seemed to suggest that a communist putsch was imminent if Connolly was elected, with Wallace and Daly coordinating the takeover with Moscow. Joe McCarthy is alive and well in our national press. I hope to see both of them back on the pitch after the next election.
A Musical Interlude
Lyle Lovett - If I Were the Man You Wanted
Lyle Lovett is a hard man to categorise but on balance we should call him country, with frequent jazz inflections. His music and lyrics are usually more sophisticated and urbane than the average country musician. I’ve seen him a few times in concert and he’s a always excellent - with a nice line in self-deprecation.
Poetry Corner
T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland was as contemporary as it got in the English Department at UCC in the late Sixties. But we were just happy to break in to the 20th Century so we lapped it up. The arcane references, the urban angst (that poor typist), the existential despair (“On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing”), the common touches. Whole chunks of it stay lodged in my memory and I have been known to bore friends and family with my favourite bits, such as: “One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire” - Eliot was nothing if not patrician.
The extract below comes from Part IV: Death by Water
“Phlebas the Phoenician forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
A Morsel of Memoir
I was never a particularly delicate child but shortly after I arrived in Cork I began to faint regularly – often in very inconvenient places. It would happen in school – without warning. I remember once crumbling to the ground from the third-row steps at choir practice. Doctors were called, tests ensued and I seemed to be in bed a lot. Then out of the blue, without discussion, or much ceremony, I was whisked off to sanatorium in Foynes, Co. Limerick – about a hundred miles away. There was no mention of duration or what exactly was wrong with me.
I was to stay there for a year on my own without a single visit from my mother and one brief one from my father. My older sister’s regular post cards were the only communications from home. Apparently, I had been struck down with TB - socially dubious and highly infectious TB. The lack of visits was due not to parental indifference, but rather to the danger of catching it from me and wiping out the entire family. Neither of my parents ever referred to my condition as TB – if my mother referred to it at all it was always that “he had a spot on his lung”.
I had a lot of grapes when I arrived in Foynes and I remember thinking initially how friendly the nurses seemed to be – sitting chatting at the end of my bed and steadily working their way through my precious fruit (this was 1955. One was a strapping brunette (Nurse Burke) who had achieved some local fame by going out with Tony O’Reilly then a young rugby hero. Thereafter, I saw very little of these friendly nurses apart from the brisk commerce of the daily round.
The wards were enormous barn-like rooms with high-ceilings and huge windows all along one side. These windows were kept open through all the seasons – no doubt the sea air was seen as beneficial for our tortured lungs. There were about twenty-four beds in these wards occupied by boys ranging from three to sixteen. The biggest problem was boredom. There was great commerce in comics and for a while I was able to trade my regular consignment of 64 page cowboy comics that were in vogue at the time. We were all sports mad and I can remember listening to boxing matches (Harry Perry and Fred Teidt come to mind) on concealed radios long after lights out.
As I never felt particularly ill, I was tempted out of bed regularly. We would bundle up a newspaper and play improvised rugby up and down the ward. The nurses were unimpressed with these antics and if you were caught the punishment was to confiscate your pajama bottoms – a particularly cruel deprivation for a pre-adolescent boy. And a surefire way to keep him in bed you’d think. The embarrassment of having your bed made as you squirmed to cover yourself was meant to give you pause the next time you planned a rugby adventure. You usually got your pants back the next day. However I was a recidivist and spent more time without than with my nether garments. It became so much of a problem that the ward sister decided to escalate and I was condemned to spend a week in the baby’s ward. This was a special hell involving the public humiliation of being the only non-baby in the ward and the constant sleep deprivation of trying to sleep in a ward full of screaming babies. Is it too late I wonder to bring this to the High Court? It surely qualifies as abuse if not cruel and unusual punishment. And I’m clearly still suffering from PTSD.
When Christmas came there was no visitation from my family but instead the Red Cross came around and we all got substantial presents. I was given a large sub-machine gun with a handle on the side that you cranked to make a convincing noise. I had great fun running around all day shooting my fellow-patients. The pants law was revoked for the day. However, on Stephen’s Day all the toys were collected and stored away – and despite numerous requests we never saw them again. I still miss that gun. I was devastated for weeks afterwards.
After a year or so, for no apparent reason, my father arrived at the hospital and I was taken home. The whole thing was mysterious to me. Because I had never felt sick, I was much aggrieved to have been stuck in hospital. I felt no different on the day I was admitted to the day I came out. Perhaps the sea air had healed my damaged lungs. When I returned home it was never spoken of. I resumed school and soon began to take part in all the sporting activities normal to a boy of that age. The fainting had mysteriously stopped.