25 December 2025
Down the road from Bethlehem the USA, the UK, France and Germany are equipping Israel and the IDF with the wherewithal to obliterate Palestine. Ireland shamefully hides behind the EU’s skirts.
Picture of the Week
Earth Trumpets from Eilis O’Connell’s Happenstance exhibition running at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork until the 12th April. It’s not quite a retrospective, more a review of her career so far. O’Connell is one of the few contemporary Irish artists who enjoys an international reputation. In addition to many high-profile commissions in the UK (including Nyama in Bishopsgate and the playful Pero’s Bridge in Bristol), her large bronze Unfold was lent by the Cass Foundation to the Venice Biennale in 2002 and her smaller sculptures were shown at the Guggenheim Museum. She has also shown at the Paris and Sao Paolo Biennales. Dubliners can enjoy her polished mirror steel tribute to E. S. Walton in Trinity.
The Moronic Inferno
Peace, joy and hope are the essential tenets of the Christian faith - attendant on the birth of Jesus. I doubt that message has penetrated the White-Christian-Fascists that currently hold sway in the USA. Hate and division are their standard operating principles. A hard core also refuse to accept the deluge of evidence confirming Trump’s gross and floridly illegal sexual history. Elsewhere piracy is now being practised as if the USA was some lawless Somalia with no one responsible in charge. Surely that rough beast is now fully formed as we celebrate that other birth in Bethlehem.
Just in case you’ve forgotten, here’s a summary of that moron’s depredations courtesy of New Republic on Facebook:
“Trump’s second term has been so lurid in its corruption that it was genuinely hard to narrow this list down. https://trib.al/o6wiwPq
I could go on forever. There’s Signalgate, the firing of numerous inspectors general, and the extortion campaigns against businesses, universities, and Big Law firms. Robert F. Kennedy’s deadly anti-vaccine policies are a mass-casualty crime in the making. We’re building concentration camps and shipping people to gulags. We’re threatening Canada and Greenland. Trump’s tariffs are ruining Christmas. He stole $230 million for himself.
And the only reason I haven’t mentioned l’affaire Jeffrey Epstein until now is that it’s been so ever-present in our lives that I don’t actually need to remind you about it.
But the biggest scandal of all is something Trump didn’t create. It’s this country’s piss-poor legacy of holding the powerful to account.”
Musical Interlude
Eddie Cochran died in a car crash at the age 22 while touring England. He was sharing a taxi with Gene Vincent who was badly injured and never fully recovered. Two fabled rockers - both strongly influenced by Elvis. Cochran wrote a touching ballad called Three Stars about Buddy Holly’s death along with Richie Valens and the Big Bopper. A year later he was gone himself.
Bedtime Reading
Helen Warner: Diaries are frank, revealing and free from airy pretension. They have three main themes: her writing doubts and struggles, her spiritual ruminations (she communes occasionally with some mysterious force) and her tortuous and tangled love life. Or maybe lack of love life. We also get plenty of coverage of the mundanities of daily life - periods and healthy bowel movements not ignored. One annoying feature is that she often attends plays or films that she dismisses without naming them. For a sober, thoughtful and pragmatic woman, she sure wastes a lot of time agonising over clearly unsuitable men. Her main love in the earlier diaries is for a married man who clearly is not going to budge from his cosy domestic billet.
A Morsel of Memoir
Christians, as CBC Cork was generally referred to, is one of only two Christian Brothers Colleges in the country, the other is in Monkstown, County Dublin. The distinction between a Christian Brothers School and a Christian Brothers College was mainly a social one. The colleges charged fees, played rugby and educated the middle and upper middle classes. However, the brothers who taught in the colleges were the same frustrated brutes who manned the schools. When I arrived in Cork at the age of nine I was joining a school with its cliques and hierarchies already in place so my sense of being an outsider was reinforced and cemented into my psyche. Even now, going back for the occasional reunion, I get the same sense of not quite belonging.
We were beaten with leathers, with canes, with thick rounded sticks and with the occasional punch. We were rarely beaten for bad behaviour, most of us were too terrified of them to misbehave. We were mainly beaten for our learning deficiencies or for not doing our homework. We had a formidable Latin teacher called Brother Leo. He was built like a second row forward and wielded a thick stick that looked as if it might have been the leg of a chair. I was an indolent child, much given to erotic reverie in my later school years and could never quite get around to preparing my Latin unseen homework. Leo would inevitable pick on me to translate and I would inevitably fail miserably. This led to four belts on the hands from the big stick and a period standing at the side of the class to shame me further. On one such occasion I had the very good sense to faint (I did that a lot at school) and this must have given Leo a fright as he steered clear of asking me for a while after that.
The school was relentlessly philistine with rugby consuming a major portion of the school’s extra-curricular energies. The cultural highlight was the annual Gilbert and Sullivan operetta where some of the schools more fey pupils got to dress up and simper. I recall no sexual abuse whatsoever apart from the odd knee squeeze from Brother Behan when I was in my tennis shorts. And shure who could blame him.
The teachers ranged from the brisk and efficient to the utterly useless. One lay teacher used to write food recipes on the blackboard and ask us to transcribe them - I think geography was his subject. A good way to fill the hour. I can’t recall one I liked except our young French teacher Mr. Moran, who, with predictable wit, was universally referred to as “froggy”. In primary school we had a frightening character called Tubby Boland. He smelled and looked unwashed, had one black tooth wobbling in the front of his mouth and often favoured a shoelace for a tie (I kid you not). He was walking proof that you can’t lose your job as a teacher unless you challenge the church through some deviation from conventional morality. I was terrified of him and after one assault I refused to go back to school. My father donned full uniform and marched down to the principal to complain, and from then on Tubby completely ignored me. A blessing. I learned nothing in that school. Anything I did learn was through my own voracious reading. I was never encouraged towards what I was good at like History and English. Instead they tried to shoehorn me towards the sciences (at my father’s behest I suspect) where I struggled,
Poetry Corner
Louis MacNeice flies under the radar a bit. Maybe his long-term connection with the BBC (1941 to his early death in 1963) rendered him a dilettante in some eyes. His delight in a well-turned ankle and his fondness for the ladies is often evident in his work.
O’CONNELL BRIDGE by Louis MacNeice
Barrel-organ music:
The cold gold falls From the lamps on the Liffey In the chilly wind
And the crinkling river Shivers the lights, And night’s companions
Are far to find.
Flotsam and jetsam Our one-while loves
Blown like bubbles In the trough of the sea, Who are not the only
Lonely in bed:
I dread the darkness
A mound on me.
Barrel-organ music—
A hackney cockney tune, A rain of riches
In a lady’s lap;
I give in answer
Not dance or spoken Token but only
A coin in a cap.