It’s time for one United football team.
No, not at all, hence my mass at Christmas reference.
Many, I suspect pay mild lip service out of respect for their parents, again, like going to mass when you’re home (me at least, though since the priest threw my ma out of mass when she went in accidentally during on/off lockdown, she’s stopped going, the uucoam)
1 Like
The most interesting thing would be to observe how they were treated by the sevco hardcore if playing for Ireland.
That’s a belter of a post. Malarkey went in two feet over the ball to be met by tank wielding the corner flag.
4 Likes
Do you think so? To another perspective, the scene was akin to a lad throwing his sheepskin out of the pram. Most amusing.
I find it intensely amusing how worked up a certain class of a ladeen gets about anything to do with The Irish Times. Highly revealing, the narrowness of some people’s world.
I do not listen to radio, because it is so boring, a waste of time, and so I read TFK for half an hour, to save time, to get public opinion, pulped. The main thing learned? Why the media is generally so bad: because people like it that way.
2 Likes
Tank, tank, tank
1 Like
Radio, like most everything is 99% dross. It’s the beauty of podcasts. You don’t have to sift through the chaff so much any more to find a bit of wheat.
TFK is my primary news source, and is often (this morning in particular) highly entertaining
There’s lads flailing away at each other who, I suspect, would and hopefully will sit happily over a pint and chat away in person. There’s some awful stuff said on here you’d never dream of saying in such forthright manner in real life, and I think most everyone realises this, and forgets about it. White line fever, if you like.
3 Likes
BTW, on the subject of a DArcy of cunts, you can read the first 3 paragraphs of Eoghan Harris’s column today without going behind the paywall. Don’t think I’ll pay for the rest…
Last Tuesday, Micheál Martin, Leo Varadkar and Eamon Ryan cravenly condemned as “misogynistic” Jim Cogan’s cartoon attached to my column in the Sunday Independent. There was no media pressure on them to do so. RTÉ did not cover the story, possibly because it would mean breaking their ban on me.
Andrea Gilligan, irreverent presenter of Newstalk’s Lunchtime Live, and guests Terry Prone and cartoonist Niall O’Loughlin refused to follow the woke agenda that depicting Mary Lou McDonald as a strong political witch was misogynistic.
Terry: “I would have no problem being portrayed as a witch, and neither should you and neither should Mary Lou: witches in the Middle Ages were the powerful women.”
Just as well Terry.
3 Likes
Just sitting down to a cup of coffee from my Clever Dripper ™ after a productive morning of errands and throwing down some bark on the flower beds
TFK at its finest.
Lads wearing their brains on their sleeves and lads taking photos of their legs.
1 Like
The lost hour has rattled a few cages.
A reasonable point, thanks, and perceptive too. But to me it is the same shite, a bit downstream.
With all respect, what you’ve written has nothing to do with my post.
4 Likes
Wasnt one of the main themes of the gaelic cultural revival the fact that it allowed non catholics the opportunity to climb on board ? Through the study of language and literature they could share in a gaelic identity…It’s no different now in many respects. You’re never gonna get hardcore loyalists/unionists to grasp that nettle but there are plenty around the fringes who could get on board.
There was an Irish identity prior to the cultural revival, and yes it was a response to the act of union, but it was political and it was overtly catholic. The GAA, Gaelic league and others tried to step outside these exclusive boundaries to build a nation on cultural values – and it wasn’t just poetry - or poets - I should have clarified that by placing poets within a wider intelligentsia shaping Irish identity at the time…and ancient Irish customs/literature/manuscripts/language were put under the microscope to de-Anglicize us as Hyde put it. It was a propaganda war.
Some years earlier in Scotland, for the visit of George IV, a planning party, wanting to impress the Royals with an authentic Scottish experience, invented the widespread culture of kilt/tartan wearing. Today every fuck with half a Scoth ancestry will fill you about the proud history of the tartan family colours but it’s bollox — it was an imagined past. A few peasantry from the Scottish highlands were tartan, but with the same type of propaganda we’d see with the gaelic revival in Ireland, a terrible beauty was born and every fuck adorned the tartan and believes it to this day.
The imagined gaelic past was our tartan in many respects. Oliver McDonagh called it ’ a modern product for a modern market.’ Ireland was bombarded with a constant stream of newspapers, pamphlets, lectures and societies all peddling a narrative about the beauty of ancient Ireland. So when I said poets, it was a lazy way of saying all of the above. Identities are shaped, manipulated and change to suit narratives. @RaymondCrotty was laying out grievances about how southerners think they own the monopoly on what constitutes Irishness so as I said yesterday, we were talking about something more abstract than the political country… You mentioned the Act of Union creating Ireland and correctly how Unionism was/is by definition and institution that rules through majority. Prior to the Act protestant Ireland ruled by minority and was very much opposed to the Act of Union while Catholic Ireland was very much in favour of it - yet within 50 years the tables had completely reversed. Even die hard Unionists like Carson didnt want to partition the country … the point being, narratives are spun and yarns told as truths but they change and evolve to suit multiple agendas. We’re all Irish on this island but some see themselves as British. In the new Ireland it’s about how we can all focus on the Irish part we have in common and no one side can lay claim to a hierarchy of Irishness in the future - That’s all I, and I think Raymond, were saying.
2 Likes
Yet another example of Southern politicians pandering to the DUP.
It is actually folk like Arlene that are the biggest obstacle to a United Ireland, or even just improved relations in the short term.
1 Like
That absolute cretin Colum Eastwood liking it.
1 Like
Look, thanks for extended reply, genuinely, but I think we are as well to leave it so. I am just too allergic to phrases such as ‘hierarchy of Irishness’ and this stuff puts me in a bad humour.
I know the co-ordinates you mention – especially Oliver MacDonagh. He was a terrific historian (once memorably described as “eejity with brains”).
The most profound essay I know on this area remains, 30 years later, Seamus Deane’s ‘Wherever Green Is Read’ from 1991. I do not feel the analyses of Arthur Aughey, Richard English. John Wilson Foster, Norman Porter, Graham Walker et al, from the Unionist side, are wearing as well. But so be it…
1 Like
To clarify, I dont mean in anyway that we should meekly bend to facilitate hard core Unionists in the way RTE do. ‘Fuck them’ has and will continue to be my catchphrase for that particular set of cretins and they should be the antithesis of how we conduct ourselves. But you cant end partition without forgoing some sacrifices … but look, what the fuck do I know? I’m just making my way in this world like everyone else. I had a very simple and dangerous view on Irish nationalism as a younger chap. The omagh bomb challenged and continues to challenge those views.
We sure as fuck cant go back nor does anyone want to go back to what it was so it’s important we start the conversation about going forward. But there’s an awful lot of voices to be heard on that front. I think there’s a very green vs orange view of society held by many in the South, and it’s outdated. We have a great opportunity to learn during the ensuing debates over the next few years but to learn we need to listen - we cant be like the Gregory Campbells and Arlene Fosters with fingers in our ears screaming-Nor can we continue to subscribe to green Catholicism. … But for all that, it will be bankers who will decide what’s what.
5 Likes