Marian Finucane

Electi On Right, Villager thinks there’ll be a hung Dáil. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil will struggle to work out whether they should coalesce, risking their exposure as ideological charlatans and the long-term growth of Sinn Féin. Another election within a year. The prognosis is tentative since around here there is no worse crime than a discredited prediction. Quite a bit at stake In which spirit… so Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump come out punching from New Hampshire and it’s cockle-warming to see the Bush and Clinton dynasties with their inequality-indulgent ideas formed a generation ago, in serious trouble, even if it does signal the return of the Angry White Man, and his supporters. Sanders’ agenda, of course, has obvious appeal in the right-on Village while Trump is dangerous in an old-fashioned FASCIST way. Assuming for the sake of mischief a Sanders-Trump election-off, for Villager the victor can regrettably (and terminally) only be Trump. Sanders is too ugly and Trump too rich for any other upshot. So what happens then? The only force in global volatility that is more unhinged than Trump is Islamic State whose principal religio-geo-strategic goal is dooms-day precipitated by a battle in Syrian city of Dabiq, near Aleppo. It is here, the Prophet reportedly said, that the armies of Rome (ie the West) will set up their camp. The armies of Islam will meet them, and Dabiq will be Rome’s Waterloo. After its battle in Dabiq the caliphate, already in 2016 nicely ensconced under Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, will expand and sack Istanbul. An anti-Messiah will come and kill a vast number of the caliphate’s ghters, until just 5,000 remain, cornered in Jerusalem. Then Jesus (Jesus!) – the second-most-revered prophet in Islam – will return to Earth, whack the anti-Messiah, and lead the Muslims to victory. After a series of domestic putsches and foreign-policy cataclysms Villager foresees an insurgent Trump, toupée to the sun on a white charger leading the Crusaders into battle at Dabiq. He will lose but be revealed as the Anti-Messiah before final wipe-out at Jerusalem. It is not clear whether the Donald will consider the big new status recompense for the loserism. Jesus and Mohammed will together sort out the souls and the Bushes’ and Clintons’ Wall Street millions will be useless to them. Hello you Former Anglo CEO, David Drumm, is to wing his way back from breaking rocks in a Federal penitentiary, with Fintan O’Toole’s misplaced endorsement for a man incarcerated in the lucre-lionising country to which he has fled, blowing up a tail wind. Drumm has announced that he hopes to wear a tag rather than go to prison here. Villager has an idea. How about wewear the tag and he gives us back the money? Valentine wishes The words ”My heart is, and always will be, yours” from ‘Sense And Sensibility’ have been voted the most romantic line from romantic literature, film and TV drama. They are uttered by Edward Ferrars to Elinor Dashwood in director Ang Lee’s 1995 screen version of Jane Austen’s classic novel with Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay,. It was the top choice of 2,000 inane British women who were polled for the cliché-blind TV channel ‘Drama’. Villager resolves to try it out on Mrs Villager. The scene in the 1997 epic ‘Titanic’ where a frozen, fearful and (Villager was happy to note) doomed Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, tells his effervescent Rose played by Kate Winslet, ”promise me you’ll survive” (inevitably) came third. Bliss and the insolvent luxury-car company ‘Former Model’ Glenda Gilson opened up to ‘VIP’ in a February cover photoshoot about her life a year since marrying ‘Rob McNaughton’. The cover (Villager claims never to get beyond it) gushes: “After 18 months of wedded bliss the gorgeous star of Xposé reveals that staying in is her new going out”. Admittedly the former vainquese of bearded developer Johnny Ronan has a lot to stay in from. Gilson mystifyingly fails to mention that during her blissful year she was barred from acting as a company director for five years. Glenda and her brother Damien were in charge of Gilson Motor Company Ltd until 2011 when it was wound up by the High Court for failing to pay €141,937 to the Revenue. Judge Paul Gilligan said Glenda was “deceived” by her sibling in the “improper way he ran the affairs of the business” which traded in high value vehicles and operated a car parking and valeting service at Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. Some of the money is owed to Ronan, who has – in other news – expressed the view that NAMA operates on the spiffing principle of Arbeit Macht Frei. you get the Tsar you deserve Ronan and his former business partner in Treasury Holdings, Richard Barrett, are back in business and back in the media, as if they had never cavorted malignly around boomtown threatening all-comers (Barrett once said he “had his foot on the throat” of poor Chicago-nurtured Garrett Kelleher) and in the end cost us all a packet. Barrett was even allowed to drawlingly pontificate on the Marian Finucane radio programme, about his vision for social housing something he has in the past been very reluctant to provide in Treasury schemes. He told Marian, always agog at a bit of developer vim, “There is an enormous humanitarian crisis of epic proportions which is causing a great deal of human suffering. It is proportionally much larger than the Syrian refugee crisis” with up to 300,000 people on the housing list. Barrett also tells a provocative anecdote of a local authority renting “a house at €8000 a month on one of Dublin’s two best roads to house a homeless mother with four children, costing the state a fortune”. But, intriguingly, he has the answer: “I have formed a series of investment companies, (in Housing, Social Housing, Health Care, Renewable Energy) [all, for some reason, called Bartra]. We will build these facilities renting them to the Irish Government”. He sees it as a sort of “social