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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— April – May 2013
villager
Courting
Villager hasn’t seen the editor for days, and now
we’re going to print. It’s either that he doesn’t
want to take responsibility for that last entire
edition about climate change – with a black cover,
or it could be ‘The Prosecutions’. Last seen, he
was still creepily confident Village would be pur-
suing private prosecutions against a prominent
banker, a developer and a comminating politi-
cian. Let’s see, shall we?
You were done
Seán Dunne faces the opprobrium of being the
first person to be made Village Idiot, twice. The
problem is that, after trying to pepper the Village
with high-rises, and stripping it financially, he’s
now left it, with the notably unbankrupt Gayle
Killilea, so he’s somewhere else’s idiot now.
Villager remembers the tears welling when he
didn’t get the hand-gilded, swan-lined ivory
invitations to the lovely, if now slightly fraying,
couple’s wedding aboard the Christina O. Charlie
McCreevy and Bertie joined the throng by speak-
aphone and Fingers was there in person – with
Karen Millen, the inevitable Michael Colgan,
and the simply strange Ronan O’Gara, but who
picked up the €.m tab? It was you in the end,
dear reader. It was you.
Mind you, perhaps North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il
was an even better candidate. He has cleared his
military to attack the US with nuclear weapons.
Watch this space.
At least they have offers
You can tell all you need to about a newspaper
from its most popular stories on-line and its
readers’ gifts. Property, particularly Dublin ,
erotica dominates the Irish Times’ online most-
viewedstories list, followed ineluctably by Tom
Cruise gossip and the like. But the Good Life is
still ascendant for those media misfits out in
earnest Timesland, looking to light up their
Volvo-driving better half: move quickly to get
your High vision reading lights, heavy duty gar-
den cart with tipping function, halogen security
light with integrated camera and in walking
knee massager. The security-conscious-yet-will-
ing-to-go-outdoors, middlebrow reader theme
is even more evident with the Daily Telegraph
which is now offering unisex snow boots, wind-
proof umbrella, a Thirsty Dirt Grabber (essential
for pet owners and gardeners), fine leather shoes
with leather soles, bed socks and a (damn-it,
Margaret, let’s go mad) Alpine Army Watch.
Gathering light
Villager welcomes readers’ suggestions for the
tackiest Gathering. One event, spearheaded by
Sligo Fine Gael councillor Hubert Keaney, aims
to assemble , people at the foot of the
iconic Ben Bulben mountain in Sligo, this sum-
mer. Each participant will be furnished with a
coloured poncho and invited to participate in a
“choreographed message of hope inspired by WB
Yeats’s poetry”, paying 1. The event will also
involve a “light show” illuminating the poet’s
grave notable for its mis-capitalisation of Life,
Death, Horseman and Eye, in Drumcliffe, with
its centrepiece – a super-convenient car-park,
and will beam images of Yeats back onto the
mountainside.
Rained out
For Villager it’s been raining since . In
keeping with the general misery he kept his head
down against the deluge during the Irish cancer
society daffodil day on March . Unfortunately
others did too, so the biggest cancer fundrais-
ing event of the year and its volunteers
are half, or more than €,, down in tak-
ings over last year. Call Save to
donate. After all, you could be next.
Idiot
Paul Murphy MEP (Socialist Party), precocious
replacement of Joe Higgins in Dublin, likes a
mill. When not having his head applied to the
pavement by the Gardaí he loves to inundate
sympathisers with angry emails. Here’s a typical
one from early April: “Charlie Flanagan’s tweet
last night on the Philpott case [where parents
set a fire that killed their children], saying that it
was an ‘indictment of a sick British society’ was
idiotic. The Philpott case is an atrocious case of
murder [actually it was manslaughter] carried
out by three individuals. It tells us nothing about
British society, but rather about three depraved
individuals. Flanagan, however, seems to takes
his lead from the Daily Mail. Using this story
as a method to launch a broad attack on people
on social welfare is a disgrace. The logic flowing
from Flanagan’s tweet is that he thinks that this
atrocious case is the product of a ‘sick society’. I
would like to remind Charlie Flanagan, that it is
not so many years ago that the Irish state stood
over the incarceration and systematic abuse and
torture of children in industrial schools - did he
consider this a healthy society?”.
Illegal not allowed
Also reflecting this admirable counter-populist
political correctness, though po-facedly, is the
Associated Press (AP), the largest news-gathering
Villager
outlet in the world, which has announced it will
no longer use the term “illegal immigrant.”
The news came in the form of a blog entry
from Executive Editor, Kathleen Carroll, explain-
ing that the decision is part of the company’s
on-going attempt to rid their Stylebook of labels:
“The Stylebook no longer sanctions the term ‘ille-
gal immigrant’ or the use of ‘illegal’ to describe a
person. Instead, it tells users that ‘illegal’ should
describe only an action, such as living in or immi-
grating to a country illegally”, Carroll wrote,
noting also that the AP prefers to label “behav-
ior” rather than “people”, that instead of using
the term “schizophrenic”, the AP now prefers
saying that one is “diagnosed with schizophre-
nia”. The New York Times followed quickly but
nothing yet from the Irish media.
Villager only hopes it stops the Editor going
on in that excrutiating way about “community
and voluntary civil-society organisations”.
Certifiable education policy
Delegates at the recent ASTI conference in
Wexford were told parents are unaware of the
changes coming down the track and would be
“amazed and alarmed” when they discover that
their children will no longer be awarded a State
certificate for the Junior Cert and will face their
first State examination at the age of or .
Students who complete the Junior Cert will
get a school certificate instead of a State cer-
tificate, risking the iniquity of diminishing the
value of schools in socio-economically disad-
vantaged areas.
Villager blames it all on allowing calculators
in to the exam hall.
Better than good: bad
Everyone in Village loves George Monbiot. It’s
a condition of employment. He coined the aph-
orism: tell a man something he knows and he
will love you for it; tell him something he does
not know and he will hate you for it.
To which Villager can only add, but
check your facts. Anyway Monbiot
(the t is silent) recently decided:
“Most of the world’s people are
decent, honest and kind. Most
of those who dominate us are
inveterate bastards”. We
have only to add the quote
from Walpole, Britain’s first
PM that no great country
was ever saved by good men
because good men will not
go to the length that may be
necessary” to get a complete
justification for Pat Rabbitte and
Éamon Gilmore.
Ormond Walk
A new eight-part drama, Scúp, set in a
struggling Belfast Irish Language newspaper
owned by the amoral Diarmuid Black is coming
to an end on TG and BBC. Black’s property
empire has just crashed. Taking an interest in
his ailing newspaper - An Nuacht (“part vanity
project, part tax write-off”) – for the first time,
he appoints Rob Cullen to take over as editor and
set the paper on its feet.
Returning in disgrace from his career in
London and a failed marriage, Cullen strug-
gles to get the team behind him and create a
new identity for the paper and the commu-
nity it serves. The series stars Don Wycherley ,
best known for his roles in ‘Father Ted’ and as
dashing Raymond the lead in ‘Bachelors Walk’.
Clearly the series is modelled on Village mag-
azine. Raymond, incidentally, was modelled
on the man who would become Village editor.
The pilot was shot in his house, which, like the
house featured in the resultant series is actually
on Ormond Quay and one of the Carney brothers,
who wrote and directed it, was at public school
with ‘Raymond’.
Cancel the Sky
Éamon Delaney has become the Irish
Independent’s roving béal bocht, attacking
debt-forgiveness and hapoily conducting a mis-
erable social life for 1 weekly in unfashionable
Drumcondra. It’s far from there he became a man,
this one-time bumptious auditor of UCD’s inef-
fable L&H debating society. Villager in sympathy
gives the Village Lifetime Achievement Award
to Delaney for his Magill Politician of the Year
Awards to Charlie McCreevy and Bertie Ahern
made when he was its editor and just before their
and our political worlds collapsed.
Kings in line
Séan Aylward, formerly of the Department of
Justice, has become under-treasurer ie factotum
for the King’s Inns (Latin motto: ‘We do not want
to be changed’), which tries to educate barristers.
Aylward had an off-puttingly no-nonsense line
with pinkos like the Equality Authority, and pris-
oners, in his former life. They deserve him.
Quit if you want sex
Cork goal-keeper, Dónal Óg Cusack is writing
in multi-colour for the Examiner. Here he is
on the new pontiff, for example: “The mother
is delighted with the new pope. Great man. He
gets the bus. He pays his hotel bills. He cracks
little jokes. He talks about love. One Direction for
the arthritis gang. Very unpopey yet you couldn’t
knit yourself a better pope. There’s no faint smell
of Nazi off him. No taint of child abuse cover up.
Ok. He was at the back of the bus gazing out the
window when the junta in Buenos Aires started
disappearing some of his Jesuit colleagues but
look, when the Smart Boy Wanted sign goes up
in the Vatican window you don’t expect to find
the perfect candidate”. But, he writes, “if I find
somebody I love and we settle down and want
to share our home with a child who needs lov-
ing parents the pope will have an actual hissy fit”.
And, true enough, the Pope’s views on homosexu-
ality, according to Cristina Kirchner, Argentina’s
President, who fell out with him over it, reflected
“Mediaeval times and the Inquisition”.
Bergoglio, aka the Pope, interestingly says
that as a young seminarian, he “was dazzled by
a girl I met at an uncle’s wedding”, so much so
that he “could not pray for over a week” because
he could not help thinking of her, and so he “had
to rethink what I was doing”.
Pope Francis suggested in an interview last
year that the Catholic Church’s rule that priests
be celibate “can change” and that the married
clergy of the Eastern churches are “very good
priests” and those pushing for the same in
Roman Catholicism do so “with a certain prag-
matism.” For now, though, “the discipline of
celibacy stands firm,” he said, adding that priests
should quit if they can’t abstain from sex or if
they get a woman pregnant.
