May 2015 9
Villager
Border Fox
The Facebook site of ‘Dessie O’Hare Crafts’
fronted by ‘Dessie from Keady who
attended St Patrick’s High School’ sells
innocuous republican memorabilia: glass
Easter lilies and the like. But have no doubt
it is the Border Fox gone retail. In October
, O’Hare and his IRA gang killed Mar-
garet Ann Hearst, a female part-time
member of the UDR, in front of her three-
year-old daughter, in Armagh. In 
O’Hare was shot twice and arrested after a
car chase through County Monaghan
ended when O’Hare crashed his car
through a herd of cattle into a farmer’s car,
before coming to rest in a field. He broke
both ankles in the crash but his companion
in the car was not so lucky and died. In
 he led an Irish National Liberation
Army offshoot gang which had intended to
seize Austin Darragh, moneybags owner of
the Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, in
Dublin but Darragh had moved out three
years before and it was occupied by unfor-
tunate dentist, John O’Grady, his
son-in-law. O’Grady was kidnapped and
initially held in a Dublin basement before
being moved to Cork, where he was held in
a cargo container. After ransom demands
were not met O’Hare cut off the little finger
from each of O’Grady’s hands with a
hammer and chisel and sent them to
Carlow Cathedral (as you did in the s).
In a telephone call to the Gardaí O’Hare
stated: “It’s just cost John two of his fin-
gers. Now I’m going to chop him into bits
and pieces and send fresh lumps of him
every fucking day if I don’t get my money
fast”. O’Hare became the most wanted man
in Ireland with the Gardaí offering a
£, reward for information on his
whereabouts. He surfaced in County Louth,
where he allegedly fired shots into a takea-
way during an altercation with his wife. In
late November O’Hare was arrested and
shot eight times during a fire-fight, in
which his companion was killed. An Irish
Army soldier was wounded in the affray.
He received a -year sentence but was
finally released in  and the PSNI has
said it will not pursue him for the  cases
of unsolved killings in which he was under
suspicion. Through imprisonment he devel-
oped an identification with the plight of the
disabled and participated in fund-raising
events for them, though he says he has no
regrets. Sure why would he?
Borderline Dog
A rat the size of a dog has been found swim-
ming in a Tipperary Irish river – and now
wants a good home.
Three-foot long Rodney, a coypu Ameri-
can swamp rat native only to South
America, is three times the size of the aver-
age Irish rodent though around half the
size of the average local politician. He’s now
being cared for at the Kildare Animal Foun-
dation Wildlife Unit which told RTÉ Radio
One’s ‘John Murray Show’: “He’s not just an
ordinary Irish rat, there’s no fear there’ll be
an epidemic”. The search is now on to find a
home for the furry creature with a spokes-
man adding: “He doesn’t have any fear in
him so we think he must have been a pet”.
He’s not then related to another rat,
-inch long and native, which came to the
attention of Dubliner homeowner Grace
Walters last year after she heard loud
scratching sounds coming from over her
ceiling.
Borderline Dogmeat
McDonalds shares sagged after they
recently announced a new Plan to replace
the general tactic for the last decade of cov-
ering the plastic in stuff that looks like
wood. But guess what: a leadership
reorganisation won’t do it. Investors (a
surrogate for only slightly more interesting
customers) believe it’s got too many items
on its menu –  new ones, and it should
use apps more. Sounds a bit like Village.
Straw man Iona-institutionalised
Villager is % behind Gay Marriage. But
jaysus has the media and political coverage
been biased towards the Yes vote. Villager
particularly recoiled from the piece by the
Irish Times’ increasingly unreadable Jenni-
fer O’Connell who joins us photogenically
from San Francisco whence she sparks
rueful envy in the gut of bemired middle
Ireland. “Gay Marriage causes abortion?
Now I’ve heard it all”, blasted her headline
in what was essentially ‘straw man’ argu-
mentation. Because if the views of the
minority of loonies on the Yes side were
subjected to analysis in this way liberals
would be incandescent. Nobody’s making
these arguments Villager murmured heter-
osexually to himself. Then his attention
was drawn to the Iona Institute’s David
Quinn who recently made just this connec-
tion. He told a room of supporters that “if
we lose the [gay marriage referendum]
badly, I think they will have an abortion
referendum in . If we keep this close,
or we manage to win, it’ll frighten them off
share-price
down again