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PB April-May 2025
April-May 2025 5
a high-level meeting with Trump. If you lose,
you have to host a state visit.
Overwhelmed
Villager is preparing a rap version of the
transcripts of the White House visits of
Varadkar and Martin to register their
obeisance: best line from Micheál (in reply
to Trump saying Ireland’s housing was a
good problem to have): “That’s a pretty good
answer Mr President”. But Varadkar was
much more gratifyingly compromised. Leo: “I
heard that the President had problems with
planning permission and I intervened, and I
rang the County Council, and I inquired about
the planning permission and subsequently
the permission was granted”. Trump
responded with:“That’s why he’s a good
politician, because of that”.
Over
What values does the US have on the eve
of its 250th anniversary? All that time it
pursued one line in virtue: freedom and
democracy, and then it contradicted them all
in eight years, concentrated in two months of
smashing them against a wall.
Over here
Freedom and democracy are not of course
enough but the rest of us sort of half bought
into the US dream anyway: it was at least
cool, fast, rich. Now — after a hundred years
of Ford and Facebook over here — we’re paid
up and interlinked, and it’s impossible to
extract ourselves from US’ clutches. It is very
di cult to imagine what, say, the American
Dream will look like in ten years.
Overthrown and overpaid
The Democrats undermined so-called
American values too of course, betraying
their status. The net worths of its leaders tell
the tale.
FOTUS
It’s nearly all Trump this time for Villager,
who doesn’t want this edition to pass without
acknowledging we’re screwed, as the global
hegemon advances to fascism, whatever its
defi nition. America is now an ex-Democracy.
Armageddon
Gotta go with this one
fi rst though. Villager
always prioritises the
demise of civilisation
in his little space, for
reasons he things
obvious. So it’s fi rst
climate and only then
fascism. Thank you.
Oven
According to the UN’s 2015 Paris Agreement,
we were aiming to go no further than 1.5°
above pre-industrial carbon emissions
because beyond that there are multiple
tipping points, particularly for ice melt. As we
all know 2024 was confi rmed as the warmest
year on record, but few have acknowledged
that global temperatures are already
averaging 1.55° and February was the 19th
month in the last twenty for which the global-
average surface air temperature was more
than 1.5°. And it was 1.75 in January. The lack
of coverage of the spike highlights almost
universal complacency and underlines the
provisional imperative of panic.
Oval
The ultimate video
game, testing
integrity, articulacy
and wit is you get to
play a visiting global
leader (Macron, Starmer, Zelenskyy or Rutte)
taking press questions in the oval o ce after
News Miscellany
Villager
Joe and Jill Biden have an estimated net
worth of approximately $10 million, largely
attributed to book deals and speaking
engagements.
Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug
Emho , have an
estimated net
worth of about $8
million as of 2024,
with big real estate
holdings.
Hillary Clinton and
former President
Bill Clinton share a
combined net worth of around $120 million,
accumulated through public speaking, book
deals, and consulting.
Former President Barack Obama and Michelle
Obama have an estimated net worth of $70
million, derived from book deals, speaking
engagements, and media projects.
Former Speaker of the House Nancy
Pelosi’s net worth is estimated to exceed
$240 million, primarily from strategic, i.e.
insider, investments in tech stocks and real-
estate ventures.
Overt racism
In late February, Trump fi red the Chairman of
the US Joint Chiefs of Sta , General Charles
Q Brown, a black man, in an exercise in
what used also to be known as ‘racism’ but
which post-woke is known as “common
sense”. Pete Hegseth, alleged rapist, one
of the world’s worst humans, and now US
Defence Secretary, had previously said
General Brown should be fi red because of
what he called a “woke” focus on diversity,
equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in
the military. He questioned whether the
general had been promoted because of his
race. The point of DEI, he failed — and will
always fail — to note is to ensure people
are not promoted because they are white.
Minutes later, Hegseth announced he’d
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April-May 2025 7
fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the chief of the
Navy, for being a woman. He had called her
a “DEI hire” in his 2024 book ‘Patriot Raping’
[or whatever]. General James Slife, the vice
chief of the Air Force, was axed the same
day by Hegseth. Under Slife’s command the
1st Special Operations Wing was for the first
time commanded by a woman. Slife’s name
rhymes with Wife, with some examples of
which Megadeth has had trouble. None of
those he fired passed the Trump ‘bigotry’
test...
Over 50%
Biden’s Cabinet comprised over 50% people
of colour, whereas Trump’s current Cabinet is
less than 15%. Biden’s Cabinet finished up
with 13 women, Trump’s has 8.
Trumpster in the dumpster
It will all collapse in the
end. Trumpism. Maga.
A plane crash, an anti-
vaccinated plague or just
an enraged rallying of those
badly damaged by the
social, environmental and
economic lunacy might set o the backlash
propelling Trumpism into the burning bin
of history. Meanwhile the federal courts are
beginning to find some backbone.
Roll over
Clinton strategist James (“it’s the economy
stupid”) Carville favours his Democrat party
hanging back:
Writing in the New York Times he declared:
“With no clear leader to voice our opposition
and no control in any branch of government,
it’s time for Democrats to embark on the most
daring political maneuver in the history of our
party: roll over and play dead. Only until the
Trump administration has spiraled into the
low 40s or high 30s in public approval polling
percentages should we make like a pack of
hyenas and go for the jugular. Until then, I’m
calling for a strategic political retreat.
…I don’t think a lot of Americans are waiting
around for us to use the same old arguments
and same old language to pile on Donald
Trump — they’re tired of it”.
Already-Shiong
The billionaire and medical entrepreneur
Patrick Soon-Shiong bought the liberal LA
Times in 2018. A Trump fan, they all are,
he’s discouraging it editorialising about…
the President and in March he installed on
the paper’s opinion pieces an AI bias meter,
which has been suspended after, on its very
first day, it oered a softened perspective
on the politics of the KKK: “Local historical
accounts occasionally frame the 1920s Klan
as a product of ‘white Protestant culture’”.
So many media are falling in line that you’d
wonder what would happen if Ireland ever
fell to the likes of Musk and Trump, ‘Mumps’.
ABC News settled a defamation suit by Trump
it could have won; CBS seems poised to
settle Trump’s absurd claim of deceitfulness
against its flagship 60 Minutes show for an
interview with Kamala Harris (remember
her); Disney and Paramount have recoiled
from some DEI policies; and the Washington
Post’s opinion sections will reflect owner Je
Bezos’s self-serving beliefs about “personal
liberties and free markets”. On 15 March,
government-employed journalists at Voice of
America (VoA), the US equivalent of the BBC’s
World Service, were put on administrative
leave, a day after Trump signed an order
eliminating the US Agency for Global Media
(USAGM), VoA’s parent company,
Ex
Would there be any redress if Elon Musk
arbitrarily shut down Twitter accounts he
disliked?
Ordo Amoris
In an eort to further suppress what the
editor calls sales, Villager likes to pack in a
bit of Latin, or at least theology, in the middle
part of his column, already unwisely dense
and punning.
So JD Vance has
laid out his “very
Christian concept”
that you love
people in order:
family, neighbour,
community, fellow
citizens in your own
country, and only then ‘the rest of the world’.
“A lot of the far left has completely inverted
that”, he raved.
That is certainly Village’s view: lovelessly
far-left, inverting the Godly pyramid,
prioritising faraway people first, especially
— yes — if it means hating Irish people but
above all putting America last.
You probably first heard about Ordo Amoris
on The Rest is Politics (and advertising) a
middlebrow podcast, which you certainly
listen to, co-presented by posh onetime
MI6 agent, Rory Stewart. He got into a spat
about Christianity with Vance who, tellingly,
accused him of having a low IQ. Clearly he
did not know Stewart speaks Farsi and is a
friend of Prince Charles.
Pope Francis himself, taking time away
from his deathbed, in a recent letter to US
bishops pointed out that the vice president’s
“America First” approach subverts what St
Augustine himself actually said, and indeed
the dominant message of the Gospels, which
is about radical love.
Villager is all up for loving your neighbour
and never overcomes his shock that the
teachings of Jesus survived as the ocial
line, at least nominally, for 2000 years. More
likely some little Trump would have dictated
an agenda of odor odii for the rise of the West
in the Roman period, and that we’d never
have escaped the darkness.
Ordo Imperatoris
The theory of the unitary executive means
that the US President can fire, at his pleasure,
the heads of the Environmental Protection
Agency, Federal Trade Commission, the
National Labor Relations Board and other
independent agencies. In its strongest form,
the unitary executive theory means that the
President can control the policy choices
of those agencies. So if the EPA wants to
issue a rule to protect the environment, and
the President hates the idea, he can nix it.
Doubling down, on 18 February Trump issued
an executive order saying “The President and
Attorney General’s opinions on questions
of law are controlling on all employees
in the conduct of their ocial duties”.
Later, with growing judicial pushback
to his deportations, Trump declared his
heedlessness: “It’s a judge that’s putting
himself in the position of the president of the
United States that was elected by close to
80 million votes”. He earned a rebuke from
Chief Justice John Roberts after he suggested
impeachment of judges who opposed his
deportations of immigrants.
The unitary executive theory has some
support from the text, more support from the
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Supreme Court and a great deal of support
from democracy-light Republicans. The first
sentence of Article II of the Constitution
states that “the executive power shall be
vested in a president of the United States
of America”. It also gives the President, and
no one else, the power to “take care that the
laws be faithfully executed”.
At its most extreme it would allow Trump
to order an aide to assassinate a political
opponent and then pardon the aide.
In the end, it’s not much of a system.
In Ireland, the cabinet is drawn from the
Oireachtas and the head of the EPA stays in
place when the Executive changes after an
election.
Ordo Hiberniae
If Trump sparks a war with Ireland and he or
his allies have to strafe or nuke the country
there will be beautiful opportunities in real
estate around the Clis of Moher.
Mump and Vamp
American journalist Michael Wol has
written a new book chronicling the 2024
Trump campaign. ‘All or Nothing: How Trump
Recaptured America’ recounts how Trump
had doubts about weirdionaire techbro Musk
after the Tesla CEO jumped wildly with his
fists in the air as he joined the president at
a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. where Trump
had previously been shot in the ear.
Elsewhere, Wol describes Trump’s
extensive second thoughts about
hypocritical ambitionaire Vance, in one
instance reportedly described in a phone
conversation with an unnamed confidant.
“Yeah. What the fuck is with that name-
change stu?”, Trump allegedly raved. “How
many name changes has he had? That’s
shifty, that’s very shifty. That’s my sta
fucking up. They know what I think about
people changing their names. I think it’s
shifty. And they didn’t tell me”,
Vance was born James Donald Bowman.
After his parents split up he was adopted
by his new stepfather and renamed James
David Hamel. Long known as “J.D.”, he later
changed to his surname to Vance, after the
beloved grandmother of whom he writes in
‘Hillbilly Elegy’, his bestselling book from
2016. He eventually dropped the dots, to
become “JD”. Dotlessness is a preference he
shares with this magazine. The only one.
Rupert bared
Wol is best-known for his biography of
Rupert Murdoch, ’The Man who owns the
News’, including Fox.
The Murdochs recently submitted their
aairs to in camera litigation in Nevada but
unfortunately 3000 pages of the proceedings
were transferred to the New York Times and
the Murdochs weren’t really in a position to
complain. Here’s a flavour of what the Times
got: “Rupert always had a special fondness
for Lachlan. He was his firstborn son, and he
shared his father’s love of newspapers, his
swashbuckling spirit — which he advertised
with his tattoos and Aussie boots — and
his more conservative politics. James, by
contrast, was more liberal and technocratic to
a degree that Rupert found both irritating and
counterproductive. What’s more, James’s
wife, Kathryn, a climate activist and Fox critic,
had a knack for making political comments
that got under her father-in-law’s skin.
His two sons’ responses to Donald Trump’s
political rise only confirmed Rupert’s
preference. Lachlan enthusiastically
embraced the transformation of Fox News
into Trump’s most loyal advocate. James
pushed back”.
Unboxed by Fox
There’s a terrible bang of Pandora’s box:
that Trump and his
inarticulately raging
supporters are out of
their box. The discourse
which suppressed their
like as fools will never
regain its innocence. Of
course it was Fox News that cynically let them
out.
War-criminal ghouls
For those who pretended that Israel’s
approach had regard to proportion or was
not about ethnic cleansing and war crimes,
Netanyahu’s statements, after Trump
extolled a vision of Gaza as US real estate,
that: “we all also welcomed the President’s
revolutionary vision for Gaza” — definitively
proves they were wrong.
Remember the time when the Israeli ghouls
disputed that they destroyed hospitals,
schools or mosques...Silence now.
Racist ghouls
Villager is frustrated by reporting of the
probably genocidal Gaza war. The only
ethical approach is to report the death of all
innocents the same way.
1200 Israelis were killed on October 7 and
between thirty-three and seventy-five Israeli
hostages were later killed or murdered; of
251 abducted.
The ocial Palestinian Health Ministry
count is of more than 47,000 Gazans dead
with more than 400 annihilated on 18 March
alone.
Of the identified dead, about 55% are
estimated to be women, children or elderly,
according to a Reuters calculation based on
Palestinian data released in January. Ocial
Palestinian tallies of direct deaths in the
Gaza war probably undercounted the number
of casualties by around 40% in the first nine
months of the war as Gaza’s healthcare
infrastructure unravelled, according to a
peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet
journal.
Each death deserves the same coverage.
Each Israeli life taken is properly celebrated
in intense scrutiny. So too the massacre of
each of the innocents in Gaza. It is racism
for Western media to give a multiple of the
space to the release of Israeli hostages as to
the death of each Gazan.
Doge eat Doge
Britain’s going DOGE faster than Ireland.
The chair of the UK’s Competition and
Markets Authority was sacked for not being
serious about growth and overseas aid will
be reduced from 0.5% to 0.3% of Gross
National Income starting in 2027, freeing £6
billion annually towards increasing defence
spending to 2.5% of GDP by then.
NHS England has been told to halve its
sta, with the loss of 6,500 jobs.
NHS England, was instigated in 2013,
eight years after Ireland’s HSE to whose
administrators it is analogous, when
technocracy was a mini rage. The intention
was to allow technocrats to make plans
beyond the next election, and to reduce
political meddling in the day-to-day operation
of the NHS but the tide has long gone out
on technocrats; and the public, if anything,
prefers politicians… In 2022, the UK’s
healthcare expenditure was approximately
11.3% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
This is comparable to Ireland’s healthcare
spending, which was 11.4% of its Modified
Gross National Income (GNI), though Ireland
has a younger population.
Hardly Keir
Can Starmer’s parents have known anything
about Keir Hardie?
Slán to (public) care
The future of Irish healthcare should be
Sláintecare, which converges on free
healthcare. Sadly, and with little comment,
the private sector is rampant in Ireland,
opening facility after facility while the policy
festers. A piece in the Business Post on 16
March notes that the system is “hooked”
on the private system and insurers. Being
the Business Post, the kicker is an insidious
accompanying opinion piece from a
consultant dermatologist making out that
— because we need “realistic, pragmatic,
adaptable plans” — this is a good thing.
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Pressed-up
The 59-bed Clarence Hotel in Dublin’s
Temple Bar is seeking to add 104 bedrooms
into, and over, Dollard House, Ireland’s first
steel-framed building. It also intends to
refurbish the bar which replaced the elegant
‘Octagon bar’ with a heptagon and didley
didley ‘Stout Bar’, to remake the double
height of the pusillanimous Cleaver East
restaurant; and to remove the na Presssup-
era paint from the Austrian-oak panelling
that once characterised the hotel’s reception
rooms. Dublin City Council has asked for
a reduction in the impact of the proposed
double-height single-storey addition in
copper to the Clarence facing South. The
idea is to mitigate the 20-year-old greedy roof
extensions foisted on the city by Bono and
the Edge who bought the place for love but
soon fell out. And the plan is to rebuild the
once-quaint single-storey Garage bar (once
a plain old… garage) with seven storeys.
The site’s owner is no longer the U two,
Harry Crosbie or Paddy McKillen Senior, it’s
not even Press-Up group or Paddy McKillen
Junior, which obtained a loan of €43.5 from a
subsidiary of Israeli Bank, Leumi, in October
2023 (not a good time in Israel) to buy the
site from the U two. It’s the more prosaic,
Keywell Dac, owned by Lifestyle Hospitality
Capital (LHC) and Elliott Investment
Management, the New York-headquartered
investment giant founded by billionaire Paul
Singer to which Press-up’s hotel subsdidiary
sold eight properties for €335 last year. In
2008, the City Council abjectly granted
planning permission to the U2 and McKillen
Senior, for a €150 million plan, designed by
British architect Norman Foster, embracing a
spaceship-style 141-bedroom five-star hotel
and spa, demolishing most of the site’s
structures behind façade, but it never got o
the ground due to the depression.
GRAnd
For a second year, the GRA, which represents
80% of all serving gardaí, won’t be inviting
Garda Commissioner Drew Harris to its
annual April conference. The GRA have never
rowed back from their unprecedent vote of
‘no confidence’ in Drew Harris which was
carried by 98.7% in September 2023. At
the time neither the Associations of Chief
Superintendents or of Superintendents
defended Harris.
The GRA considers Harris unsympathetic. A
recent Garda statement highlighted recent
improvements including a favourable new
roster, an increase in retirement age and
in age limits for recruits, body-cameras,
equipment for gardaí including armed units
and water cannons, new vehicles, mental
health training and more promotions. And
crucially, of course support for improved
Travel and Subsistence payments. But
the GRA is now “gravely concerned” (no
less) over disciplinary provisions in new
employment regulations. Bored with Garda
disinformation, Villager did a little research
and uncovered the following:
1) Harris has an ego problem. On August 9,
2024, under instructions from Drew Harris,
the Garda Press Oce announced that the
Commissioner had decided to decline the
government’s invitation to extend his tenure.
However, within hours, then-Taoiseach
Simon Harris stated to the press that the
government had never discussed extending
his tenure. McEntee was forced to confirm
the Taoiseach’s position. A benign press
never reported the debacle.
2) Garda Management are heedless to morale
in the ranks. Harris dubiously suspended the
Garda head of human resources. In 2022 a
culture audit weirdly conducted by Durham
University, which in the UK is seen as liking
policing authorities, found that garda
personnel were highly motivated, full of
pride job satisfaction. Less than ten months
later, the GRA voted 98.7% “No Confidence”
in Harris.
3) Too few gardaí get too much money. In
2018, the Garda budget was €1.5 billion.
This year it is €2.48 billion, a two-thirds
increase in spending. Ireland’s population
was 4,834,507 in 2018 and is 5,308,000
now, a nearly 10% increase. In August 2018,
the total frontline garda headcount, at garda
and sergeant rank, was 13,275. By December
2024, this number was 13,465, an increase
of just 190 in six years. Allmost one billion
additional euro resulted in very little extra
capacity.
4) Garda Management hasn’t budgeted or
strategised for promised new community
wardens and garda reservists.
More or less?
Les Moore, Head of Dublin City’s Park
Services, can’t stop leaving well-enough
alone. Everywhere you move from Wolfe
Tone park to Bull Island to St Anne’s Park and
now Merrion Square park they’re introducing
commerce, tram cafés and badly conceived
markets into what should be refuges from
the increasingly grubby city. Less is more,
Les Moore.
Fint anticlimax
Anyway Villager has definitely done his bit
for castigating the evil US President. As to
the Irish Presidential election, in October,
Villager believes it’s between Tommy
Tiernan, Joe Brolly and Máiréad McGuinness.
Fintan O’Toole, Ireland’s only journalistic
intellectual and the favourite for Villager
though a villain for social media, got a
welcome flu piece in the Sindo. But before
we knew where we were he was denying the
possibility though not the aspiration.
