It’s 30 degrees today. I’m on my holidays from work. There’s hundreds of years of tradition and culture parading through the streets. I have friends visiting. Why oh why would anyone not want to leave Ireland?

Fianna Fáil have a problem with responsibility. Bertie Ahern is adamant that the fiscal problems in the country stem from the collapse of the Lehman Brothers without acknowledging the contribution of his Government’s blind eye to banking regulation. Willie O’Dea, on the Late Late Show, accused the Green Party of acting ‘very shabbily’ when they insisted he step down as Minister of Defence ignoring the fact that he swore an inaccurate affidavit to the High Court. He also said that the Greens should be banned from ‘twittering’ as this was corrosive to Government. Minister for Science Conor Lenihan withdrew from launching a book that calls evolution ‘a fantasy of farraginous, farcical, fatuous, feculent, facile facetiousness’ but still said he would appear at the launch in a personal capacity and that ‘diversity of opinion is a good thing.’ All of these things, except for Bertie’s long running opinion, have happened in the last week or so.

Then there is Brian Cowen’s ‘hoarse’ radio interview. In the interview Cathal Mac Coille gave an example of an individual in Galway, one of 400,000 unemployed who saw no option but to emigrate and went on to point out to Mr. Cowen that ‘On the likely maths she might as well emigrate. ’ to which Mr. Cowen responded ‘Defeatism…will not solve this problem….Yes there will be cutbacks… We all have to get in behind it and make sure we do it because it’s exactly about that by the way it’s about how we secure our kids future.’ Cowen is a man of superhuman abilities. He doesn’t get hangovers at 8.30 in the morning having been up past 3 a.m. Who can argue with him? This IS all about securing the future for our children. How are we going to do this? Cuts. Cuts. Cuts. Stabilising banks. More cuts. Throwing 24 billion into Anglo Irish bank.

As far as I can see it there is no future in this country. Many of my peers have already left and more are making plans to leave. Fianna Fáil is doing nothing to stop this. It’s as if they want to see us leave so the Social Welfare budget can be tightened but no doubt they would refute that claim with a neatly dressed soundbite.

On Tuesday I will go to Spain to begin to look for employment. I leave behind a country torn asunder by the collective greed of a select few individuals protected by Fianna Fáil’s ‘shure tisn’t my fault’ policy. I am going to a country where I can buy alcohol for half the Irish prices, where the pubs and clubs are open all night long, where the sun shines more than 30 days a year, where twenty cigarettes is one quarter the Irish price, where abortion is legal, where gay marriage is legal, where blasphemy is legal, where marijuana is mostly tolerated, where food is cheaper, where the public transport is punctual and regular and where personal responsibility is something people take account of. Spain is also suffering from high unemployment and credit problems in the banking sector but at least there I can respect the people in charge.

I am a part of the new lost generation. I, like thousands of others, have no intention of coming home. Life abroad is much too comfortable. Ireland lacks a way forward. There is no culturally rich future waiting for us a few years down the road. There is nothing but more struggle to pay for the greed of rich men and the mistakes of the lazy eye of the Government.

Fianna Fáil are living in a fantasy world. They are hiding behind soundbites, feigned ignorance and an attempt at playing the victim to the scrutiny of the media. The people leaving this country aren’t leaving just for economic reasons. They leave because the country is stuck in the past. When Willie O’Dea says the Greens should be banned from ‘twittering’ he is conjuring up the Ireland of the past, a society reluctant to evolve, happy only when the cat remains firmly in the proverbial bag.

Mr. Taoiseach, Ministers and policy makers, I am a real person. You have sunk the ship I am jumping from.

Slán go foill

Egg

His trademark out of touch with reality Irishness popped up in the Late Late show on Friday. I didn’t see it because I’ve better things to be doing with my life, such as folding underpants and walking to the shops for tobacco, but I saw it reported in the Limerick Leader, which in my opinion isn’t too far from the Willie O’Dea school of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Here’s the quote:

Tweets and breaking ranks with the party line are corroding the Government, he said, urging that the Green party should be told to stop tweeting.

Deputy O’Dea said Government ministers should be focusing on serious matters at hand – such as rising levels of unemployment – and not be “tweeting and twittering and blogging.”

First off ‘Breaking ranks’ with Government or party lines is what democracy is based on.

Secondly ‘breaking ranks with the party line is corroding Government’ would be true if ‘breaking ranks’ meant corruption, look-the-other-way regulation and the  ‘blame it on de Leeemen Bruders’ excuse. Something seems to be missing from the rationality of Willie’s statement. Namely rationality.

Who is going to tell the Green Party to stop using Twitter? Sorry lads, but Government policy, you’re not allowed post stuff on Twitter. Ok, we’ll just release press statements of 140 characters. Or we’ll put it up on Facebook. Or we’ll just pay a homeless man to tattoo his forehead. You know I hear in Iran they want to ban Twitter too.

Government ministers should not be “tweeting and twittering and blogging” is exactly the kind of statement you expect from a gorilla looking for votes among the classes of moron who fear change, hate the greens because they make them feel guilty about throwing landfill waste into their brown bins and think twittering is for twits (and who think it’s humourous to say so). Willie O’Dea is so out of touch with reality it’s painful to watch. It’s like watching your friend go back with the ex who’s cheated on him ten times. It’s the belief in the world that was and not the world that is. It’s the Ireland where politicians apologise for breaking the law, say it was a mistake and then say it was all the fault of the media anyway.

This is one depressing fucking country to live in. Hopefully I’ll be gone within the fortnight.

View from Smerwick Harbour, Kerry

And using the zoom lens from exactly the same spot:

Detail of view across the bay

The technology is amazing. The camera is amazing. To take great pictures like this all you need is to be loaded. Back in the early 1900s you needed to be a bit of a genius.

The problem with photography as historical document is that the technology available at the time makes that period of time look – in retrospect – grainy, or blurry, or black and white. Imagine seeing World War 2 in high-definition. I mean the real war not the National Geographic reconstructions. Or the middle ages. Or the war of independence. Or Jesus Christ. Or the sixties. It would change our perspective of the time. Well, 100 years ago, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was taking colour pictures. And what’s most striking about his pictures from 1910 onwards is that the pictures look like they were taken today in Afganistan or Siberia or the Ural Mountains. They show us that not that much has changed in terms of how the world looks.

View of Tbilisi (early 1900s)

This is a picture of The Monastery of St. Nil on Stolobnyi Island in Lake Seliger in Tver Province taken in 1910.

The Monastery of St. Nil (1910)

It has been improved by digital technology but the original is also in colour. Here’s how he did it. He took three monochrome pictures of the same thing using three different filters. Like this:

“]

Ostrechiny. Study. [Russian Empire

Under the correct light and projecting the three monochrome images it was possible to create a colour image that was very close to reality.

Ostrechiny. Study. Russian Empire

The pictures he took are amazing. His pioneering skill has made the past look modern and modern technology a little less awesome. His catalogue is available from the library of congress website if you can manage to navigate that randomly organised site.

The modern world being what it is he also has his own flikr account. Go look at some of his pictures there.

Weighing office (Chakva)

Articulateness is a sure sign of intelligence. Lincoln and Jefferson were great writers and great presidents. Winston Churchill won the Nobel Prize for literature. The Collected Works of Gandhi is over 50,000 pages long (he also worked as a newspaper editor). Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X wrote prolifically. Trotsky was in his study where he spent thousands of hours writing when he was stabbed through the head with an ice axe. Literature is essentially an honest venture. Literature and words used to have power. Nowadays I don’t think that’s true. An honest politician is, like a good summer in Ireland, a thing of nostalgia.

Barack Obama reads books. Can you imagine? Books. Ones without pictures. Or graphs. He reads literature. He reads modern literature. What’s more, he seems to enjoy it. He doesn’t publish obviously made-up booklists as a PR ‘I’m not a fucking idiot’ stunt like in this Karl ‘Bullshit’ Rove op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal. He reads because he has the love of reading that strikes with rare but severe resonance. We don’t have this luxury in our politicians. I bet Brian Cowen thinks John Banville is a cartoon character.

According to the newspapers Obama went into a bookshop while on holidays (in Martha’s Vineyard) and bought a bunch of books for himself and his daughters. Jonathan Franzen, who for some unknown reason was on the cover of TIME magazine last week with the words ‘Great American Novelist’, has a new book coming out. Americans are wet for it. It’s his fourth novel, his first in the nine years since people decided he was any good. Apparently it’s more of the same, a Midwest family surviving the modern culture-vacuum that is America. So Obama walks into the bookshop, buys the book a WEEK before its release date. Bastard. How dare he? How dishonest. How impatient. Who does he think he is? When I went down to my local bookshop and they just kept repeating ‘It’s not out yet’ to my incessant questions. So the next time the lunatic fringe on the right in America accuse Obama of not acting democratically, they can point to this action as proof he has abused his position to his own advantage. I hope the book is shit.

On another note. Obama bought a copy of The Hunger Games for his kids. Children’s literature is encouraged to give kids a moral compass, an idea of how lucky their middle-class arses are and how shit it was to be around in the imagination of Charles Dickens. According to Wikipedia The Hunger Games introduces sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives in a post-apocalyptic world where a powerful government called the Capitol has risen up after several devastating disasters. In the book, the Hunger Games are an annual televised event where the Capitol chooses one boy and one girl from each district to a fight. The purpose of the Hunger Games is to show how no one, including children, is above the Capitol’s power. The last person standing wins the game. The book is set in Panem, the nation that “rose out of the ashes” of what was previously North America. Panem consists of a wealthy Capitol and twelve poorer districts.

Maybe Obama thinks Sarah Palin will win the next Presidential election and is preparing his kids for the inevitable collapse of society thereafter.  Maybe that’s why he was so rushed to read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Maybe there’s not much time left.

I write this in the bleary aftermath of a fourteen hour shift on Election Day in Australia. The result of that election, much like my head, is still far from clear. However, there seems a very, very good chance that this man will be the next Prime Minister of Australia.

Tony Abbott

This is Tony Abbott, leader of the Liberal Party (NB: ‘Liberals’ in Australia are what the rest of the world would call ‘conservatives’. It’s a strange and very annoying quirk. Call yourself ‘quite liberal’ in Australia and people are liable to assume you are somewhat to the Right of Mussolini). Tony is a deeply conservative and religious man who enjoys watersports, believes climate change is ‘crap’, and  that ‘wimmin’ generally ought to be seen and not heard where possible.

In the UK human egg with hair David Cameron took power from an admittedly rubbish Labour government in May.

Cameron, seen here imitating what he has been told human beings call ‘sadness’

Meanwhile President Obama is struggling against the rising tide of hard-Right lunacy in the US led by the ‘Tea Party’, whose deep belief that man can be a Communist, a Fascist, an athiest and a Muslim all at once holds a lot of sway in large parts of Mer-kah.

Obama's More Pressing Plan: Increase Funding for Education

Since the global financial crisis, it would seem, much of the world has taken several confident steps to the Right. There are right-wing governments of various shades in Canada, New Zealand, France, Germany and Italy. As right-wing politics and neo-liberal capitalism have been  proven an empty sham over the past two years they have, perversley grown stronger, while leftish politicans across the world have decided to collectively crap the bed and stumble about with all the confidence and direction of a drunken blind man with a severe concussion.

The question is; why?

Why, when neo-liberal capitalism is faltering and environmental issues are coming to dominate political discourse, is the Right surging? One major part of the puzzle, methinks, is fear.

Conservatism is the philosophy of fear; fear of change, fear of the future, fear of difference. Lucky for right-wingers then that fear, much like sex, sells.

During the Australian election campaign Abbott made a bald-faced appeal to people’s base fears; fear of asylum seekers in particular. His was a negative campaign built around buzzwords like ‘stop’ , ‘no’ and ‘end’. Abbott has admitted to being a bit spooked by gay people and worried about Muslim women and their scary veils. ‘Be afraid, Australia. Be very, very afraid’ was the unofficial slogan of his campaign.

Admittedly, on the left and centre-left fear predominated too. Different kinds of fear though. Fear of climate change provided a huge (and well-deserved) swing to the Australian Greens while the governing Australian Labor Party imploded in ungodly mess of puss and bile throughout 2010. Fear of a backlash lead the party to dump its plans on climate change. Fear of big business interests led into a humiliating back down in negotiations over a tax on the mega-firms that run the country’s mining industry. Above all, fear of losing the election caused the party to dump first-term Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

In the UK, the Labour Party and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown stumbled to a hideous, farting death between 2008 and 2010. Terror of losing a looming election left the party looking and governing like the bastard offspring a rabbit in headlights and a startled deer. The Conservative Party delighted in the panic that the global financial crisis elicited in the people of Britain. They tut-tutted and advised not caution, but fear. ‘Be afraid; we’re going the way of Greece. Be afraid; we can’t pay our debts. Be afraid; our nation will fall off into the sea without a Tory Government.’ The fear campaign worked wonders, if not quite well enough for Dr. Eggman and his Cabinet of Dukes and Earls to rule without the Liberal Democrats.

The instability we have seen in financial markets since late 2007 has allowed a tidal wave of terror to grip hearts and minds globally, such that Obama’s momentous 2008 victory looks more like a blip than the birth of a new politics in the western world. In the mid and late 1990’s, centre-left politics stood tall and rode a tidal wave of confidence to power. Bill Clinton in the US, Blair in the UK, Schroeder in Germany and others throughout Europe. Then the politicians gave in to fear; Clinton feared an electoral wipeout in 1996 and lurched to the Right, making decsions that would have had Ronald Reagan thinking ‘Ooh that’s a bit to much for me.’ Blair, of course, lost his mind and soul in the aftermath of 9/11. Across the world politicans feared tinkering with the markets or standing up to big business interests, for fear of losing foreign investment. The result was the unfettered orgy of greed that created the financial crisis that has brought the western world to its knees.

And in the aftermath of that fetid explosion what are we left with? Fear. Fear of China, of Muslim immigration, of radical Islam. Fear of losing our jobs or never getting one again. Fear of defaulting on our debts or dissapointing the bond markets. Fear of Mexicans and Marxists. Fear of a black man in the White House. Fear of the other, fear for our children. Fear of the future. Fear of change.

It’s a conservative’s wet dream.

No wonder Tony looks so happy.

Happy Abbott

The example I’m giving is of Galway but it can be said of a number of towns and cities across Ireland. As businesses are shutting down, more and more of these Kebab ‘Restaurants’ are opening up. This is probably due to a combination of a number of factors.

1. More Turkish Nationals are immigrating here.
2. We’re going to places like Galway instead of Malaga for weekend breaks and are getting mad pissed and eating kebabs.
3. Kebabs are cheaper than real food.
4. You can’t eat two large battered sausages and live with yourself.

When I first visited Galway in 2006 this was the place to be at 3a.m. with your last ten quid:

Back then you could even get a Doner Burger (kebab meat in a burger bun) for €1.90. And the chilli sauce was so hot you had to buy a glass of milk to stop from choking on fire. It was great. The staff were always friendly (They didn’t complain when a friend of mine dropped a €2 piece into the yoghurt sauce bowl. They just fished it out and accepted it as legal tender) and the mural on the wall of the blue mosque in Istanbul gave you something to focus on as you waited for your balance to find itself.

I don’t remember any other kebab places from that time except Abrakebabra, which sold shit overpriced kebabs to people who didn’t know any better. Abrakebabra in Galway is now closed (after having spent time as the Kebab Klub and then the Wok). We all know how shit Abra is. And how it makes you shit. It has a reputation as a place of drunken violence throughout the country. In Galway, after they changed the name to Kebab Klub, this happened:

Then it changed to the Wok. And This happened:

Conlon’s Restaurant on Eglington Street used to be a fish restaurant/fish and chip shop. You could get a fancy fish dinner or you could get battered cop and chips. There were benches at one side and proper tables at the other side. Then it went on fire. When it reopened it was all posh. No more fish and chips. Instead it was Oysters and Baked Sea-Bass and Galway Bay Dolphins or whatever it is rich people eat. Bad business move.

New York Pizza was a place up on Eyre Square run by a real New Yorker. He sold Pizza by the slice and was ever so nice about everything. The pizza’s were ‘daycent’, a little bit pricey but the quality was worth it. You could order delivery and sometimes he’d send you a pizza so big you couldn’t fit it in the front door (until you figured out you could hold it horizontally. And you needed more Rizzlas). Only about two months ago I was in there with the Irish Times reading about NAMA, watching the rain and wondering what the f-ing hell this guy from New York was doing here. Then:

Another one? A friend of mine returned to Galway briefly recently after a three-year absence (he wasn’t in jail, I swear) and he told me to meet him in The Charcoal Grill.

I told him to meet me by the Arch. Just Easier.

How long until there’s a Charcoal Grill on O’Connell Street in Dublin? Until, like Supermacs, it’s in every town and village in the country? Is this the beginning of some dystopian future where this is the only kind of food available? Where most of our nutrition comes from ‘mystery meat’? Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell have touched on this in their books The Year of the Flood and Cloud Atlas. I’m just saying. Even record shops (Zhivagos) are turning into kebab shops.

And this next place used to be called ‘Pacino’s on the Bridge’ and it sold pizza. Then someone had a better idea. This is the second Pizza place to be taken over by a kebab shop. The Turkish are kicking the shit out of the Italians in some cultural race to supply cheap oily sustenance to the intoxicated. This place still does sell Pizza but it’s far less important.

Then finally there’s an old Galway favourite. The Kebab House is lucky because it is the only Kebab shop on Dominick Street where the Roisin Dubh empties on to every night. And even though I’ve been in there loads of times (don’t get the curry chips) I’ve only just now noticed it’s actually called Costello’s Kebab House. I may be guessing but I don’t think Costello is a Turkish immigrant.

Galway is a tiny city. These places are all within stumbling distance of each other. I walked around to all of them today when I was taking the photos and I was only in town for half an hour, most of which was spent trying not to look like a lunatic talking pictures of kebab shops. The fact that these places are replacing other businesses definitely says something about the state of the economy and the state of the people in that economy. When we go out nowadays we skip the restaurant altogether (and sometimes our home cooked option also) so we’re starving by the time we get thrown out of the pubs and a kebab is the only dinner-sized thing you can stumble up the road eating.

So long as we can afford to get drunk we’re happy.

]]> http://eggthedail.wordpress.com/2010/08/18/eat-drink-and-be-fat-and-drunk/feed/ 0 eggthedail Charcoal Grill Eyre Square The Charcoal Grill Cross Street Wok 100_2033 100_2039 100_2029 100_2028 100_2036 100_2021 100_2041 http://eggthedail.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-down-under/ http://eggthedail.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/the-view-from-down-under/#comments Tue, 17 Aug 2010 14:37:16 +0000 eggthedail http://eggthedail.wordpress.com/?p=13 Continue reading →]]> from our Australian correspondent:

In May of 2009 I departed the shores of the old country and made my way to Australia. I have always been something of a political junky but, frankly, growing up in the Wesht of Ireland isn’t the best place to be dreaming of a career in the second oldest profession on earth. After all, not being the son or nephew of a sitting TD, my chances of making it to the Dáil were wedged between slim and none. More in hope than expectation I joined the Australian Labor Party (being a dyed-in-the-wool lefty also gave me limited hope of getting anywhere on the Irish political scene). Not much more than a year later I work for my local State Member of Parliament and sit on the executive of my local Labor Party Branch.

In 12 months I managed to achieve more than I could hope for in 12 years of rutting about at the bottom of the Irish political ladder. I have been slightly horrified to learn that in Australia doing a half-decent job and working hard count for more than nepotism and shouting ‘Up Mayo!’ during battles for the party leadership. The longer I have worked in politics Down Under the more I have come to appreciate the horrifying black hole that politics in Ireland really is. And I was someone who was already painfully aware of the failings of the Irish political elite.

Take the nepotism question, for example. In the Parliament of Queensland only 2 of the sitting 89 MPs are the offspring of former politicians. In Ireland you’d be hard pressed to find a single Fianna Fail TD who isn’t the scion of some political dynasty.

When I told my boss about the not irregular occurrence of Irish politicians writing to An Garda Síochana on behalf of constituents, attempting to (and in more than a few cases succeeding) quash convictions for speeding or perhaps the odd rape or murder (‘He’s a decent hurler Sergeant and sure I’ve never seen him miss Mass of a Sunday. If he killed that fella sure he must have been asking for it.’), he almost tripped up over his own jaw. Not that there isn’t a place in Queensland for politicians who attempt to influence police officers or judges. It’s called prison.

In Queensland there exists the Queensland Ombudsman, to investigate complaints against Government Departments and local councils, the Auditor General, an independent body that evaluates the budgets of public sector bodies and the money governments spends and the Crime and Misconduct Commission, a powerful organisation that oversees government agencies, investigates political corruption, the police service and prisons. Politicians can’t fart in Queensland without incurring the wrath of at least five different watchdogs. I doubt very much that unless Charles Haughey had garrotted Gay Byrne to death live on the air he would have been seriously investigated for any of his alleged misconduct. The thought of the Premier of an Australian state wandering around with duffel bags stuffed with cash like auld Bertie is like imagining John Waters writing an article that didn’t make you want to punch him in the face. It’s just too ridiculous a notion to even consider.

In contrast to graft the expenses scandal that rocked British politics last year and the ubiquitous scumbaggery native to Irish politics, there are obscene levels of oversight when it comes to politician’s expenses. Queensland MPs are given $30,000 a year to cover their office expenses, each and every penny of which must be carefully accounted for. I have watched grown men and women tear apart whole offices in a desperate search for the $5.00 taxi receipt they need to account for. Politicians who would gladly stare down a furious crowd of 1,500 union activists screaming blue murder would rather eat a bag of their own hair than fail to declare the cup of coffee they bought from the parliamentary café. Haughey would be rolling in his grave.

When the Federal Election campaign in Australia was launched in late July I, like the bumpkin I am, craned my neck on the walk in to work in expectation of a sea of campaign posters polluting the local area with the ruddy faces of aspiring politicians. The telephone poles remained bare. ‘You see Paul,’ my friends explained to me slowly and with diagrams, ‘In Australia candidates are limited in the number of posters they can print and display during a campaign.’ 100 for a Federal election, 50 at state level and a mere 25 for local elections. Imagine the joy of not having eighty million vacantly grinning Fine Gael wingnuts gaping at you on the bus in to work in the run up to polling.

Australian politics is a million miles from perfect. Some 20 years ago Queensland was considered a corrupt backwater. Police corruption and brown envelopes are to be found in the land of Kangaroos and Crocodiles like anywhere else, for sure. We have our fair share of resident lunatics in the various parliaments of the land. But Aussies have a terrible habit of learning from their mistakes and politicians have a terrible knack for being called to account for their actions. Imagine radical notions like that taking root in Leinster House.

I read a lot. I like books, newspapers, blogs, comic strips, plays and even poetry. I absolutely hate it when someone asks me to read something they’ve written. I hate it because I’m an honest person and I don’t want to tell them how shit it is. Especially poetry. God save us from the poetry of the masses. Utter drivel about the sky and how small we are and how watching the sun come up is like being born or how being alone at night listening to nature is like hearing ancient music lost to clacking phones and humdrum cars. Shite. All of it. Here’s an example of what I’m on about: (keep in mind this person says ‘I’d really appreciate feedback, thanks.’ Would you? Really?  Do you want someone to tell you it’s great that you have emotions JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE AND YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL IN ANY WAY.)

Breathe

I breathe in and think of you,
I breathe out and see your face,
Tenderly touching it in my mind’s eye,
I stoke your face…I cry.

I want you, I need you, I miss you,
The other me,
“You’re bad for me”,
Two of a kind, always there
Only consolation…we breathe the same air,

The male me…I love you, I let you go

Love is free…always entwined,
Never to be.

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055997834.

I also want to know how you ‘stoke’ someone’s face. Is this some new-fangled word the ‘kids’ are using that I’m not ‘up’ with? (or is it ‘in’ with?)

Modern technology has made it so much easier for people to give me their shite to read. They don’t even have to have a copy of it with them. All they have to do is remember my email address, or worse, make friends with me on Facebook. This is why I think it’s utterly fantastic what Barrack-à-Scéal are doing.

The staff of three pubs (Bar Pigalle, Tom Barry’s and Bradley’s) on Barrack Street in Cork invited people to send them their stories. They then bravely waded through the chaff and poo and shortlisted seven good stories, posted them online and are asking the public to pick a favourite. Here’s how it works. You make friends with Barracka Scéal here http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/…00001164063757. You read the seven short-listed short stories and you send them a message with the name of the story you liked best to cast your vote. They have hardcopies of the stories in the pubs, where you can also vote, for the internetless or facebookless out there.

Using the internet to distribute good new Irish writing that has gone through rigorous shit-detecting is a great idea. It gives people a chance to  read stories that are written by peers without the stories having to be crap. You also get to pick your favourite without having to listen to those pretentious tossers you usually come across at readings of new-writing. It cancels out the shit from both sides: the utterly shit writing and the utter wankers who read their moderately successful stories with so much self-enjoyment they may as well be touching themselves inappropriately.

Go have a read and vote for your favourite. It’s worth it.

Labeta Debela

The papers are running with the story of Labeta Debela today. An African guy who lives in Limerick and likes to run. He landed in hospital after running through Moyross. The Examiner are claiming that it may be racially motivated. The Irish Times focuses on how many races he’s won since he arrived here. (He’s  Ethiopian, running races against mostly Irish people = Big fish. Dried up pond). The Limerick Leader runs with its usual ‘isn’t it awful, this is not in the spirit of real Limerick people’ self-aggrandising, even quoting his trainer at one point saying ‘He’s a lovely young man.’

It is awful what happened to the poor guy but to be honest this stuff happens in Limerick every day. The papers are wondering why it wasn’t reported to the guards but hardly any of these events are reported to the guards. (I was headbutted on O’Connell Street in Limerick back in 2000, in the middle of the day, for no reason. I didn’t tell anyone because I was supposed to be at school.)

Here’s what I think happened. The guy is running along the road. A bunch of Moyross’ finest are standing by a wall. They joke about the guy (after all why would you run unless there’s a guard chasing you) and then the guy sees a car coming, runs onto the footpath and is tripped by an outstretched leg. His momentum etc. was probably enough to land him unconscious. And then they laugh the haughty laugh of the scummer.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that he’s African. If it’d been anybody running through Moyross the result would have been the same. Most people I know reacted to this story saying ‘What the fuck was he doing running through Moyross for?’ Perhaps he was in training for the Olympics in London thinking he’ll have to run through  Hackney during the marathon. I think that’d be a great sport. Running through the world’s most problematic estates. They’ll run faster, the locals get to be on TV hurling petrol bombs and abuse in equal measure, and I get to see the estates without having to go there. Everyone’s a winner.  Sponsored by Buckfast. If ITV or TV3 hear about this it’s going to happen.

And to end this I’ll say what all Limerick people would say in response ‘There’s plenty of nice people living in Moyross too you know.’

I know there is. It’s their delinquent kids I’d be worried about.