Somewhere in a pub in County Clare…
“A drop of the top shelf, in your own good time, please. Make it Green Spot”
“Uisge beathe”
“Go raibh maith agat, Sean Beag.”
“Slainte”
“You know I asked Joe Langers today, the Donegal fella, I asked him today, “What do you think, Joe, who was the greater of the two villains… was it Cromwell, or was it St. Patrick… which one was the greatest scourge that ever came to Ireland?” And you know what he said?”
“I have an idea,” said Seany.
“He said St. Patrick was the greatest scourge ever to come to Ireland. He told me that it wasn’t snakes that St. Patrick drove out of the country…. It was people who would not recant their faith… and he drove them over the cliffs of Donegal… what do you think of that, Sean Og?”
“Well, you know there’s some things we just can’t talk about. And that is one. We can only weep.”
“Seany, I never thought I’d see times like these. I never in my life thought I’d see the downfall of the Roman Catholic Church as we’ve seen it in Ferns and in Dublin.”
“You know it broke my father’s heart… his brother was a Christian Brother in Australia… he got the OBE from the Queen of England!”
“I remember Sean, when in the year 1999 the Christian Brothers set up a counseling service for all the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers… that just about capped it.”
“Look, take it easy… that’s not what’s really happening”… said Sean. “What’s happening is that Bertie Ahern is making his annual trip to Washington with his begging bowl in hand. Right now as we speak they’re doin the dirty deal… amnesty for our illegal aliens in return for more looking the other way while they transport their prisoners to more torture prisons in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. They’re using Shannon airport as if it were an English airfield.”
“Why didn’t they just use England then, their ally… the difference in fuel to stopover in England would be the volume of about 6 by 6 by five feet….”
“We’re better at looking the other way….. Don’t you remember the night Mary Kelly took an ax and gave a warplane forty wacks? The guardai were in their cars asleep !!! I mean you can’t have guards… not Irish guards doing security at an airport… so now we’ve got the whole flippin army to do it. And still they don’t inspect these planes. You know I think half the workforce in Shannon do nothing more than paint planes coming in from one country to go out looking like they come from another country. Get real, this war is good for tourism, and that’s the bottom line.”
MARY KELLY’S STATEMENT:
“I went for a walk with my friend along the perimeter fence and at the control tower area, with her help, I was able to scale the fence and get through the barbed wire, then over and on to the runway. It was about 6 p.m. I had a placard saying ‘NO U.S. BOMBERS’. My intention was to get arrested in order to get the issue into the media.
“A police patrol car immediately screeched towards me and a Garda jumped out. I gave him a good run. When he caught me, he forcibly dragged me to the patrol car, pulled my hair and twisted my arm up my back.“I told him to take it easy, that I was going without a fight. He was really freaked out and I thought he was going to have a heart attack, as he was so unfit and gasping for breath! He took me to the place where the baggage comes through and there were loads of passengers there. I yelled out several times that there were US bombers landing illegally at the airport. People looked astonished to see me being yanked off into a room.
“The Head of the airport security told me I had committed a very serious crime and was being charged with endangering the lives of people and planes! I asked them why they did not protest themselves and that Ireland would be colluding with the bombing of Iraq as we did over Afghanistan. They were very rude. I kept myself in good spirits by annoying them.
“Then I was taken to Shannon Garda station and was greeted with, ‘Oh No, not you again.’ I kept talking to them and at one point was near to tears when telling them about Palestine. Suddenly their attitude completely changed. The previously obnoxious sergeant said, “Look, the Government has been taking it up the a** for years from the US and they are not going to stand up to them, and ye don’t know the f***ing half of what goes through here at nighttime!” He said they felt sickened by it themselves but don’t know how to do anything and have not got the will!
“The main guy told me that one night at 4 a.m., he went out and found Clinton’s special jet on the runway with two fighter jets accompanying it, bearing Chelsea, his daughter on a visit to her pen pal in Switzerland. This disgusted him. He also mentioned that there was some jet in recently that they – the airport security guards! – were not allowed near. He repeated that we don’t know the half of it. He then said that the only way our protest might work was if we got over 1,000 people at Shannon! And do a daily protest outside the Dail (Irish Parliament) as well!
“Yeah right. But she hit the wrong plane. That was an Italian cargo plane full of tires, Coca-Cola and potato chips. A half a million pounds in damage to a flying junk food and spare parts shop.”
“It’s the principle of the thing, Sean. The principle. I hate junk food myself. Jesus, Sean. Give me another, would you, and have one yerself.”
Whisky vs. Whiskey – Dispute of the spelling of a favorite national drink has brought two proud nations to the brink of war. Angry trade representatives of Ireland and Scotland have been in furious negotiations to try to establish an international standard for the spelling of their national drinks. “They can call it scotch if they want to, but whiskey is whiskey,” claimed Irish trade representative Liam O’Hara. Scottish trade representative Scott Macpherson responded to this by saying: “Whisky is whisky, whether is it scotch or not. In this case I see that we have the backing of several other countries, most notably Canada and Japan, although I dinna understand what these countries can understand about real whisky if you ask me.” This comment was answered by some furious cussing and name-calling. “Those gits practically drink all of their own ‘whiskey’ themselves anyway, what right do they have to dictate an international standard?” the Scottish representative asked loudly. “Whiskey comes from the gaellic anyway, so who’s mincing words now?” countered the Irish representative. “Those cunts can’t make whiskey, they can’t drink whiskey, and they can’t play football neither.” The meeting carried out of the room and into the street, onto the football field and into the bars. The trade meeting concluded amicably, sometime around 2 in the morning, but as nobody could remember the wording of the agreement (or even the general idea), negotiations continued from scratch the next morning, with all members nursing bad, bad hangovers.
“No word of a lie, don’t you remember in February of 2003 when the Irish Anti-War movement and PANA and the Labour Party and the Green Party confronted Bertie Ahern about all the planes going through Shannon Airport, and he said right out in the Dail, “What you’re talking about here is a $90 Billion US investment in Ireland… you come up with something to replace that and then we’ll start talking about Irish neutrality.”
“And right you are, too, Sean… Bertie came out with it … you’ve got to admire him for standing there with a smile on his face and making the people an offer they couldn’t refuse… but don’t forget Smith, and Cowen and that fecker Willie O’Dea…. Collusion…. and that’s the way this country has survived and prospered for years…. This Celtic Tiger stuff looks like a betrayal of Irish culture, values, and national identity, a betrayal of the Irish Contitution…. A betrayal of history too.”
“You think this is something new? It was deValera who flew the Irish flag at half mast when Hitler bit the bullet in a bunker….
Look, get yerself turned around, do you honestly think that any Irish man or woman supports this illegal war on Iraq, would anyone of them be complicit in forming some kind of economic alliance with the Brits or the Yanks…. in return for those kinds of favors? The whole country is against that war… we just don’t want our people punished for being decent and hardworking, and making some money in America.”
“But Sean, the gang of five: Ahern, Smith, Martin, Cowen & O’Dea…. They’re caught in the Brussels net now…. These are war crimes… to facilitate the illegal transport of prisoners to torture prisons…. These guys have involved the whole country, by their policies, in war-profiteering… it’s shocking…If it was St. Patrick then, we’ve got our Cromwell now…. and they’re going to have to answer for it. This is going to cost us huge.”
As Ever, Follow The Money via Free Stater
January 16th, 2006P. O’Neill over at Best of Both Worlds asks a question: “Secret treaties between Republic of Ireland and USA? In the Dail today, Michael D. Higgins referred to two treaties between the USA and the Irish Republic that are listed on the US State Department’s website but were never presented before the Dail. Given the sensitivity of the Shannon airport issue and the general erosion of the republic’s neutrality, this is a source of concern. The line from the government is that these are administratively focused and don’t tie the country in any hitherto unknown GWOT fashion. But one of them sounds dodgy. Here are the relevant pages from the State Department’s website, which list the name of the treaties, but not their text. [text of treaties] The former looks especially suspicious.
“I’ll tell you something right here. There’s a worse scourge than St. Patrick or Cromwell…. and this war in Iraq is the worst… because this country has been aiding and abetting the genocide of a people…. They’re starved, they’re sick, they’re being bombed into extinction… and anyway you cut it, we’re involved.”
“Yes, Sean. It’s desparate.”
“Listen,” said Sean. “I’ve got an idea. We’ll offer them Knock Airport. You know that statue down near Shannon Airport, `Our Lady of The Skies’… well we’ll go down there and kidnap the statue and bring it up to Knock. We’ll open up Knock Airport to all US/UK military flights…. And during their stopover we’ll convert them… we’ll make good Catholics of them all…. And we’ll take a good bit of their money while we’re at it.”
“No good, Sean. I don’t like it.”
“Well, I thought we could combine the stopover with a retreat/rehab for all the priests who have been caught in the Ferns and Dublin abuse cases….. we could make a theme park out of it….. Call it Camp Treason or something. And build really thick walls…. Like 15 feet thick….. And forty feet high….. Camp Containment”
“And what would you use for money to build this Camp Containment?”
“The money from the Bank Robbery in Derry. Ask Gerry Adams for the cash.”
“That won’t fly, Sean. Gerry is strapped. He can’t go to the US for fundraising any more. Shit, he can hardly get into the country at all, at all.”
HAPPY ST. PADDY’S DAY, GERRY!!
Adams delayed in US airport
Sat Mar 18, 2006 5:17 AM GMTWASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams was delayed at a Washington-area airport on Friday for a secondary security screening, a Homeland Security Department official said.
Adams had been scheduled to fly to Buffalo, New York, for St. Patrick’s Day appearances with Democratic Rep. Brian Higgins of New York but was unable to make the trip because of the airport delay, said Teresa Kennedy, a spokeswoman for the congressman.
Earlier on Friday, Adams, along with Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and other Irish leaders attended a meeting at the White House with President George W. Bush.
A Homeland Security official told Reuters that as Adams “was travelling to Buffalo, he was routinely going through (standard security screening) and he had a very thorough secondary screening.”
“He was never arrested and he was never detained from the department’s perspective,” said the Homeland Security official, who declined to be named. The official declined to explain why Adams underwent the secondary screening and would not comment when asked if Adams’ name had appeared on a terror watch list.
“There are privacy restrictions that preclude us from talking about individuals on no-fly lists,” the official said.
“Well, Bertie can get the cash. He just has to ask Uncle George”
“And what will you do for labor to build this Camp Containment?”
“I figure it’s time for some of our people to come home. They were driven out by these bastards years ago… it’s time for them to come home.”
“And what will you do to keep the people happy while they’re in Camp Containment?”
“We’ll give them RiverDance©, we’ll get Michael Flatley© to do his Yankee Doodle Dandy© Celtic Tiger© show, and move that whole phony Chief O’Neill©’s entertainment extravaganza out of Smithfield©.”
Ceol© is located in Smithfield Village©, a trendy new complex in Dublin that was once home of the Jamison Whiskey Distillery©. A hotel bar connected to the museum sometimes offers live traditional music©. The setting in Chief O’Neill©’s Bar© is too modern for the music to feel authentic, but the museum itself offers a fun© and thorough introduction to Irish music©, and a launching pad for some time in countryside pubs©.
“OK, Sean. And what will you call your new pub and B&B in Knock?”
“I’ll call it “The Boycott.”
“Class, Sean, real class. You’re a right clever hoor you are. Give me one for the road…. Will you?”
“Here, have one on the house and safe home.”
“Dia Dhuit.”
“Slan sa m’bhaile.”
