That time we sent Michael D to visit the Queen

“I think he done you proud and Her Majesty loved him. I don’t understand what you was saying earlier that he’s a bit of a figure of fun.”

“Ah, look sorry, I suppose I shouldn’t have said that. He’s not, not really. Ah, it’s just, ah, he can be a bit airy-fairy, d’you know? But I voted for him and he was brilliant with the Queen alright. I suppose it’s just… we take him for granted because he’s been around forever, you know?”

“And has he always been the premier?”

“What? No, no, we only elected him President a couple of years ago but he’s always been there, d’you know? He’s always been the Minister for the Arts, and the Minister for Irish as well, it seems like even when his lot weren’t even in power. And I suppose ’twas only to see him beside the Queen, as an equal, I was glad ’twas him we elected.”

“We-e-ell… as a loyal subject of Her Majesty, I couldn’t agree that anyone’s her equal but I take your point. That said, here, he is tiny, though, ain’t he?”

“So’s the Queen.”

“Yeah, but she’s the bloody Queen, mate!

“Another pint?”

“I will, please. Cheers.”

I overheard that on Friday night, just as President and Sabina Higgins were settling back into Áras an Uachtaráin for a well-earned rest and, as Philip Nolan teased on the wireless, the President’s accent was settling back to normal too.

I was struck during the Irish Presidential Election of 2011, (that never-ending war that those of us on Twitter still call, in hushed and traumatised tones, #Aras11,) that for all the touchy-feely talk of inspiration and personification from all seven candidates, for all the Celtic mist and the Enya backing tracks, the only ones who actually understood the job for which they were applying, were the three political lifers.

Mary Davis? She rose without a trace but my goodness wasn’t she on a lot of Quangos? She talked a good fight about volunteerism but it turned out she had been paid rather a lot of money for her own volunteering.

Dana? No. Just no. Even before that whole thing with the family and the attempted assassination by, er, a burst tyre, just no.

Martin McGuinness? He did a good bit to sanitise Sinn Fein’s image down here in Mexico but he never really was a runner and I always got the impression that he knew that. He was a minesweeper for the Shinners. He also was at least instrumental in the downfall of The Man Who Should Have Been King.

Yes. Seán Gallagher. Oh Lord God. A man who was so Fianna Fáil that he wasn’t even in Fianna Fáil and if you’re not Fianna Fáil yourself well then neither is he but if you are Fianna Fáil well shur you know yourself.

Days before the election, he was the serious favourite to be our ninth president. He was on the telly so he was and apparently he was going to be some class of an entrepreneur in the Áras as well and give us all jobs. Or something.

He would, like Old Man Willikers in Scooby Doo, have gotten away with it too, if not for, at least at first, Martin McGuinness. The only candidate with actual previous experience as the head of an army, McGuinness exposed Gallagher as a Fianna Fáil bag-man on live TV. As Ken Curtin tweeted at the time, “General Tom Barry himself would have been proud of that ambush”.

I still think, though, the real damage was done by Gallagher himself in his ill-tempered reaction to Glenna Lynch‘s questions. The mask really slipped there.

Then there was the “fake” tweet. I remain convinced it might have been a plausibly-deniable tweet but I think it came from exactly where Pat Kenny thought it did. Anyway, let’s not keep going on about it. Like Sean Gallagher is.

Which leaves, as I said, the three political lifers.

Fine Gael, against Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s wishes, ran a veteran candidate so grey and charmless that my mind slides off the subject and I’m thinking now of a really great episode of Doctor Who. Sorry. Fine Gael. Right. #Aras11. Yes. The Fine Gael candidate. For the presidency. The really great thing, though, is that the writer, Steven Moffat, twists the whole idea of narrative and leaves the viewer, like Carey Mulligan’s protagonist, trying to reassemble the brilliantly fractured plotline. Despite the terrifying monsters, there’s a real joy to this story.

Sorry, what?

I would have voted for David Norris. I think he’s a great man and a patriot. I think if not for him, there is a good chance that homosexuality might still be a crime here or at least would have remained a crime for much longer. He lost my vote though at “classic paedophilia” when, as the late Christine Buckley noted, he seemed momentarily and utterly uncharacteristically blinded (I think possibly by loyalty, possibly by love) to the suffering of victims of abuse.

No, I think that given a choice between a man who had no personality, and a man who had way too much personality, we made the right decision when we elected Michael D. Higgins by over a million votes. And I’ve just realised that I’ve indirectly described my president as Goldilocks. Which is, I’m pretty sure, treason.

A man who was always there, even though we might not have really noticed, even though we might have laughed sometimes at his excesses of pomposity and flights of oratorical fancy but a great man who always remained a tireless champion of the underdog and also a kind and generous ambassador for the very best of Ireland.

A small man who makes a whole Nation a whole lot taller. And a man who always, to quote that Englishman from earlier, done us proud.

Donal O’Keeffe

 

The CRC: spending other people’s money like water

“The money that man got would allow me to create 50,000 nursing hours for my children. I resent that.” – Jonathan Irwin, CEO of the Jack & Jill Foundation.

So it turns out Paul Kiely, former CEO of the Central Remedial Clinic, got the guts of three quarters of a million, in a secret deal, basically to shag off. Using accountancy mechanisms which the late Father Ted Crilly might have recognised, the money was kept off the books via a “donation” from the charity “Friends and Supporters of the CRC”. By turning over this particular rock, the Dáil Public Accounts Committee certainly earned their money this week.

€700,000, as Gavan Reilly tweeted, is 233,333 of those CRC Santa Bears. Or, as many commentators have noted, about half of the money donated charitably in one year to the CRC.

An important point, which is in danger of being lost in this controversy, is that the CRC does vital work for vulnerable children and adults with profound disabilities. The money that was given to Paul Kiely had been raised in good faith by decent and kind people, and donated by decent and kind people, to provide support for people in desperate need of help. In fact, Tony O’Brien, head of the HSE, says that the money given to Kiely would have shortened waiting times for CRC patients. Go on. I suppose that’s why Tony’s on the big money himself.

Maria Nolan is the mother of 17-month-old Oisin. Oisin is dependent on the services of the Central Remedial Clinic. Maria calls the CRC “a lifeline” and “a second home”. Speaking to RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, she appealed to the public to continue to support the charity. I would really urge you to listen to what she had to say.

http://soundcloud.com/morning-ireland/parent-of-child-attending-the

Dr Tom Clonan has also spoken and written very movingly of the care and affection given to his eleven-year old son Eoghan, who is a patient of the CRC, by the frontline staff there. “They are the reason people like me can sleep at night,” he says. He calls the CRC “an extension of the family and an oasis”. He feels that the patients and staff are the victims of a tactically-timed government leak to distract from the damage being done by Health Minister “Calamity James” Reilly and it’s very difficult to argue that he hasn’t a valid point.

Still, if not for the devastation being caused to real people, I might grudgingly like Reilly. It’s hard not to smile at a man so comically-inept he seems hardly able to answer the phone without setting fire to himself.

The CRC scandal throws up a very important question. There is a pressing need to ask what sort of a supposedly grown-up country outsources essential services to the charity sector but, to recycle the old Irish joke, if we were going there we probably wouldn’t start from here. Welcome to The Land Of We Are Where We Are.

The CRC scandal is a legacy of the nest-feathering cronyism that went on in our Ceaușescu Era, back when Fianna Fáil ran the country, possibly out of the back room of Fagan’s in Drumcondra. But not to worry, we’ve had a democratic revolution since then. Everything’s grand now.

You may, however, have noticed that the small matter of Irish Water (and the staggering €50 million which has already been spent on consultation fees) was also before the Public Accounts Committee on the same day. For instance, €4 million went to Ernst & Young to come up with a name for Irish Water. They came up with “Irish Water”. €4 million. Nice work if you can get it.

Of course you may not have noticed either, given the Augean stink raised by Paul Kiely’s pay-off. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Unless you are a completely starry-eyed innocent, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that while the CRC was the way Fianna Fáil ran the country, Irish Water shows how Fine Gael and Labour do it. Once every five years, our ruling elite lets us change the donkeys nominally in charge and pays them well so they stay onside. Nobody is ever really held accountable. Small people suffer and the big boys, the lads who helped crash the country and their drinking buddies, retire on telephone-number pensions. Even if the money for those pensions has to be collected in buckets by the families and friends of disabled kids.

Imagine if, when nobody was looking, I dipped my hand into a CRC collection box and helped myself to half of the contents.

You’d call me a scumbag. And you’d be right. But compared to a man who would trouser three quarters of a million in charitable donations, I’d still only be the second-lowest of the low.

Donal O’Keeffe

Please help raise a few quid for the Cork Simon Community (with thanks to #vinb)

 

Hello there. I know I’ve been overdoing the plugging of my Vincent Browne caricature, but in my defence I think you’ll agree one thing about my drawing:

It’s really, really cold out there these nights.

It’s damned cold. It’s so damned cold that I doubt even the damned are as damned cold.

Jump into the bed as fast as you can but My! GOD!! It’s freezing cold! It’s cold enough to justify swearing profusely just to distract yourself until you finally warm yourself up. 

But just think: cold as you are until the heater warms the bedroom or the duvet warms your toes, or your true love distracts you with a cuddle or a kiss, imagine having no bed and no door. Imagine that. No window and no roof. And no love.

A grimy, threadbare sleeping bag in a filthy, frozen alley or doorway and perhaps a corrugated cardboard sheet for a pillow. The pavement, bitter beneath you, leeching every ember of warmth out of you, no hope, no future, except the cold ground beneath you promising only one thing: this is how cold it is when you are dead and I assure you, my dirty, hungry and unloved friend, you will be dead very, very soon.

Can you even imagine how cold that would be?

I can’t. To be honest, I actually can’t. I can’t imagine it and I don’t even want to imagine it and I have a feeling you don’t want to imagine it either.

I donated a silly caricature of Vincent Browne (but silly as it is, I’m proud that it’s signed by the man himself) to the Simon Community in Cork. They are auctioning it online and after two days, bidding is already up to €300. That’s an awful lot of €2 coins given to the pale and frozen men and women I see sprawled, it seems, in every second doorway in my city.

But here’s the thing. My friend Philip Nolan has a brilliant idea. Instead of competing with a ridiculous figure, (like, say, currently €300) here’s what we can do: please throw a few quid, whatever you can spare, into the pot here. €1. €10. €50. Pence, cents. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you can spare.

Zippo’s plan is that we will outbid whatever the top bid is on the Simon auction site (at the time of writing, our figure is already ahead of the official tally) and then, once we’ve bought the horrible-looking thing, we hand the Simon Community the money we’ve raised and we give the picture back to them. Then our winning bid becomes the reserve price at the Cork Simon Ball on March 28th and maybe the people in tuxedoes will better our bid.

It’s a bit of fun for us, toward a great cause and, please God, (whatever God in Whom you do or don’t believe,) we can help provide a bed and a future for people who, but for the grace of that same multiple-choice God, might well be you or me.

Happy New Year. And thank you.

Donal O’Keeffe.

PS: If you want to bid on the picture, please do so here. Or, if you want to have some fun, please call here.

 

The curious incident of Fidelma Healy Eames, marriage and adoption equality and Fidelma Healy Eames

Senator Fidelma Healy Eames tells the Sunday Business Post: “Personally I have an open mind on the issue of gay marriage. However, gay adoption raises a number of concerns in relation to how we rear children and the dangers of commodifying children.”

The Sunday Business Post, 29/12/13.

The way I see it, Senator Healy Eames doesn’t even have the moral conviction to own up to her own prejudice. She’s saying “I’m not a bigot but”. Imagine someone saying “I have an open mind on inter-racial marriage but I think there are a number of concerns surrounding miscegenation”.

Leaving aside the logical conclusion of her “commodification” argument, which surely suggests that all babies born through assisted reproduction (and indeed children adopted by heterosexual couples) are in fact commodified children, it is hard not to conclude that those who claim to have no problem with marriage equality but draw the line at adoption equality are saying, in essence, “Let the gays do what they want, to and with each other, but I wouldn’t trust them around children”.

I am informed that Senator Healy Eames has long been known online as Helen Lovejoy. This nickname is spot-on, given her metaphorical screeching “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” and it recalls a wonderful piece by Alan Flanagan entitled “Marriage Equality, The Iona Institute & Helen Lovejoy Syndrome”

I’m sure I’m being unfair and Senator Healy Eames has given a lot of thought to her deeply-held beliefs on marriage and adoption equality. As a public representative, she probably has a long record of having a very conservative view on these matters and is not just cynically saying whatever auld guff will give her most advantage with her new friends in the Fine Gael version of the Tea Party, the so-called Reform Alliance.

I’ll leave you with some thoughts on the subject of marriage and adoption equality from one public representative speaking in 2010.

“I am a heterosexual female married in a traditional family unit. I do not feel the (Civil Partnership) Bill threatens my personal status as a married person or threatens the state of marriage. I was gobsmacked to hear David Quinn from the Iona Institute speak on ‘The Frontline’ about how threatened he felt marriage was by this Bill. He said marriage needed a good PR job just as we have healthy living programmes and advertisement campaigns on television. Why does he feel so threatened? Why is he so unconfident? I have complete confidence in marriage and that marriage will continue to be very popular.

“There are shortcomings in the Bill. There is a glaring omission of children from the Bill and this is an area of major concern. We have an obligation to ensure that children who have parents of the same sex are treated equally in the eyes of the State.

“The Bill does not address the issue of adoption and guardianship, leaving the law unchanged for same sex couples. That is a major flaw and I would like the Minister to address this when summing up. When will we have the guardianship Bill? The Ombudsman for Children, when advising us on the adoption Bill, recommended that the categories of people eligible to apply for adoption should be extended to include same sex couples, and that if the Bill was unchanged, it would continue to deny certain children the possibility of enjoying a permanent and secure legal relationship with both of their parents.”

Of course, you know who said that, don’t you? Yep. Fidelma Healy Eames.

Donal O’Keeffe

(With thanks to Joe Leogue, Nicola Mitchell and @Ruaidhri_.)

Ireland of the welcomes?

Today saw over four thousand people become “new” Irish citizens, the 73rd such group to become, in the words of Justice Minister Alan Shatter, “part of the national family” since citizenship ceremonies were introduced in June 2011.

At a time when Ireland’s national morale is near to an all-time low, it is good to remember that there is still hope in Ireland and hope for Ireland. It seems to me a vote of confidence in Ireland that people come here from every continent and say “I want to be Irish” and it lifts my heart that we are still, despite everything, capable of showing generosity as a Nation. Maybe the idea of an Irish welcome isn’t so much blarney after all.

Or maybe it is. We once voted, and recently enough, by a massive majority, that a child born in Ireland is not necessarily Irish. It is fervently to be hoped that such days are behind us and a manifestation of the worst excesses of the Celtic Tiger.

And yet. I hear it all the time, the mean-spirited remark that “They shouldn’t be let in” or “Haven’t we enough of them” or worse. My favourite refrain from the hard-of-feeling is “We should look after our own first”. You never seem to hear that from people who actually give a damn about “our own”, do you?

The satirist Tara Flynn was herself subjected to appalling attacks when she made the film “Racist B&B“, a very funny and subtly serious piece of work highlighting the racist abuse aimed at her husband.

Attitudes toward immigrants tend to harden in times of austerity and while we have yet to see any sort of large-scale organised anti-immigrant groups, we have plenty of free-range racists and we have no shortage of those wanting to appeal to them. Noel O’Flynn TD managed to top the poll in Cork North-Central in 2002 after calling asylum-seekers in Cork “spongers, freeloaders and conmen”.

There have been attempts to form an Irish fascist party, which thankfully fell apart in predictably hilarious fashion. This was the brain-child of, principally, a Mr Michael Quinn, about whom the mighty Fintan O’Toolbox has blogged here. More about Ireland’s hapless fascists in a moment.

We have been so-far blessed in the sheer stupidity of those who would organise in the name of racism in Ireland. We cannot afford to be complacent. That said, this really made me smile. My friend Elaine Edwards saw a depressing piece of graffiti on a hoarding on Tara Street in Dublin the other day. “Ireland for the Irish” was its deep and meaningful message. However, by the time Elaine had returned to photograph it (above), some brilliant soul had amended it so it now read “Ireland for all. Feck racism”.

Mark Twain said “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand”, so courtesy of my pal Rudy, I’ll leave you with one of the funniest things I’ve ever read on the internet.

Ireland’s seven-man fascist movement is already on its third Split, the latest of which occurred when “The Irish Nationalist Movement” broke off from “Democratic Right Ireland”. This is the report on The Split, as written by former Quinn lieutenant John Kavanagh. Sadly, it omits Kavanagh’s summation of Quinn’s fighting prowess: “He was in the IRA for years and all he learned to do was bite people”. These guys are exactly who you think they are. Enjoy.

– Donal O’Keeffe

For the record: some thoughts on music and one musician

A gift from a friend has put me thinking about music in general and vinyl records in particular.

I know how old and cranky this sounds, but in a time when songs and albums are increasingly sold and downloaded as a virtual concept, the vinyl record is a monument to the idea that works of art should be real and have innate value.

I blame the Horslips. I never recovered from the first time I held in my hands “Happy To Meet, Sorry To Part“. An album on vinyl is an entire package: the album sleeve, with its artwork and booklet; its size, the weight of it and the fact that playing a record makes listening to music almost an interactive thing. Taking a record from its sleeve and placing it upon the turntable is, I think, almost a sacred ritual. Opening a box and throwing on a CD? Meh.

But carefully handling a vinyl record and so delicately guiding the needle to the groove? That in itself is an art and it adds to, it enhances, the joy of listening to a record. Turning the record over to play the other side is also an act of physical collaboration which allows a natural break for refection between songs.

I have shown my little niece and nephews how to play records and, without prompting, they have treated the disc with near-reverence and reacted with awe at the crackle and hiss as suddenly a beautiful sound, so much warmer than on a CD, comes from the speakers. You did something, is the lesson, something real, and because you treated that action with respect, here’s your reward: music. This is important, I think, and it has been a part of humanity since the Banū Mūsā brothers invented the first known musical machine in Baghdad in the Ninth Century.

Music is a huge part of my life, although I lack any music in myself. Well, that’s not true. Like John Cleese’s Pope, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like. Just don’t ask me to sing. You won’t thank me.

“All art is quite useless,” according to Oscar Wilde (you’ll know that, especially if you’re an A House fan). I remember once reading that, of all of the arts, music is the least useful, the least explicable and the most esoteric. Well, I think the technical term for that theory is “bollocks”.

Of all of the arts, music is surely the most instantaneous and, I’ll say it, essential. Music can bypass the brain and form an immediate connection with the heart. I challenge anyone to listen to the Beatles’ “Please Please Me” or Buddy Holly’s “Rave On” and not be lifted with sheer joy. Before ever I went there, I knew what New York feels like from Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue“. Switch on Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” and you’ll just cry for humanity in all our base brutality and soaring kindness. Now there’s a piece of music that’ll break your heart at the same time as it restores your faith.

And, by the way, while we’re on the subject, frankly, if Nina Simone or Johnny Cash don’t knock your socks off, then I don’t even want to know you.

I mentioned that I’d received a gift from a friend. I’ll have to name-drop here but sure that’s hardly a burden to me… My friend’s name is Julie Feeney. She’s a multiple-award winning singer-composer and her gift was a vinyl copy of her astonishing third album, “Clocks“.

I first heard Julie on John Kelly‘s late and still-lamented Mystery Train. Kelly’s show was an unmissable treasure trove of brilliant and encyclopaedic unpredictability. The world of music he opened up for this listener has left me richer in every way except financially. And, as a feller once said, “He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about but I’ll see him in anything, so I’ll stand in line.”

Even on a show as exceptional as The Mystery Train, here was a voice, a song, a performance, that stopped me in my tracks. All this time later, “Aching” remains a stunning piece of music.

Julie’s 2005 debut album, “13 Songs“, deservedly won the inaugural Choice Music Prize. Since then, her career has blossomed in the intervening years, with hits like “Love Is A Tricky Thing” and “Impossibly Beautiful“, from 2009’s “pages” propelling her to ever-greater heights. Last year, the New York Times gave her the sort of rave review that long-established acts would kill or die for.

I’ve got to know Julie a bit over the past while and she’s a very decent person. She’s also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met and a good friend. Plus, I can tell you this much: you really haven’t lived until you get “Impossibly Beautiful” dedicated to you in a church in Westport.

Right. Now to listen to “Clocks” on the record-player. First, I have to displace Rory Gallagher. But that’s okay. I think Rory would have loved Julie. Then, the album sleeve, pale yet warm, inscribed with a beautiful, personal message, yields a booklet and there – look – wow! My name in the “And thank you to…” section. That’s never going to get old.

Then, the record. Place the needle in the groove (careful!) and a crackle and…

(P.S. Well, what do you know, I managed to get to get to the end of this thing with only a single Dylan reference.)

– Donal O’Keeffe

(P.P.S. Something I drew…)