Quelle surprise!

It seems that the French authorities are going to prosecute the members of their national soccer team who were shagging underage prostitutes after all.

Three of their top players admitted to paying tens of thousands of euro to bang teen hookers, which is a child abuse offence in France.

Yet somehow, they were not only not prosecuted on the spot, but two of them even made it onto the plane to South Africa and ended up shaming their nation all over again with dismal performances and that hilarious Gallic strop where they refused to train.

We're well used, via exposure to the England wags, to the ignominious sight of an overly made-up professional shopper standing by her man after he's been caught knocking off pay-to-play pussy.

But it's a bit of a new experience for the French. I wonder whether this case would ever have reached court if Ribery and Govou had helped their team to the title, or at least made the semi-finals? Perhaps it is not their disgraceful sexual shenanigans which are being punished so much as their failure at football.

As a coda to all of that, the cheat Henry has gone to the graveyard of ageing footballers, America, for one last payday. Unfortunately, he chose to play for New York Red Bulls - one of the two franchises in the MLS with as many Irish-American fans as Hispanic ones. There already have been calls for a boycott.

Much as I loathe what Henry did, and galling as it was to think of how much better Ireland's hungry young Turks under Trap might have done in place of the French in South Africa, I think it is appalling that it is Thierry who faces the shame and the boycott and not those who thought it legitimate to hire children for sex.

Justice!

First Saville, now this.
A great week for delayed justice finally delivered.


Hopefully that's au revoir to that money-driven fool Domenech and his merry band of cheats and child abusers.

Congratulations to Mexico. What a splendid performance of football in the face of diving, cheating, hacking and whining from their opposition.

Just can't keep their hands to themselves

French footballers, that is.

As if palming the ball into the net to cheat Ireland out of a World Cup final place was not ignominy enough, the French national soccer team appear to be grasping for ever greater shame.

Two of their most prominent players have just been questioned by police over allegations that they may have slept with underage prostitutes.

Or, as we call them in the civilised world, children.

Anonymous footballer's defence? The all-time classic (well, it worked here in Ireland and we're still waiting for the corrective surgery on the constitution), "I thought she was older."

I wonder how old he thought she was. Older than 27 year old married Muslim Franck Ribery? Older than 30 year old Sidney Govou, father to a five year old girl?

The age of consent in France is, incidentally, 18. The prostitute on at least one occasion is believed to be younger than that. And of course, the concept of 'consent' is highly debatable in a context rife with pimps.

What charming role models the French football team are for young people, altogether.

At this point, they couldn't accrue more negative publicity if it emerged that they sacrifice downs syndrome children to Satan before each game.

Cheats. And now (allegedly) child rapists.

Napoleon's complex

It shows you how utterly irrelevant feminism has become when short-arsed misogynist Frenchman Nicolas Sarkozy is doing more for women's dignity than that entire movement.

Paralysed as always on the crux of multiculturalist relativism, feminists have said nothing and done nothing for the plight of women across the majority of the planet who remain in illiterate, uneducated, abused, indentured poverty.

Instead, dazzled by their own petty concerns, they have adapted what was supposed to be a liberation movement into a shopping list of entitlements they want the state to pay for, like child care, or their endless quangos.

Meanwhile, the man with the Napoleon complex, the model Mrs and the platform shoes has decided correctly that there is no room for the Muslim full face veil in France.

There is no room for it because it erodes female dignity, despite what some token female Muslims might spout about it giving them freedom from sexualisation and so on. There will always be the house niggers who are happy to support their own slavery. They must be ignored, and Sarkozy has rightly done so.

Let's remember that there is no provision in Islam demanding that this shameful item of clothing be worn by women. Only in despotic Medieval regimes like Saudi or Somalia is it the norm, and even there only because of the existence of drug-crazed militias or morality police to enforce the law.

People are knocking on the doors of Europe all the time. They seem desperate to come here and sample European living. Well, it's long time past that everyone was reminded that living in Europe is not compatible with living in the Seventh century.

Well done, Nicolas. Let's hope the rest of Europe follows suit.

Evra is a tosser

Sorry for the third football related post in a row, but I could not let things pass without noting for posterity that Patrice Evra (seen on the right, breathing heavily while sexually abusing a reluctant Wayne Rooney) is a multiple tosser.

Firstly, he has a girl's name. Secondly, he plays for Merchandise United. But primarily, he's a tosser for his response to the Thierry Henry debacle.

Yes, he said that they should erect a statue to his cheating pal. Yes, he also cheekily offered a replay on his playstation. But those moronisms are not why Patrice Evra is tosser of the week.

Here is his response to the fact that politicians joined the calls for a fair play replay: "When you hear politicians calling for a replay, you wonder if they know the ball is round or oval."

Erm, like your handballing mate Thierry Henry last Wednesday night, do you mean, Patrice?

Why the internet doesn't matter

I've discovered a new mathematical formula today. It expresses the relevance of the internet, and I have calculated it to be 0.1%.

How did I do this? Quite simply. I took the 300,000 people who said on Facebook that they would march to the French Embassy to protest against the thieving of our World Cup place and divided that number by the 300 or so who actually turned up.

This little illustration firstly confirms the old gag that internet petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on. But it also reveals the extent to which posturing has replaced action in the repertoire of modern man.

Perhaps we are much more cowed, more frightened, more afraid to rock the boat than previous generations. Perhaps we are more lazy, more indoors, more sedentary too.

But primarily I think we're more inclined to spoof and bluster and posture than previous generations, and few things fulfil that remit better than the 'look at me' amateurism of the internet, especially (yes, I know) blogs and social networking sites.

We already know that such things aren't work. They aren't proper communication either. And if they're what passes for fun in the 21st century, I'd like to be put on the first bus back to the 20th, please.

So what are they? A billion electronic clamours for attention? Hard to say. One thing is increasingly sure though. The internet doesn't matter, and what you read there is almost definitely bullshit, unless it was nicked from some more trustworthy offline source.

How bullshit? Well, on the basis of my calculations at the French Embassy today, somewhere around 99.9% bullshit (unless I somehow missed a quarter of a million people in my count.)

The French are cheats

Did anyone doubt that the French would cheat their way to the World Cup finals?

Well, consider your naivety shattered tonight.

The inevitable happened - Ireland won the game and were cheated out of the World Cup final by a combination of Thierry Henry's legendary lack of sportsmanship and FIFA and UEFA's desperate desire to rig the finals to ensure that the French (and their large TV audience) attend the World Cup.

Thierry Henry, as anyone who watched the diving petulant scumbag in the premiership will know, is an awful inveterate cheating arsebag who'd throw his granny in front of a train to rob an undeserved goal.

And he did exactly that tonight with his double handball which ought to have warranted a red card for such blatant gamesmanship.



But this vista could never had arisen were it not for the inate corruption within FIFA and UEFA, who rigged the draw AFTER the qualifiers were over in the hope of sparing France and Portugal proper tests in the qualifiers.

Not only did they insist on a seeded draw, they also rigged it to ensure that recent results (bear in mind Ireland went through their campaign unbeaten) were not included.

Then the nightmare occurred and la belle France got drawn against the Irish - nice team, everyone likes the country but only 3 million TV viewers, so fuck them.

Of course, France had to win. And after a dodgy deflection in Croke Park that seemed like an odds-on affair. Then Ireland arrived in Paris and destroyed the French. The referee was clearly desperate by midway through the second half to throw the French a lifeline of any sort.

You just knew that the first opportunity to give a free kick or penalty to the French would be gratefully granted by the ref on behalf of his FIFA and UEFA paymasters, who were so desperate to see a French victory.


In the end, some classic Thierry Henry cheating had to make do. It was the best a moribund and poor French team could offer, having been totally mastered by the Irish.

In short, we have been robbed of a World Cup final place, and the FAI, have they any balls which they do not, would be taking this to the European Court of Sports Arbitration.

The French have no place in South Africa and ought to be ashamed of claiming a role in that tournament, having blatantly cheated to get there.

Remember that. The French are cheats. Fuck them. Stop buying their products. Ignore their poncy perfumes and BS fashion. Shove their smelly cheeses up the place their aroma recalls. Drink Spanish and Italian wines instead (or Aussie or Yank - they're all as good and not as expensive.)

If you're a proud Irish person, don't let the French forget they had to steal our World Cup place by cheating. Take every opportunity in the next eight months to remind each and every French person you meet that they should feel ashamed of their nation.

Despite losing every war they fought for the past eight hundred years or so, the French remain bizarrely impervious to shame.

After tonight, it's time to introduce them to that concept. Because they should feel utterly ashamed.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and France

Documents recently uncovered in British archives reveal that a beleaguered French leadership proposed a full union between Britain and France in the 1950s.

They were prepared to accept the crown, join the Commonwealth and share common citizenship, according to proposals made by French Prime Minister Guy Mollet in 1956, at the height of the Suez crisis.

Needless to say, the discovery of this jaw-dropping proposal, which Mollet quietly shelved after Suez was lost and tensions between Israel and Jordan dissipated somewhat, hasn't impressed French nationalists very much.

And it certainly offers a different perspective of Anglo-French relations to de Gaulle twice vetoing Britain's entry into the EU only a few years later.

Though of course there is a precedent - England did occupy regions of France around Calais and Bordeaux in the early Middle Ages, and they still bear traces of their lost English heritage in the ancient architecture of those regions.

Nevertheless, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and France would have turned Irish and world politics on its head, had it actually happened.

There would have been a different centre to the burgeoning EU than the subsequent Franco-German axis that developed later. There would have been a ready made superpower in Western Europe to offer an alternative pole of power to the Eastern Bloc and America.

English dominance of the isles would have been exceedingly dissipated by French influence. It would be much harder for a country of 45 million people to dominate 100 million of a total union, rather than just the 60 million of the isles.

One intriguing question is whether a UK of Britain and France would have applied sufficient pressure of the stagnant, virtually bankrupt backwater of Fifties Ireland to rejoin the fold.

Certainly had it proved a successful union, I suspect that there would have been moves, possibly even a viable Unionist party in the Republic, agitating for union with Britain and France.

It didn't happen though, and probably couldn't have happened, despite Mollet's flirtation. And we can say 'Vive la difference!' to that. But it poses an intriguing counter history for the latter half of the twentieth century.

Would a Western European UK superpower have suppressed the creation of an EU? Would they have created rival client states in Western Europe to stifle the spread of the Eastern Bloc? Would they have retained their empires, as France largely has done and Britain has not?

Most interestingly, would we now be living in a UK dominated world, with America merely an affluent backwater, had this union come about?

Posh Spice's knickers and Robbie Keane's girlfriend are not news, or are they?

It seems that everyone is very animated all of a sudden over the recent spate of fatal car crashes in the country. I won't call them accidents - in the vast majority of cases, human error or impairment is to blame.

On top of the media calling for Martin Cullen's head (no bad thing in itself, but in fairness, it's not like he was driving any of the cars), all sorts of Irish bloggers from Sunday Times' Sarah Carey to acerbic smoker Twenty Major to the Swearing Lady appear to be very agitated about the issue.

So, working on the counterintuitive logic that people have heard enough about road safety, and also operating on the basis that as long as we have cars we'll have car crashes, I'm going to discuss something entirely different.

What passes for news in this country?

The front pages of the morning papers make desolate reading sometimes. Whether it's the warmed over Government press releases that dot the Irish Times front page, or the shrill moralising usually found on the front of the Irish Daily Mail, it's hard to discern actual NEWS anywhere.

Today's Daily Mirror - and I'm not picking on them specifically, it was just the only one I bought this morning - was a case in point that actually had me wondering whether the papers in this country would recognise news if it swanned into their offices wearing a T-shirt that read 'I'm news, print me!'

Front cover of today's Mirror had the jawdropping revelation that Robbie Keane is going to marry his long-term girlfriend. Yup, a football millionaire is going to marry the girl he's been with for five years. Sometime. We're not sure when. But they are engaged. Even though she's had a ring on her finger for weeks. And this is FRONT PAGE NEWS.

The other revelation from the same front page? 'POSH - Raunchiest pictures yet.' Accompanied by a snap of Skeletor flashing half a malnourished silicon tit.

Now, were the reader somehow brave enough to get past this smorgasbord of irrelevance and actually open the paper, page two is equally fascinating. Actual news - that we're not going to let the Bulgarians or Romanians in - makes an appearance.

And down the side of the page, between a tale of rabbits in Antarctica and the fact that apparently lots of Japanese people are really old, we get the following story. This is it in full, by the way:

France behind 1994 Genocide
France is being accused of taking part in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. French troops there are believed to have armed the Hutu militants who killed 800,000 Tutsis in a 100 day bloodbath. France has denied officially taking sides.

That's it. That's all you're getting. Yes, I know it's a tabloid. Yes, it's about a massacre long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away from CelticTigerland. But clearly I'm missing something here.

Isn't the suggestion that one of the world's major powers armed and caused the massacre of nearly a million people NEWS? More than a suggestion, in fact. A downright overt allegation from someone who ought to know - the man who was Rwandan ambassador to France at the time.

We get a full page of puff about Posh Spice's new 'fashion guide', and three sentences about how one of our allies and neighbours conducted the devastation of an entire country?

According to Reporters Sans Frontieres today, we have the most free press in the world, along with Finland, Iceland and Holland. This, of course, is an assessment that predates Minister McDowell's plans for a privacy law that will devastate the media's ability to report the news.

So with such press freedoms, why do we get such an appalling news agenda across the board?

Go on, people. Someone please explain this to me before I go mad entirely.