The curious case of the empty plane in the night sky

A gombeen stares right into my front room, like a drooling idiot grinning slackjawed at technology never before encountered. His empty-headed moonface is there morning, noon and evening. The police won't permit me to move him along. Apparently it would be a crime for me to do so.

This gombeen's name is Micheal Martin. He is the leader of Fianna Fail and tomorrow he hopes against hope that the Irish people will be so remedially stupid as to forget the economic treachery he played such a prominent role in so recently and elect him as Taoiseach.

You have 450,000 reasons not to do so - all of those people languishing on the unemployment register.

You have 80 billion reasons not to do so, in fact - all of those euro that he and his pals stole from your pocket to pay off the bankers' bad gambling debts.

But permit me to add one other reason, freshly minted. Consider it the latest turd floating on the tidal wave of detritus and sewage that Fianna Fail have made of this country. Consider it Micheal Martin's most recent demonstration of his brazen inability, his brass-necked incompetence.

The Irish air force flew a plane to Libya, where there is massive civil unrest, to evacuate our citizens from the country. Let's park for the moment the question of why the Irish state, with such precarious finances, should pay to evacuate those who pay no taxes to this country. They can be asked to pay later. Right now, they need to get out. The money's not important just now.

Last night that plane departed Tripoli with no passengers. Let me spell that one out. Due to a quirk of election times, we still have a government and ministers, of which the current foreign minister is Brian Cowen, due to Micheal Martin resigning his post after challenging Cowen for the Fianna Fail leadership last month.

So Cowen is immediately to blame for this abject failure to retrieve our citizens. But in a more meaningful way, the blame falls on Martin, under whom all the protocols for such evacuations would have been developed.

It's not a case that people could not be evacuated. In fact, at least two Irish citizens and likely more were evacuated by the British government earlier today. They've been on BBC Radio Five Live explaining their gratitude to the British authorities for doing so, and their gratitude to the British taxpayer for underwriting the cost of their safety.

British prime minister David Cameron is currently out of Britain, in the Gulf on a trade mission. However, he immediately apologised this morning for Britain's slow response to evacuating their own citizens. He's apologising for not getting his people (and ours) out quick enough, even though he was out of the country when this happened.

Where's the apology from Cowen and Martin for failing to get anyone out at all? I haven't heard it. I don't expect to hear it. There won't be an apology because for these corrupt cretins, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

It's at times like these that I feel sickened to be Irish, sickened to be represented by these venal incompetent scum.

They're a cancer in this country. And if we don't wipe them out for good, they will return to kill off their host, this nation, once again, as they've done so many times before.

Imagine sitting in Tripoli airport, afraid for your life last night. Imagine watching the Irish air force plane taking off empty into the night sky. Imagine your relief when the Brits find you quivering in the terminal and tell you that they've a seat for you as far as Gatwick if you want it.

Fianna Fail never fail to disappoint. They should not be trusted with operating a coffee dock kiosk, never mind a nation.

Let's amputate them tomorrow. Let's cut out the cancer for good, before they leave all of us stranded on the tarmac, set to face armageddon, while they jet off into the sunset once again.

David Cameron is a Tory wanker who'll make Britain a police state

An Evening Standard hack blogged today that cops had raided the home of a photographer who had placed a 'David Cameron is a wanker' poster in his window.

Then the blog mysteriously disappeared, though the Daily Telegraph still links to where it once was.

So it may or may not be true.

But in case it turns out not to be true, I wouldn't want anyone to get the wrong impression.


David Cameron IS a wanker. Worse, he's a self-entitled Tory wanker who'll make Britain the sort of police state where the cops will tear your door down for dissenting.

Call-me-Dave wasn't so precious when he and his Bullingdon Club pals were busy trashing restaurants like posh-boy hooligans at Oxford. Why the thin skin now?

Please God don't let this PR creature and his hordes of evil assume power in Britain tomorrow.

Jail the taximen arseholes

Has anyone else ran out of patience with scumbag taxi drivers blockading our towns and airports?

I rang the cops yesterday in a panic when I heard about their shenanigans in Dublin. My child was crossing town on a bus. Ten minutes later, and everyone on that bus would have been held captive for hours by the caprice of the cabbies.

On the radio, I could hear interviews with baffled and frightened tourists trying to get to their hotels, irate parents trying to get the kids and shopping home, annoyed drivers blocked from moving in any direction by a completely illegal blockade.

And what did the plod do? What do they ever do? Absolutely nothing. While our economy is going down the shitter, these mongs are permitted to block the airport and the commercial heart of the city without any punishment, allowed to break the law without being stopped or prosecuted.

And they were at it all around the country too.

Let's note the double standards here. If you're a protester annoyed at the risk to human life and the theft of Irish natural resources in Rossport, and you stand in the middle of the road to protest, you'll be jailed.

If you're a cabbie, annoyed because your industry is no longer a closed shop, and you blockade the city centre for hours on end, the police will do nothing to stop you.

I reported them for committing a series of traffic offences, yet I understand there was not one arrest of any of those blockading. They're lucky I wasn't on the road myself at the time. I'd have given the cops one chance to move them, then rammed my way through.

Since when did the possession of a PSV licence and a yellow sign entitle anyone to shut down the city?

Two of them apparently did get scooped for invading the taxi regulator's office and refusing to leave. They whined afterwards that they were only seeking a meeting with the Transport Minister.

Here's a clue for you cabbie cretins: he doesn't work in the regulator's office. If I wanted a meeting with your boss, would it be reasonable for me to break into your house and occupy it?

Yet their removal - under court order - was apparently sufficient 'provocation' to bring the rest of the no-brainers out to shut down the city centre for hours on end, terrifying kids, frustrating parents and workers, and screwing over the few much-needed tourists.

I couldn't give a shit what they want. It's not about what they want. It's about what works for the whole of society.

What we need is taxi drivers who know their way around the town; none of this 'you show-I go' nonsense. We need cabs that are new, clean, with disabled access. We need the fares to be about half of what they are currently.

And if all of that results in half of the taximen ending up on the dole, so be it.

They couldn't give a shite about inconveniencing the rest of us, so I don't see why we should indulge their petulant and childish pranks anymore.

The next time (and inevitably, given that they've the collective intelligence of the average dung beetle, there will be a next time) they pull a stunt like this, I want to see mass arrests.

They're not above the law, and it's long past time that the law was enforced upon them.

Rhino-dating the Irish service sector

I've learnt quite a bit this week.

Apparently, 'Rhino-dating' is what happens during speed-dating nights when you sit down opposite someone of the opposite sex and they spend the entire three minutes criticising your clothes and ranting about how brilliant they are, then at the end of the night they collar you on the way out the door for some abuse, because they're shocked you didn't choose to see them again.

I've been rhino-dated by the Irish service sector this week, and it wasn't too pleasant.

There was the fuel firm who took my money, promising me my heat within 24 hours, 48 max. It took them five days to get around to delivering to me in the end.

And that was only after I had to call them daily, have others call them daily, and even threaten to sue for my money back. And on the rare times I got them on the phone, they had the insane audacity to say I was being unreasonable. They lied repeatedly, and even sought to fabricate emails.

But now that they've finally delivered to me, they've sent me an email asking me to 'keep their number safe' for future deliveries! Classic rhino-dating delusions there. I'd rather freeze than keep such a shower of useless cunts in business, needless to say.

I'm not quite at the point of naming and shaming, but if you're concerned to avoid these shitehawks, don't order fuel online like I did. Call someone local instead.

Then there's the bank whose machine chomped my banklink card earlier this week.

I called the number on the machine as you do, and got some thundering gobshite who insisted my card 'must have broken' their machine, who suggested I was lucky his bank weren't in the habit of suing for such damages and who insisted they'd never had an IT glitch in his 'twenty-five years with the bank.'

So we have someone manning a customer service desk - frontline with the general public - who makes up nonsense, fails to apologise for the inconvenience caused, preposterously threatens legal action and ridiculously claims that they alone of all firms on Earth are immune to technical problems.

Is there any wonder that AIB still have this mong manning phones after 25 years service, assuming he didn't make that shit up as well?

I'm fed up rhino-dating the Irish service sector. I'd like a nice positive interaction with a service industry who valued my custom, treated me with respect, took responsibility when they screwed up, apologised when they let me down and actively sought to resolve my problems with their service.

But in this country, that sounds like some romantic fantasy, far removed from reality.

I'd emigrate if I could

Twenty Major reckons the obligatory pension (translation: more tax) is his tipping point. He's leaving if it's implemented.

I couldn't blame him.

I'd do it myself if my circumstances permitted it. After all, when the rats are leaving the ship, why should the hard-pressed crew remain as the tide rises above the neck?

The bankers have fled to their hidey-holes in Spain or Canada already. The cabinet are bailing out one by one.

Why stay to pay for their mistakes, their incompetence and yes, their crimes?

If you can, go. No one will thank you for remaining behind, except of course the aforementioned bankers (whose debts you'll pay) or the aforementioned politicians (whose pensions your 'pension levy' will fund).

There's a really simple choice here - stay and get shafted, stay and fight back, or leave and don't ever look over your shoulder at the mess behind you.

I'm forced into option 2. But despite the 'fighting Irish' nickname we have worldwide, this nation is one of meek, subservient sheep who would take any punishment and tug their forelock gratefully in response.

In short, I don't expect to see many others backing my belligerence because historically, the Irish have never shown backbone in a crisis. 1798? Most of the country bottled. 1848? Same again. 1916? Same again.

When it comes to fighting each other, we're masters though. Look at the North, or the civil war, or indeed the public V private spat ongoing at present.

If you're going, you do so with my blessing and best hopes for the future.

If you're staying, please get up off your knees, remove the penises from your mouth, stand up and fight for justice.

Fight to jail the crooks. Fight to see the corrupt bankers and developers bankrupted and jailed. Fight against being lumped with their debts and fight to retain some dignity in this country.

The most dishonest political campaign ever

That's what Lisbon II has been.

It's as if every single campaigner on both sides of the debate have been possessed by demons making them lie. In the case of the professional politicians, that's business as usual. In the case of Mick 'low fares plus huge charges' O'Leary, it's to be expected.

But when Intel and fundamentalist Christians start in on the spoofing act, one really does begin to despair.

The blatant attempts by the supposedly impartial EU to buy the election have been as despicable as the attempts by foreign Eurosceptics like Bonde or the UKIP to swing the decision to what suits them.

No one comes out of this with any credit. Not the liars who have attempted to link a yes vote with economic recovery. Not the liars who said a yes vote would lead to a shredding of the minimum wage.

The bottom line remains: you're voting on the treaty itself and nothing else. Not on the 'guarantees' which don't actually exist. Not on the minimum wage, or abortion, or a federal Europe, or economic recovery, or the current government, or NAMA, or anything else. Just the treaty.

My advice? Read the treaty. Not the summaries offered by vested interests, but the treaty itself.

I did. It's almost impenetrable. It took me about four days to finish it. At the end I was extremely concerned at how much of the treaty eroded our say over our own country and how many things were open to wide interpretation.

They say that if you don't understand a contract, you shouldn't sign it. Equally, if you don't know what to make of an issue, you should probably vote against it.

For those reasons, and not for any of the dishonest, disingenuous reasons offered by both the Yes and the No campaigns, I will be voting No on Friday.

I suggest that unless you've read, understood and approve of the treaty, you should do likewise.

Tiananmen: 20 years of silence and oppression

We have to remember Tiananmen Square.

It's two decades to the day since the Chinese people demanded their freedom from the despotic, mass-murdering junta that rules their nation.

It's twenty years since they stood in Tiananmen Square and sang songs and demanded that the Communist dictators quit power.



It's twenty years since the power-hungry psychotics turned tanks on their own people and murdered them for asking to be free, killed them, jailed them, sent them to re-education gulags where they were tortured horrendously.

It's twenty years in which more terror has been inflicted on the people of occupied Tibet, the Uighur nation, and the other minorities within the Maoist monolith.

Twenty years in which the hypocrites of the West facilitated China's leadership by hiring their slave labour, buying their bloodstained products at dirt cheap prices, handed back free Hong Kong and Macao into their anti-democratic hands and helped them block the internet from reaching their people, and let them hold a propagandist Olympics that will go down in history as stomach-churning as Hitler's Berlin Games in 1936.

Twenty years in which their template for terrorising their own people has been exported elsewhere, to other stubborn juntas who will not countenance democracy or liberty or freedom of choice, in places like Burma.



It is not anywhere near as long since I was in China. But the people there still yearn for freedom.

We cannot allow the Chinese government to exercise their blanket control over information. We cannot let them rewrite history. We cannot permit the spirit of Tiananmen to be ignored.

Because one day, the proud Chinese people will be free from the sixty year nightmare of Maoism, and they will legitimately say:

"Yes, for much of that time, we bowed to the terror and let ourselves be ruled. But one day we rose and sought our freedom, and we were brutally beaten down. And you in the West did nothing. Rather than insist on our freedom as you did for the people of South Africa, you instead rewarded the Communist cadres and made them millionaires."

Remember Tiananmen. Remember what they did.

Remember how democracy was stillborn in China twenty years ago, and how we still trade with the murderers.

The truth is out there

According to the best guess of astrophysicist researchers, there is somewhere between 361 and 38,000 intelligent alien civilisations in existence in our galaxy.

I would have thought this was self-evident. The proof that intelligent life exists in our universe is that not one of them have seen fit to come near here:


Or here:


Or here:


Or here:


Or here:


And especially not here:


You have to admit, those aliens, wherever they are in the galaxy, have demonstrated impeccable taste in avoiding this planet.

Mbeki is a genocidal criminal

Thabo Mbeki is a genocidal criminal who ought to be facing the International Court of Justice for the unnecessary death of 300,000 South Africans.

He also shares responsibility for the death of innumerable Zimbabweans who perished solely because Mbeki has provided the only support that syphilitic scum Robert Mugabe has.

Those in the West who continue to cheer the 'rainbow nation' because they did well at rugby and Uncle Nelson has a nice friendly smile need to start paying attention.

Mbeki has caused the death of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Africans. His single-party state continues to defy genuine democratic principles. And worst of all, he has sustained the evil of the Mugabe regime a full generation after it should have ended.

Not that I expect the apologists for Mugabe's despotism - generally one-eyed Marxists who consider any opposition to the syphilitic loon to be neo-colonialism - to start caring about ordinary Zimbabweans now, all of a sudden.

But perhaps the PC credentials of opposing the spread of AIDS might prick a few Western consciences.

Mbeki and Mugabe are no better than the previous post-colonial generation of utter cunts who have murdered their people for their own profit since the Europeans left.

But while we rightly consider the names of Idi Amin, Charles Taylor, Mobuto Sese Seko and Mengistu Haile Mariam to be dripping in blood and ignominy, so far the same reproach does not adhere to Thabo Mbeki.

But it should. It really should.

How to boycott the genocide olympics

Here is where you can find the complete roll of shame - the list of corporate donors and contributors to the Genocide Olympics in Beijing.

To assist people in boycotting the services and products of those firms seeking to promote themselves at the expense of the liberty of Tibetans, the democracy of the Burmese, the hunger of the North Koreans and the right to life of refugees in Darfur, I've listed below their rivals who you can use intead:

Scumbag Sponsor Firm - Rival Firm you can use instead

Coca-Cola - Pepsi (or better still, avoid tooth-rotting cola)
ATOS Origin - Literally thousands of alternative firms
General Electric - Thousands of rivals depending on sector
Johnson and Johnson - Body Shop (or use natural/artisan products)
Kodak - Nikon for cameras, Lexmark for printers
Lenovo - Dell, Acer, HP all do better PCs anyway
Manulife - Thousands of financial and insurance firms
McDonalds - Burger King (or better still, eat healthy)
Omega - Rolex, Timex, Cartier, Tag Heuer, etc, etc.
Panasonic - Sony, LG, Pioneer, Phillips, etc.
Samsung - Sony, LG, Pioneer, Phillips, etc.
Visa - Mastercard, Amex.
Volkswagen - Ford, Renault, Mercedes, Toyota, etc.
Adidas - Gola, Nike (though they've a poor history too)
UPS - Fed-ex, DHL
Haier - Whirlpool, Siemens, etc.
Budweiser, TsingTao, Yanjing beers - Drink your local beer
BHP Billiton - BP, Shell, various metal processors
Great Wall Wine (It's truly muck) - Something tasty from France, Italy, Oz, etc.
Beifa Pens - Scheaffer, Cross, Parker, etc.
Schenker Logistics - Bax, DHL, Fed-ex, Geologistics, etc.
Technogym - Nautilus, Oemmebi, Weider, Weslo, York, etc.

Don't forget the Scumbag Suppliers too:

Education First - Study somewhere else instead of China
Der Floor - Respol, Hytech, Premfloor etc.
Liby - Daz, Tide, Total, Lenor, etc.
Price Waterhouse Coopers - KPMG, Ernst and Young, Deloitte and Touche

By the way, don't forget to also boycott subsidiaries. For example, Volkswagen also own Audi, Bentley, Skoda, Lamborghini, Bugatti and Seat. So don't just boycott the leading brand, boycott ALL the firm's output.

A simple background check of any of the firms above online, especially via wikipedia, should reveal a list of their subsidiaries.

Do let firms know that you're boycotting them and why. How can corporate scumbags be expected to learn if we don't tell them why we're withholding our custom?

Happy boycotting!

All adverts are lies

All adverts are lies. Let's ponder that for a moment.

Okay, we'll return to that later.

Meanwhile, Consumers International (who are unsurprisingly an international consumers organisation) have unveiled their list of the crappest products on the market worldwide.

Top of the tree are sleeping pills marketed at Japanese kids, closely followed by Coca Cola's tap water masquerading as spring water, Kelloggs' sugary breakfast cereals that pretend to be healthy, and shit Chinese toys sold by Mattell that fell apart and were full of lead.

Now, let's drop the shit toys from the list. What's so wrong with sleeping pills? Did they poison people? Did they not work and instead, like being sold cocaine instead of mogadon, they kept kids awake? No. They worked fine. They just weren't properly advertised.

And what's wrong with selling tap water? If people are prepared to pay a quid for something they can get out of a tap, bully for you (or in this instance, Coca Cola) for parting fools from their money. It's not like the tap water is bad for you.

Incidentally, Coke pull the same stunt in Ireland. Deep River Rock, the water you wear, is also the water you get out of a tap in Belfast. True.

As for Kelloggs' breakfasts, well, no doubt they're not the sort of thing that Mr Kellogg had in mind when he set up his healthfood company back in the Nineteenth century. But they're not bad products. They're simply sugary products that should be considered akin to sweets, desserts and other things that kids should only have in moderation.

So what do all these things have in common? They're not bad products, despite what Consumers International say (apart from Mattell's shit Chinese toys, which are genuinely bad products.) They're actually bad marketing.

Let's return to where I came in. All advertising is lies. It is. The next commercial break that comes along in your evening's telly watching, analyse the lies you're being peddled.

"Because you're worth it?" Says who? Worth what? Worth it how? What does it even mean?

Don't read into it, simply dismiss it as the lie it actually is - the lie that these mass-produced, morally dubious cosmetics products are somehow 'elite' and you are part of that elite and entitled to these unlikely expressions of luxury lifestyle.

There's the crux of the ad (not the science bit, which is total bollocks) and it's a fundamental lie.

Same with any of them, all of them in fact. All adverts are lies. Lies designed to part you from your money for something you don't need.

I previously highlighted my plan to fine companies 50% of profits if they can't prove their advertising claims. I still stand by that as a plan to universally improve the existence of pretty much every human being on the planet (apart from advertising execs and marketing scum, who we all know aren't human at all.)

Having established that all ads are lies, it's time to return to the bad products list and rap the knuckles of the Consumers International people for failing to notice that these are bad marketing stunts, not bad products, and also for failing to notice genuinely bad products out there.

Ryanair flights, for example. 'Booking fees' for concerts. Premium rate phone lines, especially on customer support lines. Ringtones. Dry cleaning. Luas tickets. Fianna Fail governments.

These are really shit products, and I hope to see them on the next Consumers International list, rather than products that are actually legitimate, but are merely the subject of bad marketing lies.

"Pyjamas are our culture" - deadbeat Belfast single mum

According to the denizens of Divis Flats in Belfast, wearing pyjamas all day long, whether in bed or at the shops, is 'their culture.'

Jesus wept! It's the culture of these bet-looking harridans to scare the rest of us by appearing in public places wearing their spunk-stained bed clothing, is it?

This bizarre sartorial tradition emanates from two separate sources, one geographical and one relating to the predominant character trait in Divis.

The pyjama phenomenon first was noted in Dublin some years back. It has since been spotted across the British Isles, wherever chavs, spides, knackers and millies congregate.

The other place it stems from is the total fucking laziness of people too indolent even to change their clothes once a day.

It is generally a female phenomenon, whereby women of any age, although usually young single mothers on welfare, don't bother changing their clothes in the morning when they leave the house.

This phenomenon is not to be confused with similar incidents of public pyjama wearing across the globe, such as in Shanghai (where pyjamas are a legitimate form of public dress) or among Michigan students (because we all know students are lazy wastes of space.)

But it is part of a growing phenomenon of scumbags the world over not bothering to change out of their bedclothes when forced to leave their hovels, either to sign on the dole, collect the child benefit or buy more fags and booze.

Here's Americans at it (probably because they can't fit into normal clothes anymore.) And this phenomenon is long-established in the crappier parts of British and Irish cities. Many moons ago, the Dublin community blog highlighted the prevalence of public pjs in the fair city.

But until now, it has always been acknowledged that wearing pyjamas in public was a sad and tragic event related to deprivation, akin to begging on the street or drinking meths in the park.

Even the deluded attempts of some fashionistas to 'do' public pjs ironically backfired when the public rightly said 'Eeewwww!"

This isn't the first time that right-thinking normal people have objected to the public sight of septic belly-piercings poking out from the pasty white spare tyres of flab that the bedroom flannels have failed to cover up.

A few months ago, a Belfast school principal also objected to the sight of fifty of these welfare mums turning up at his school each morning wearing whatever they slept in.

But only the beleaguered people of West Belfast, the official MOST OPPRESSED PEOPLE EVER, could turn public expressions of slovenly laziness into a culture, and transform a polite request for them to dress properly in public into a fascist attempt to silence their freedom of cultural expression.

Can't we just cull them? Darwin would thank us.

Death and Taxes

They say the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. Well, that's probably correct in most cases. But then you think about Jesus Christ, or Charlie Haughey, and you remember that there's always someone bucking every system.

Anyhow, I had to go and file some returns at the O'Connell Street Revenue office yesterday. That was, of course, great fun. My mate Rusty the Taxman had warned me that the Revenue office had moved to temporary accommodation, and he wasn't lying.

The usual queues of non-nationals seeking PPS numbers to legitimise their stints working behind the counter of my local shops were still present, of course. But with the original building around the corner being refurnished, the current Revenue office is even less cosy and comfortable than the original.

Plonked in some rent-a-room palace next to a shop selling pictures of the Virgin Mary, there isn't even a seat anywhere. You have to queue, standing, for hours. Then you finally reach the revenue officers, who are sat at their desks, and you have to stand there too, like naughty schoolchildren brought before the principal, while they ruffle your papers and pretend to be busy.

Anyhow, I took my ticket from the machine, surveyed the mammoth queues of various Balts and Africans waiting to legitimise their work in the eyes of the Irish exchequer, and promptly fled to Burger King next door, where there are seats a-plenty.

I reckoned that I could peacefully relax and read my paper for a good half hour, then wander back into the Revenue's temporary home just in time to be called.

So I was quietly mulling over my crap coffee when I was approached by a gold-toothed, heavily bangled Roma gypsy (see image of similar above), a grubby hand thrust under my nose, seeking money.

I pointed out to her that begging is illegal in Ireland. She shrugged and went to the next table instead. Looking over her shoulder, I could see three others like her working the room.

I went to the poor lad whose job it is to clean the place and asked him to throw the beggars out. Let's call him Pablo. Pablo is from abroad, and he came to Ireland to work. He has possibly one of the worst jobs in Ireland, cleaning up the tables in O'Connell Street's Burger King.

Every twenty minutes, a load of Roma gypsy beggars come into his place of work and annoy everyone in it, begging for money. He used to tell them to stop. That's when they stopped him, on his way home after his shift, and threatened to kill him. He's seen them getting into Mercs at the top of O'Connell Street with Dunnes' Stores bags full, literally full, of cash.

So he sympathised with me, but explained that he wasn't going to risk his life or job trying to stop these gold-toothed scam artists from begging anymore.

Back in the tax office, waiting for my number to be called, I looked around at all the faces - the black faces, the white faces, the yellow faces - that surrounded me. I listened to the Russian language, Polish language, Spanish language and French language being spoken.

I thought about all the decent people from so many different places, like Pablo in the burger bar next door, who had come to Ireland simply to earn a living.

Then I thought about the Roma gypsies, their begging scams, their threats on the life of a poor man asking them to stop plaguing his workplace, their Mercedes lift home in the evening.

And I wondered when I'd ever see any of them in the tax office seeking a PPS number and filing a tax return. And I wondered when the Gardai on the most policed street in Ireland are ever going to give poor Pablo a hand and arrest and deport this criminal gang of scum gypsies.