A tale of two Irelands

Partition is a reality. We're a number of generations down the road from the creation of the border, and while the two sections of the island have grown closer in recent peacetime, there's no doubt that a cultural gap has grown in the intervening years.

I'm not talking about the presence of significant numbers of Protestants in the North. They've been there a long time. I'm talking about the difference in cultures that is demonstrated by these two stories of health service junketeering:

1. On Monday, the Irish News in Belfast had a story all over its front page about jet-setting NHS chiefs, swanning off to America on health service money.

2. Today, the Irish Times in Dublin has a story mentioned briefly on its front page about jet-setting Irish health service middle-manager, swanning off to America on health service money.

What's the difference? Well, in the Northern case, the top two guys (named and shamed in the article) in the ambulance service attended a legitimate training course in Boston this year that cost £6,000 but could have been cheaper by about £1,500 if they'd stayed in cheaper hotel rooms.

In the Southern case, an unnamed official went on SIXTEEN foreign junkets to places including Australia and New York, wracking up an unmentioned total bill on trips that were found to have little relevance or merit.

In the North, the culprits are named and the costs identified, and even though it was one trip and the figure relatively paltry, it made the front page. Because the culture in the North is to be disgusted at any waste in the health service when front line services are being cut.

In the South, we'll never know who the culprit was. We aren't told how big a bill he wracked up. He's already retired, so there will be no punishment, no comeback. And it's a tiny story, because we're so inured to this sort of corruption, from Government ministers, to Fas, to every arm of the state using the country's money like a holiday voucher, that sixteen pointless trips abroad, often suspiciously around St Patrick's Day, is just another drop in the ocean of corruption and greed.

£1500 quid too much spent on a legitimate training trip, and the North is up in arms. Many multiples of that squandered on pointless junkets in the South, and we don't find out who was responsible, or how much they wasted, and the story will pass into history without a second glance.

For me, this is the single biggest obstacle to uniting Ireland. I know plenty of Unionists and Loyalists. They're coming to terms with the rest of the island. Many of them can imagine a single state with them in it, as long as their identity was protected.

They're not fearful of 'Rome Rule' anymore. They're fearful of this - ending up in a basketcase economy, rife with corruption, where a blind eye is turned to cute hoors with their noses in the trough.

The cross-border bodies set up under the Good Friday Agreement have been enlightening in this regard. With the singular exception of the Ulster-Scots Agency, which was a junket fund for spoofers, bigots and paedophiles, the cross border bodies have been one long litany of Northern civil servants complaining, appalled, about how their Southern counterparts behave in regards to wasting funds and pulling fast ones.

This gombeen culture, and our collective tolerance of it, has to stop. The media can play its part. The Irish Times deserves some credit for reporting this at all. But until the day when these sort of stories of corruption are reported with the same appalled horror that a much more minor misdemeanour in the North attracts, there will forever be two Irelands on this island.

Congrats! You now owe €170,000 each!

Thanks to the corruption of banksters and the craven treachery of the current government in the face of bullying gangsterism by the IMF and the EU, every man woman and child in Ireland now owes €170,000 of sovereign debt.

This cannot and will never be repaid in full. Default is inevitable. The longer we wait to default, the more the banksters get paid and the worse state this country will be in.

This came about because grasping banks and billionaires, named correctly as terrorists by the estimable Senator David Norris in the Seanad, lent money to AIB and Anglo Irish who then spunked it on property development loans which are now not being paid back.

In a fit of madness or corruption, the government decided secretly in September 2008 to guarantee those debts. According to cabinet member John Gormley, who revealed it on the Marion Finucane show, they decided this weeks before revealing it, and presented it as an overnight emergency fait-accompli.

That guarantee has since been enacted, and the billionaires want their money back from the Irish people. They have used the EU and the IMF as the guns pointed at our heads to achieve this by way of the infamous bailout.

The bailout works as follows - we, Ireland, borrow tens of billions and pay it back to the creditors of the Irish banks. The billionaires are now paid but we the Irish people now owe the money to the EU and the IMF. That money now totals €170,000 EACH. And it will rise at around 6% annually.

If you don't want to pay this money which you never borrowed, you have only three choices left:

1. Emigrate.
2. Go on the dole and refuse to pay taxes. This will cause you hardship, because that is going to be one of the first things cut to ribbons in tomorrow's banker bailout budget.
3. Protest, loud and long, outside the Dail tomorrow. Call your local government TD, be they Fianna Failure, Green or so-called Independent, and insist that they vote down this treasonous budget. Fight for your right not to be held accountable for the debts of others.

You can, as the saying goes, die on your feet or live on your knees. Your choice. You have less than a day to decide.

The limitless powers of the banksters

There's been little point posting about the toing and froing over the treacherous sell-out of Ireland. The minutiae are so much less important than the Dail vote on the budget on December 7th.

Either the Dail votes that crap down, and we get an election and the chance to renegotiate this gun-at-the-head bailout of billionaires, or we become a serf-nation of slaves in debenture perpetually to big banksters.

Anyhow, I've been more concerned about the true extent of big banking's powers. Ok, we now know that they hold more sway with the IMF than sovereign nations. But we knew that decades ago. What's new is that they hold more sway with the EU than with its constituent nations. That's disturbing to say the least.

But what's really concerning is the Interpol warrant for the arrest of Julian Assange of Wikileaks on charges of sexual assault. The details of the charges aren't the issue - Assange is accused of raping a woman in Sweden during sex which began as consensual - so much as the timing.

Wikileaks has been involved in some major leaks of secret documents in recent times. Lets review the biggest ones:

1. The files on US torture of Iraqis. Response? Virtually nothing.
2. Details of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Response? Some PR posturing by the US.
3. The recent release (after a lengthy warning it was coming) of US diplomatic documents. Response? Angry statements by Hilary Clinton.

And now? Wikileaks threatens to release secret documents from a major US bank. Response? Interpol arrest warrant.

The more paranoid out there suspect all sorts of things, from Assange being a CIA plant to the victim of a deliberate honey trap. My response to the conspiracy theorists is to file away their crazier ideas for future thriller plots.

But there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the timing of this Interpol intervention stinks. Assange has been interviewed by Swedish authorities who repeatedly (ironically?) leaked the details to Swedish tabloids. He spoke to them recently from Britain by Skype, offering to conduct further interviews in a Swedish embassy. They refused.

Now, almost as soon as Wikileaks threaten to blow the lid on a major US bank, there's an Interpol warrant issued for his arrest.

It appears that the powers of the banksters truly are limitless and that they have sway over not only national but supranational agencies like the EU, IMF and Interpol.

Things are looking bleak, not only for Julian Assange, or for the Irish people, but for everyone on Earth who is not a major bankster right now.

Not your debt - don't pay it

Anglo Irish Bank's debt is not your debt.

You didn't borrow billions from Roman Abramovich and European banks. You didn't lend it foolishly to speculative property developers who went belly-up. So why are you expected to pay off the billionaires?

Print this up and stick it in your window. Stick it on your car. Stick it across Bertie Ahern's tax-dodging gob. Stick it all over the place until they get the message.

It's not your debt or mine. Let's refuse to pay it.

(Thanks to Esker Riada for the image.)

The death of the Irish Republic

Well, the traitors have managed to achieve the death of the Irish Republic tonight.

It was done without a shot fired in anger. Perhaps some shots should be fired in anger. After all, so many people have died on this island for so much less.

The world is talking about Ireland being 'bailed out.' I took a call from an elderly relative tonight, joking about tapping me for a loan, since Ireland is obviously now swimming in EU and IMF euros.

The world, and more importantly the Irish victims, clearly have no idea what is really going on. It's quite simple, quite dastardly and quite horrific.

Two Irish banks, run and operated by corrupt bankers, borrowed billions from European banks and billionaires like Roman Abramovich and lent the money out to property developers in Ireland and elsewhere.

Those property developers fuelled a property bubble, assisted by their pet politicians in Fianna Fail, and are now largely going bankrupt, with only unfinished houses to offer in repayment of their loans.

So the Irish banks have no money coming in from the developers. And their big depositors are worried about their viability, so they have taken their money in recent weeks and shifted it elsewhere. Now the Irish banks have next to nothing to pay off the billionaires with.

Except a foolish government guarantee, provided by the Fianna Fail crooks who have long been the developers' proxies in power. That irrational, illegal guarantee holds that the Irish taxpayer will repay any debt owed by these corrupt banks.

The billionaires want their billions back. They gambled and they lost, on a speculative market. But when you're hyperrich, you don't ever lose. You just change the game until you win again. And that's what they have done. The bank's bondholders pressurised Ireland and Europe to ensure that those debts would be repaid.

At the end of the line is the Irish taxpayer, who has received nothing tonight. Rather, the Irish taxpayer now owes 80 billion euro that they didn't owe before. That money will come from Europe to Ireland and be owed by Ireland to Europe. But Ireland won't see a penny of it.

Instead, it will go to the banks who will give it back to the billionaires.

And we will be paying off those debts for the next two decades.

This, in short, is corporate welfare gone mad. It is treason, conducted by the government on the people of Ireland for the benefit of foreign billionaires. A side-effect is that the country will now effectively be run by Brussels. The Euro-state begins here.

So for anyone languishing under the delusion that Ireland received anything tonight, let's be clear, all Ireland got was a debt that it didn't accrue. All Ireland got was the blame for bankers' mistakes. All Ireland got was the removal of its sovereignty.

It's a times like these that I get nostalgic for the paramilitaries that plagued my youth in Northern Ireland. If ever there was need of them, it is now.

Listen to how a nation dies today:

My new book

I sent off my new book to some publishers the other day.

It's a true story, set in Ireland, of a Mad Max-type post-apocalyptic scenario where people fistfight for mouldy potatoes and sell their daughters for a litre of petrol.

Unfortunately, I've had to call it fiction because it's set in 2011 and that hasn't happened yet. I prefer to call it 'future factual' because by the time it's published, if it's published, it'll have already happened.

That's due to the delay in bringing books to market, largely due to the welter of Jordan autobiographies already in the system.

The good, the bad and the ugly

What's good about the US elections tonight? None of the multi-millionaire big spenders managed to buy themselves political power. The kerrazzee wrestling CEO didn't manage it, nor did the former Hewlett-Packard CEO who exported jobs out of America, nor the eBay CEO.

It seems that the day and hour when you can simply purchase power is not today and not this hour. Not yet. Thank goodness for that. It's a small mercy.

The bad? Stalemate in US politics for the next two years. Looks like a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. But the Republicans are riven between the GOP old guard and the Tea Party, which is itself riven between the likes of Marco Rubio and the likes of Christine 'not a witch' O'Donnell.

The tea partiers want smaller government, but they don't know what to cut except Obama's healthcare programme, his one achievement which he won't give up. The GOP wing, as demonstrated by Bush, are as big spending as the Democrats. And the Democrats have just been viciously pasted.

The ugly? Proposition 19 seems to have been voted down in California. This was the proposal to legalise and tax cannabis in the state. It would have brought billions in revenue to the bankrupt state. And it would have set in process a much-needed wave of legalisation across the world had it passed and been demonstrated to work.

The war on drugs has failed utterly. Cannabis is one of the most benign of psychoactive substances, rated only this week by prominent medical journal The Lancet as much less damaging to individuals or society than alcohol.

America's demand for drugs won't recede just because cannabis remains illegal. People will continue to die by the thousand in Mexico and elsewhere to feed that appetite. And the civil liberty to choose freely a favoured intoxicant has again been denied.

According to exit polls, the vote broken down by age was as follows: 18-29 59%, 30-44 50%, 45-64 44, 65+ 32.

So it was voted down by grannies. Boomers are slightly opposed (what utter hypocrisy) and younger voters (under 45) are in favour. It's inevitable that cannabis will be legalised in California, then America, then the rest of the world, in future years. But during each of those years, criminals will pocket billions and thousands will die as a result of this ludicrous prohibition.

All that glitters

It's US mid-term election night.

The exit polls are predicting a hammering for the Democrats. That should mean good news for the dollar and bad news for precious metals on the markets.

After all, the perception is that the Obama socialists (US perception, not mine) are flagrant tax-and-spenders, while Republicans are fiscal scrooges.

But of course, these aren't ordinary Republicans. These are people who have to issue ads telling the electorate that they aren't witches. These are ill-educated, small government looneys who have, with the support of frothing-mouthed cheerleaders at Fox News, successfully eaten up the GOP.

The markets like Republicans. But they don't like looneys. They probably like Obama better than they like looneys. (After all, he did bail out Wall Street.)

That fact, coupled with the inevitability of Ben Bernanke's great dollar printing machine going back into overdrive tomorrow, is driving the dollar back down and precious metals up.

Today, the Aussie dollar smashed through parity with the greenback. Expect the Swiss franc and the Canuck dollar to do likewise shortly.

What does this all mean for Ireland? Well, firstly, we're still screwed. The Germans are keeping the euro high in the ongoing currency war, meaning we're buggered on exports outside of the EU (ie to two of our nearest and biggest trading partners, Britain and America, who are both printing money like it was going out of fashion.)

Secondly, a bunch of Tea Party nutjobs won't look outside their narrow national interests. There will be more rabble-rousing about illegal immigrants, and more demands to repatriate jobs back to America. Either President Hopey Changey concedes to some of this rhetoric or he kisses a second term goodbye over two years of lame duck administrating.

The gelding of the Obama administration in conjunction with the destruction of the GOP by Tea Party malignants is not and cannot be good news for us.

Right now, Ireland is so far gone that we need a white knight to save us, and the Germans won't play ball, and the Americans are taking off their armour and hiding in a cave. And for all the Fianna Fail rhetoric and ass-kissing in Beijing, I wouldn't expect any help from the Chinese.

After all, they made their money playing a rigged currency game for the past few years, leading to the current beggar-thy-neighbour currency wars.

In 24 hours, America will look inward. It will look bankrupt. And it will look stupid.

And our Uncle Sam won't be playing sugar Daddy to Ireland possibly ever again.

Some notes on Germany

I'm just back from Germany. Berlin, to be specific. I noticed a number of differences there to Ireland and thought I might share them in the spirit of seeking solutions to our current crises.

In Germany, there isn't an economic meltdown, nor are a fifth of their population unemployed. This is due to a few reasons - firstly, they didn't let banks run with dodgy loans and bogus accounting for decades, only to bail them out afterwards. Secondly, they didn't let half of Eastern Europe in to work there in the past decade. And finally, they make stuff that other people want to buy.

They don't sell houses for spiralling prices among themselves. House prices have been stable forever in Germany. They don't shuffle money about or launder taxes. They build cars, washing machines - stuff people in other countries want. Then they sell them. It's not rocket science. It's simple economics. Lesson number one: we need to start making things again.

Everywhere I went, I was served by Germans. Germans who spoke, when required to do so, English too. I didn't go to Germany to meet Polish people, or Chinese people. I go to Poland and China to engage with their people and cultures. I went to Germany and everyone I encountered, in hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions and shops, was German.

Contrast that with the average experience of the rare beast, the American tourist in Ireland, today. They get a poor room, crap food and are universally served by non-Irish people. No wonder they don't come back. Lesson two: we need to rethink our service and hospitality industries so that they are populated by Irish people who speak multiple languages and not foreign people who barely speak English.

The final thing I noticed was a certain degree of equality across the people. Sure, there are beggars here and there. And East Germany remains significantly less affluent-looking than West Germany. But people drive the same cars, eat the same food, stand in line next to each other for public transport.

You don't see helicopters of arsehole speculators in the sky above. You don't come across too many gated communities. They don't need them in Germany. Everyone realises that, whatever their income, they're no better than anyone else. There is an innate sense of equality in Germany that has been sadly lacking in Ireland for quite some time. Lesson three: address the equality issue.

Germany works, and Ireland doesn't. That's the bottom line. Germany works in a particularly German kind of way, though, and that isn't easily replicated without possessing the same kind of hard-working, honest people that they do. And we don't.

But we can learn some useful lessons from Germany. We need to make stuff people want, make it well and sell it all over the world. We need to attract people to visit here by showing off OUR culture and OUR people, not staffing our hospitality industry with whoever from wherever was prepared to do the work for the least cash.

And we need to recall that we all eat, sleep and shit just the same way. There's no one of Irish descent who's more than four generations away from poking a pig with a stick for entertainment. It's time to lose the airs and graces.

No, Biffo doesn't deserve a 300K Mercedes. No, Mary O'Rourke shouldn't get hundreds of grands a year of a pension. No, the speculators weren't merchant princes who needed to soar above us earthbound mortals in choppers as they sped from one shit housing development to the next.

It's time we got real. It's time we got German about things.

18% is still 18% too many

What's wrong with our education system when there's still 18% of the population prepared to vote for Fianna Fail after everything they've done to ruin this nation?

I find it tragic that these people, who fuelled the property boom, lined their pockets with junkets and expenses, facilitated tax evasion and had dodgy tax returns themselves, who took bribes for planning decisions, who bailed out their bankster pals at the cost of our children's futures, still somehow attract ANYONE who would vote for them.

It can't be said enough times - this has happened before (late 60s, late 80s) and will happen again until definitive action is taken to remove this cancer from our nation.

It's way past time that the bank bailout was reneged upon. It's not our debt and we shouldn't pay it. And it's even more pressing that the people responsible - the bankers and their pals GO TO JAIL FOR A VERY LONG TIME.

Why have their been no prosecutions? Why are we bailing out these corrupt scumbags? Why is this shameful government still in office when no one wants them there?

Do we have to actually wait for Britain or Europe to annex us entirely, and eradicate the final smouldering remnants of our sovereignty before someone is actually held accountable for their crimes?

Or will the people of Ireland ever stop splaying their buttocks for another round of 'necessary budget cuts' and stand up, pull up their pants and take these fuckers OUT?

Poison Pens 8: the art of confirmation bias

Confirmation bias is, speaking simply, the psychological process where you seek out things that agree with your opinion and dismiss those which do not.

It's most commonly acknowledged among market traders, who seek to be ever alert to the prospect that they could be wrong, and try to remain open to contradicting views. The reason they do this is because if they didn't, they'd quickly lose a lot of money.

But for most of us, confirmation bias isn't something we worry about. We like our own opinions, and we like those who share them, mostly. Sure, we might like people who disagree with us too. But being around them all the time would eventually become... disagreeable. So we don't.

Confirmation bias is one of the things that makes people interact with the media they choose. It's a long-standing canard that tabloid readers buy the redtops in order to confirm their own neanderthal point of view on the world.

In fact, it's much more likely that the very people levelling this argument, smug broadsheet readers, are themselves the biggest victims of confirmation bias.

Tabloid readers are very aware that the world consists of more than X Factor, celeb affairs and premiership football. They read them like some women read Hello! or Elle - for the escapism away from the humdrum reality.

Broadsheet readers, however, do not have the same level of disconnect with their chosen media. Let's take, as an example, the following piece from today's Observer, entitled 'US shaken by sudden surge of violence against gays.'

According to the title, there is a surge of anti-gay violence sweeping across America, which is a shocking prospect, not least to the gay-friendly readers of the Observer.

Yet, the evidence doesn't remotely support that. Within the article, the entire evidence offered consists of one suicide (well-reported, and subject to legal action towards alleged bullies), one quite vicious beating of a gay man and some vaguely euphemised 'other youths' in New York, a group of men who had a bin thrown at them, and a customer of the Stonewall Inn who was robbed.

I don't wish to diminish the seriousness of any of those individual acts, but frankly, all of that and much worse likely happened in any single Dublin housing estate last night. It doesn't add up to anything close to a surge of violence against gays in a country of 300 million people.

The article opens with the poignant scene of one brave man's 'lonely vigil' protesting for civil rights for gay people. Then swiftly moves on to inform us that, like him, 'Liberal America looks on aghast as virulent homophobic prejudice seems to have returned to its streets and cities.'

'Seems' is the key word here, the mealymouthed weasel word which excuses the writer from offering objective fact and allows him to present biased opinion in its place. It's a technique pioneered and perfected by the dark minions of the Daily Mail, where insinuating invective has been house style for many years.

'Seems', 'may be considered to be', 'is now thought by many' - such phrases are bullshit euphemisms. They are shorthand, telling the reader - here is what you should conclude, here is what you should be thinking.

Ironically, the very people who would be impervious to this technique in the Daily Mail are suckers for it in their own favoured papers, like the Observer.

This is confirmation bias in action.

The issue isn't whether there is a tidal wave of anti-gay violence in America or not. Clearly there isn't, and even the article is forced to concede in a single hurried line that the US is set to overturn the ban on gays in the military and Florida has just introduced gay adoption.

The issue is that the Observer, for some reason, has thought it legitimate to pretend that there is, using all the Daily Mail's rhetorical tropes of insinuation to depict skewed opinion in place of objective fact, when those facts do not add up to support their argument.

Journalism is becoming ever more debased, and nowhere is this more evident than in the broadsheets. Don't let confirmation bias blind you to that.

Not my debt

The 35-40 billion euro quoted today as the (current) estimated cost of the Irish banking bailout is not my debt.

So I'm not going to pay it, and I urge everyone else who is not responsible for the debt to behave likewise.

Iceland has demonstrated that the idea that keeping bogey banks afloat is essential to the survival of a state is nonsense. Anglo and the other banks gambled and lost. They should have been let go to the wall, as capitalism suggests. They should still be let go to the wall even now.

This transfer of cash, from the taxpayer to the banksters, the banks and their bondholders is nothing more than corporate welfare. These scum speculated and lost. But when I lose a bet, neither Paddy Power nor the Government intervene to secure my money. So why do the hyperrich get their losses nationalised?

If you weren't in Fianna Fail's Galway tent, if you weren't on Seany Fitzpatrick's dinner party list, if you didn't help run up these spectacular losses, then it's neither morally nor legally your responsibility to pay them.

Brian Lenihan and the pondlife in Fianna Fail want you to pay these debts to bail out their pals. Don't do it. Only a policy of public disobedience in this matter will see this Government removed, the cancer of their corruption excised and the debts transferred to where they belong - to those who ran them up in the first place.

You can't stop them taxing you. But you can do everything possible to minimise your taxes. You can't bring down the banks, but you can hurt them by transferring your savings out of the state. You can't refuse to pay moneys due to the state, but you can delay paying them for as long as possible, and eke out those payments in instalments to create maximum difficulty for the state.

Or you could go further. I don't mean drive a cement truck into Leinster House. I mean get out on the streets and demand change.

There are only two ways to avoid being saddled with 40 billion euro of debt you never ran up - emigrate like hundreds of thousands of people are doing already, or protest. REALLY protest.

It's not my debt and I won't pay it.

Jail the bankers and their politician protectors NOW. Let THEM pay the debts THEY ran up. Or let them rot in prison.

Dole we can't afford

There is some interesting data hidden in the latest live register figures today.

There are currently 18,120 people from the UK signing on in Ireland. These are people who do not hold Irish passports, so include Britons but not necessarily Northern Irish people.

There are 3,902 people signing on who come from the old EU15 (minus Britain and Ireland, that is.) That includes French people, Germans, Spanish, Italians, Danes, etc.

There are 40,427 people signing on who come from the EU accession states - Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, etc.

And there are 13,926 people signing on who come from elsewhere.

We can do nothing about the right of EU citizens to take benefit payments from Ireland, even if we cannot afford it.

But these figures indicate that for every Western European signing on (and remember they have had the right to live and work here for generations) there are TEN Eastern Europeans signing on (who have only had the right to live and work here for the past few years.)

And we are apparently paying dole to nearly 14,000 people who do NOT come from the EU.

My question is simply, why?

Arsehole's Day

Well, here we are again, at the intersection of marketing masquerading as culture.

Noted masters of the dark arts of advertising, Guinness, are trying for the second year running to parlay some bullshit date they picked almost at random into a secular national day in honour of their piss-poor product.

Most Dubliners, indeed most Irish people, were prepared to tolerate this blatant hijacking of Ireland and Irishness for a once -off event, especially since there was little we could do about it, short of banning their pub promotions.

But now that they're trying to make their secular Paddy's Day into an annual event, it's time that people started protesting.

Why bother, you might ask. After all, if Diageo want to give away cheap pints in Dublin, what's the problem?

The main problem I see is that it is yet another elision of drunken behaviour with Irish character, one that plays to outdated stereotypes that the global media laps up, just as it lapped up the idea that our Taoiseach is an ardent boozer who does interviews while hungover.

There's the secondary problem of anti-social behaviour resulting from this Arthur's Day nonsense, as Garda figures for arrests for disorderly conduct last year in Dublin will testify.

But if we really must have another national drinking day, why must it celebrate one of the great tragedies of the Irish brewing industry?

Not only did the growing hegemony of Guinness (a British run firm owned by a multinational) destroy the vibrant local brewing industry in Ireland in the past century, but their own much-vaunted flagship product is, frankly, muck.

Don't get me wrong. They do know how to brew at St James Gate. But the marketing wankers won't let them. The Guinness Foreign Extra Stout is one of the world's great beers. But try buying it in Ireland. The carbonated Guinness Extra is also pretty damn good, but is restricted to a few dusty bottles hidden away on pub shelves behind the ranks of Smirnoff WKD.

The draught version of the stout is nothing like what it was even after the nitrokeg creamy head was introduced. On order from on high, the brewers have been forced to try to brew all the taste OUT of the beer, so that the marketing wankers can 'position' it against swillable piss-lagers like Budweiser.

But Guinness is a stout. It never was, nor never could be a competitor for bland, fizzy alco-waters. The result is that they lose their traditional consumers and yet fail to attract the 'Heino or Carl' contingent either.

It doesn't stop them trying though. We've had Breo. We've had Guinness 'Lite'. Now we've got 'black lager'. All diabolically bad. And this is the direction they keep pushing Guinness draught towards.

There's a reason why Guinness doesn't compete in international beer competitions anymore. It's because they're not only not the best stout in the world, they're not even the best stout in Dublin.

(That honour goes to the spectacular Wrasslers XXXX by the Porterhouse Microbrewery.)

Thankfully, there has been something of a renaissance in craft brewing in Ireland in recent years. In addition to the Beamish/Murphy (same brewery now) Guinness alternative, there are now real options for stout drinkers who wish to avoid the fish-scales slop coming out of St James' Gate.

Carlow do an extremely tasty O'Hara's stout, and College Green in Belfast have the excellent and sumptuous Molly's Chocolate Stout. And of course the Porterhouse boys specialise in stouts and porters, as the name suggests. Their Plain, Oyster Stout and XXXX are all superb.

These are REAL Irish beers, deserving of people's attention, palates and money.

I propose that all right-thinking beer lovers and Irish people turn their back on the bullshit that is Arseholes' Day and spend the evening instead exploring the delights of Irish craft brewing either in the nearest enlightened hostelry or else in the comfort of their own home.

Maybe when Diageo start shipping market share in large amounts to real brewers, they will realise the error of their ways and permit their own brewers to do what they do best and make some proper stout.

After all, they do it for foreign markets and they've done it in small batches for Ireland too. The only thing stopping them is the delusions of the ponytailed wanker brigade who have such contempt for both beer lovers and the Irish nation that they genuinely believe you'll buy into their new national day proposal just because they'll discount their pints of muck for the night.

And now Budweiser are getting in on the act, proposing their own 'national happy hour' in the US.

This crap is going to spread, people. Not content with privatising our public spaces, now they want to privatise our holidays too. Don't let the marketing vermin win.

Pass me or I'll sue

Oh, this is just priceless.

A graduate at Queens University is suing the college because, get this, he reckons his human rights have been breached because he didn't do quite as well in his degree as he expected.

Andrew Croskery got a 2.2 degree in electrical engineering. What with the state of the current economy and the rampant grades inflation at work across the entire educational establishment, Mr Croskery no doubt realises that his degree won't permit him to study further and won't impress would be employers.

After all, they're already lining their waste baskets with CVs from people who actually earned first class degrees and masters degrees.

The poor diddums hasn't accepted that perhaps he should have hit the books a bit harder. Obviously, it's not his fault that he didn't do particularly well. Of course, it's the university's fault for not providing him with 'better supervision.'

I wonder what he means by better supervision. Did he expect the college to provide a mammy surrogate to get him out of bed and to his lectures on time? Or a study coach to sit him down and make him hit the books? I suspect what it means is that he expects them to simply give him the degree grade he wants, whether he earned it or not.

The High Court heard from some lawyer, who's presumably happy to bank a large amount of cash for pursuing this case, that: “It is obviously an important case for the applicant. He avers his employment prospects have been jeopardised."

It's self-evident that getting a poor grade jeopardises your job chances. But let's say he wins his case and Queens is forced to grant him a grade he didn't deserve. Then perhaps Mr Croskery might gain employment on the back of that grade with an employer.

What happens if the employer discovers that Mr Croskery isn't up to the job? Will he sue the employer for breaching his human rights too?

This sorry court case is the culmination of two odious trends in modern society. The first is one prevalent in education from kindergarten upwards - the idea that everybody wins, that no one fails, that top grades should be handed out to everyone for fear of someone's feelings being hurt.

The second trend responsible for this is the creeping culture of entitlement running rampant in society. Mr Croskery feels entitled to a better grade. It doesn't matter to him that he may not have done the work to deserve a better grade. He wants it, and feels it is his due, and therefore he must have it.

It will be fascinating to see how this case pans out. I genuinely believe it's possible though unthinkable that Mr Croskery might win.

What a wonderful precedent that would be. It opens up a second route to academic success - the courts - and slaps down one of the few remaining arenas of meritocracy left in society, permitting those who can afford it not only to access third-level education but also to buy, via a legal action, the grade they desire.

Leadership: Two examples from Europe

In Ireland, it's considered good political leadership for the Taoiseach to stay up till four in the morning drinking, singing and mimicking sportsmen.

Well, it isn't, but if you listened to Fianna Fail the past couple of days, you'd think the man had been up till all hours fixing the economy.

The desperate attempts to paint dipso Biffo as the innocent victim of scurrilous Fine Gael tweeters fell on deaf ears - the country, indeed the whole world, recognised truth when they heard it and now everyone knows we're a crisis country led by drunkards.

Needless to say, the markets responded, hiking up the cost of the borrowing we already couldn't afford. By the time Cowen had slept it off and roused himself to apologise 'for sounding hoarse', the last of his credibility was being piddled up against the wall and the damage was long since done.

It's not the boozing while the country's a mess that makes him such an abject leader. It's the going on radio and letting everyone hear he's been boozing his head off, and then trying to deny it, that makes him a bad leader.

By contrast, the poison dwarf Sarkozy isn't going to be bullied by the Eurocrats over his Roma expulsions. Whatever you think about expelling Roma, and the majority of Western Europeans think extremely highly of the idea, it's the rare state leader who doesn't cave when Brussels starts threatening.

And when they started comparing Sarko to the Nazis, thereby invoking Godwin and losing the debate, it was clear that the knives were out not only for the expulsion policy but for the diminutive leader too.

Sarko's response was effortlessly brilliant. If the Luxembourgeois commissioner rabbitting on about World War 2 comparisons was so concerned about the Roma, perhaps they could be housed in her country instead of being deported to their native Romania and Bulgaria?

The howls from affluent Luxembourg could be heard all over Europe. That is of course the LAST thing they want. And with Sarko now going after their shady banking system (which he accuses of assisting tax dodging) the state of Luxembourg is now singularly unimpressed with the Commissioner who brought down France's wrath upon their expensively-coiffeured heads.

Far from painting Sarkozy out to be a Nazi, Viviane Reding has likely signed her own career suicide note in this spat. Her own country will not thank her for turning France against them so effectively. It would not surprise me if she was to step down in the next few months for family or other spurious reasons and a new commissioner appointed from the Duchy.

These two, it seems to me, are the current polar opposites of leadership capacity at the nation state level in Europe currently.

In Ireland an abject garrulous drinker, croaking through a hangover on morning radio then grumpily trying to deny it afterwards.

In France, a politically astute, determined individual insistent on making strong decisions, standing by them and defending the sovereignty of his nation against all attacks, including those from the suprastate.

I'm no particular fan of Sarko's politics, but we could do with his leadership qualities in Ireland right now. Frankly, any change from the current cretins would be an improvement. Even a monkey wouldn't cost us percentile points on the bonds exchanges by turning up drunk on radio.

Edit: Not only does this story just keep rumbling on, with the addition of a golfer's demand for an apology for being mimicked by the drunken Taoiseach, but it is now gathering the sort of momentum that can take out a government.

By contrast, Commissioner Reding's appeal for back-up from Barroso at the highest EU level has, understandably, been equally brushed aside by the now rather irate French.

The Science Minister's brainfart

Only in Ireland, or perhaps, in the buckle of the US bible belt, would a science minister launch a book on why evolution is wrong.

(Here comes the science part - no, it isn't.)

Specious nonsense doesn't begin to account for the superstitious claptrap contained in this tome by some godbotherer called John May.

What's even more nonsensical is that the Minister for Science is launching it.

Kebabs Lenihan has always been the Tweedledumber to Brian's Tweedledum. But now this walking political liability is not only demonstrating uselessness at his job (which one expects from the current cabinet) but downright moronism of the lowest order.

He should have been sacked a long time ago during the GAMA scandal, when he racially slurred migrant workers. He should be sacked now for this brainfart.

But it's testimony to both the void of talent in Fianna Fail and the utter lack of anything resembling ethics or integrity that this oxygen thief will continue in government, wasting more of our time and money spouting crap about 'de knowledge economy' even as he promotes retrograde anti-science falsehoods.

In defence of burning books

So a gun-toting yeehah Southern-fried man of God in the good ole U S of A is going to hold a Koran-burning ceremony.

Not particularly respectful or in good taste, I'm sure you'd agree. Downright offensive to Muslims, one might think. Possibly inflammatory, in fact.

Lots of people are getting very upset about that prospect, and everyone from Hillary Clinton to newspapers in the Arab world have called for the event to be cancelled.

While some people have expressed their distaste for the offence offered to Islam, most are more concerned about the possible ramifications of this activity. They have raised the spectre of the riots across the Muslim world that followed the publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons being repeated.

Amid all of this, almost no one has pointed out that burning books in itself is distasteful and ignorant and achieves nothing in real terms. The knowledge contained therein does not die, just the dignity of the arsonists.

But while Pastor Jones is undoubtedly a fool, he has one valid point to make. Why should the West continue to tiptoe around the psychosis of radical Islam for fear of offending people who are, at the very least, as idiotic and backward as the Pastor himself?

"Instead of us backing down, maybe it's time to stand up. Maybe it's time to send a message to radical Islam that we will not tolerate their behaviour," he told Associated Press.

It seems to me that the reason he shouldn't burn the Korans is because burning books is an act of profound ignorance. But he should not be prevented from doing so for fear of offending Medieval lunatics like the Taliban, the mass murderers of Al Qaeda or the Wahhabist psychotics running Saudi.

If Islam is truly a religion of tolerance, then its adherents will see this act for what it is - attention-seeking by a retard - and ignore it.

If however, Islam is dominated by those keen to seek out offence, quick to anger, ready to riot at the perception of a slight, and prepared to refute the pluralism and tolerance that permits their freedom of religion in the West, then they will indeed set fire to their own towns, protest at embassies and issue fatwahs demanding Pastor Jones' head on a spike.

And if that does occur, then Pastor Jones will have succeeded in a very real way in exposing the hypocrisy at the heart of Islam - a creed that demands to be tolerated where it has no rule but tolerates no plurality where it rules.

Let us not forget that a woman accused of adultery still faces death by stoning in Iran. Let us not forget the oppression offered by the Talibanin Afghanistan. Let us not forget that there is no freedom of religion in many Muslim-dominated countries.

It's time for Islam to grow up, and they can demonstrate that maturity by ignoring Pastor Jones' little stunt.

Chav Cock, or how God tells Englishmen to steal Irish homes

This man is called Guy Chave-Cox. He is behaving like both a chav and a cock, thereby fulfilling the demands of his preposterous surnames.

He is also a vicar, and hence allegedly a religious gentleman of the Christian faith. But this has not prevented him from seeking to claim the homes of people in Sligo as his own.

The back story is available from the Irish Indo here, but to keep it short, his people, the Middletons, left Ireland some 90 years ago, never to return. They held land that was likely originally stolen by the British crown from Irish people and given illegally to their antecedents anyway.

In the Seventies, with the intention of sorting out land ownership, the people affected worked to trace the Middleton heirs and offered them hundreds of quid for the ground ownership. Having secured their properties, this all went to bed. They should not have had to do this, of course. All colonial claims to Irish land by non-residents ought to have been revoked upon independence.

Or so people thought till the boul vicar, a Middleton heir, along with his wife Heather, decided to try to lay claim to some properties that had not been resolved in the Seventies.

Here now is a true test of the Irish state and Irish judiciary. Clearly this man, who has no connection whatsoever to Ireland, has no reasonable claim to these properties. Yet he has issued eviction notices to people who have lived there all their lives.

The only rational response is to throw his claim out of court and charge him a fortune in damages for his malicious suit. Anything short of that, and you can reasonably conclude that the 'Republic of Ireland' and its judiciary are about as free and independent as Iraq.

I still don't understand what was wrong

This photograph depicts something extremely ugly indeed.

Not the humiliation and torture of Palestinians in their own country, horrific though that is.

Not even the pig-brutal munter in the Israeli Army uniform posing with a smirk in front of them.

Nope, the real ugliness is in her attitude that it was perfectly fine to act this way, to incarcerate Palestinians in their own land, then pose for a picture in front of them like a tourist snapping themselves at the Eiffel Tower or the Taj Mahal.

This sub-intelligent bitch posted these atrocities on, inevitably, her Facebook page. Then took them down when the civilised world was outraged. But today, safe with the assurance that the Israeli occupying forces have no intention of reprimanding her, she has come out batting with the following jaw-dropping lines of madness:

"I still don't understand what was wrong. It was solely to show the experience of military service," she said.

For anyone with any lingering doubts about the illegitimacy of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the humiliation of that land's indigenous occupants and the dehumanising attitudes of the idiot occupying forces, this is all you need right here.

These pictures evoke not only the similar pictures taken by American knuckledraggers at the Iraqi torture centre Abu Ghraib, but also those of many Nazis, posing in front of piles of Jewish clothes and shoes, in concentration camps during the 1940s.

They too failed to see anything wrong in their photos posed before the torture they were committing, because they too failed to recognise what they were doing was torture, was evil, was wrong.

The history of the Zionist project brings to mind those famous lines from the end of Orwell's 'Animal Farm', because now it has become increasingly impossible to draw any distinction between the torturers of Israel and those who once tortured their antecedents in 1940s Europe.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."

Who now can tell a Zionist from a Nazi?