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.

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.

It takes a thief to spot global theft

The name Darius Guppy probably doesn't provoke much recognition in Ireland, even though he lived here for some time.

A brief precis of his life thus far might run:
Privileged schooling at Eton,
followed by more of the same at Oxford where he chummed around with top Tories David Cameron and Boris Johnson as part of the odious Bullingdon society,
followed by his father's spectacular bankrupcy,
which in turn led to Guppy Jr scamming Lloyds insurance to make up for the cash he believed Lloyds had stolen from his family.

Guppy was caught, prosecuted and jailed, then vanished into obscurity on release, firstly in Ireland and latterly in South Africa.

In short, he's the sort of rum bloke that the British aristocracy churn out all the time - the well-spoken crook.

But he's no fool and no idiot. And his introductory essay as a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph today is one of the more important articles to be published today or any other day.

Guppy's not the first to argue as he does, that the core problem with our global economy is the banks and how they invent money out of nothing in a form of alchemy that better resembles a card sharp's sleight of hand.

But few others have ever made the case so convincingly, so accessibly and so simply.

He argues clearly that you cannot allow banks to invent ever more amounts of money when the planet itself is finite. But this isn't an eco-hippy argument in favour of culling children so that the whales may feel free. This is a warning to everyone - the global economic collapse isn't over; it's barely started.

Perhaps it takes a thief to tell the rest of us that the banks are thieves on a truly colossal scale, and that a root-and-branch overhaul of the entire way money operates is now needed to prevent global meltdown.

His article is essential reading for anyone with a bank account, mortgage, personal loan, savings or property. If you haven't dropped out of society entirely, he's speaking to you.

Or, like the banksters, you might prefer to embed your head back in the sand and hope for business as usual to resume. It won't of course.

Money is debt, and allowing banks to create unending supplies of it is what's wrong at the core of our world. If you've got more time, perhaps you might like to view the following documentary, which expounds even further on the same points Guppy makes so excellently.

Britain has the wrong Bullingdon yobs running for office. Guppy would make a much better PM than Call-me-Dave Cameron. Because his criminality is so much less serious, and because he at least is prepared to acknowledge the real wrongs.

The Pogrom That Wasn't

A week on from screaming headlines all over the globe, what are we to make of the anti-immigrant pogroms in Belfast?

It made for perfect headlines for the world's media. To the outside eye, the North of Ireland has always resembled a boiling pot of irrational hatred and sectarianism.

Logic dictates that if these neanderthals are prepared to kill each other, despite sharing language, culture, skin colour and a God, what wouldn't they do to foreigners?

And that's what we got, all over the world, last week. Endless handwringing articles about a 'return to hatred', hectoring PC sermons from fingerwagging commentators in other countries, multiculturalism 'experts' warning ominously about the slide toward Nazism.

It always helps to return to the facts, and on this occasion, they didn't really get aired at all (although fair play to some of the local media and indeed Myles Dungan on RTE for eventually getting round to reporting the facts.)

So what happened? Same as everywhere else in Europe - a load of Roma gypsies moved into a nice area and made shite of it. Robbed, begged, intimidated local elderly people, and howled racism when asked to stop.

Wellington Park and Wellesley Avenue are NOT some Loyalist shithole full of 'For God and Ulster' meatheads. It's a mixed area next to the university and always has been. Go back two decades and it was probably one of the few areas of the city where a foreign face could be seen. Many Chinese and Indians live in the vicinity, as do many foreign students.

It's a nice, peaceful residential area, and it's not the sort of area that would easily accommodate a family of thieves, living in squalor 30 to a house, intimidating the locals.

Now let's deal with the lies. No one put copies of 'Mein Kampf' through any letterboxes. No glass bottles rained down on the 'anti-racist' march. No organised campaign by Loyalist terror groups or the BNP or Combat 18 or any other far right group took place. There is, in fact, no evidence of ANY FORM of far right or racist involvement whatsoever.

The only organised element in these whole proceedings where those of the sinister far left Socialist Workers Party. These demented Trots, none of whom come from or live in the area, saw a bandwagon to jump on and did so with gusto.

They organised an 'anti-racist' march through the area, pissing off all the locals and attracting abuse from drinkers at a local pub. Petrol on the flames as far as the Roma were concerned, I'd imagine, but far be it from the Socialist Workers to think of others. They had an issue to hijack after all.

So they lied to the media about being struck down in a hail of bottles that never happened. They lied to the media about copies of 'Mein Kampf' being put through letterboxes. They lied to the media about the involvement of a who's who of far right organisations. Not a word of any of it was true, but the media lapped up the headlines and repeated them unquestioningly.

There is a Polish shop on that street, but no Poles came out even for a minute to show solidarity with either the bussed-in Socialist Workers or the Roma. However, plenty of Romanians could be found protesting AGAINST the Roma.

How so? Well, who knows the Roma better than their compatriots? Who suffer more from being confused for Roma than other Romanians? Who are most upset at the good name of their country being dragged through the gutter by the behaviour of Roma gypsies than Romanians? And so Romanians were also involved in the protest against this particular clan of gypsies.

Where are we now? The world's base opinion of Northern Ireland is once again confirmed thanks to the clever media spinning and lies of a tiny coterie of crazy Trots. A bunch of thieves who should be facing charges are instead hiding in churches and claiming to be the victims of racism, while they await free flights home.

The losers are the good people of South Belfast, and a special neighbourhood that always accommodated everyone, even at the height of the Troubles. They have been maligned, and libelled, and lied about.

The winners as always are the Roma. More free food and clothes and accommodation and someone else to pay for their flight home from the squalor they've made in yet another foreign town.

And in two months time, they'll be back, in Belfast or Dublin or Galway or Leeds or London or Paris or Naples or Munich or Valencia, squatting in a house they don't own, fifteen or thirty of them, living like animals and creating a hygiene problem for the neighbours, who they will threaten with their big knives even as they beg from them and steal from the local shops.

Until once again, either the authorities will take their children into care and arrest them or deport them. And so the merry-go-round spins again.

The people of South Belfast are not the problem. Romanians are not the problem. Racism is not the problem. Far right organisations are not the problem. Policing is not the problem.

The Roma are the problem, and that problem was deliberately and disgracefully compounded by the pondlife of the Socialist Workers Party, a political movement of such extremity that they do not dare run candidates in elections.

Belfast has suffered many pogroms in the past. My own family were burnt out of an area in the Seventies during one of the most dangerous ones. The Thirties also saw some horrific pogroms too.

And of course, in the furore about the rights of thieving foreign gypsies to intimidate local communities, we have all seemingly forgotten how a Catholic man was kicked to death in Coleraine, his wife and a pregnant woman assaulted too, only a few weeks back.

That's a REAL pogrom, but 'Loyalist bootboys still murdering Catholics for kicks' isn't as sexy a headline as 'Race riots in Belfast' even if it has the benefit of being true.

But this week saw a new chapter being written in Belfast - the pogrom that wasn't. Despite the lies and the headlines, I think that's progress.

Related posts here and here.

Keeping track of the dig outs

30 December 1993: Bertie Ahern lodges IR£22,500:
of which IR£15,000 cash,
IR£5,000 from Padraic O'Connor of NCB
and IR£2,500 from Des Richardson.

25 April 1994 Bertie Ahern lodges IR£30,000,
of which IR£27,164.44 to special savings account
and IR£2,835.26 to current account.

8 August 1994 Bertie Ahern lodges IR£20,000
to account in names of daughters

11 October 1994 Foreign Exchange. 
Bertie Ahern lodges IR£24,838.49 to deposit account
(equates to £25,000 stg)

5 December 1994  IR£50,000
(in two amounts-28,000 and 22,000)
is transferred from Bertie Ahern's account to Celia Larkin account (CL1)

5 December 1994 Foreign Exchange. 
IR£28,772.90 lodged to Celia Larkin account (CL2)
(equates to $45,000)

19 January 2005 IR£50,000 transferred from Celia Larkin deposit account to cash save account

27 January 1995 IR£50,000 withdrawn from Celia Larkin Deposit Account and given to Bertie Ahern

15 May 1995 IR£8,442 withdrawn from CL2

19 June 1995 IR£20,050.91 withdrawn from CL2 for  work on house

22 June 1995 Foreign Exchange 
IR£9,684.71 balance from CL2 used to open a new Larkin account - CL3
Also lodged to this account on this day was IR£11,743.74,
comprising IR£2,000 and £10,000 stg (£IR 9742.74)

24 July 1995 IR£9,655 lodged into CL3 account

1 December 1995 Foreign Exchange 
IR£19,142.92 lodged to Bertie  Ahern's deposit account
(equates to £20,000 stg)

New A/Cs Feb '08
IPBS a/c £38,000
BT a/c £52,000
That's half a million euro worth of dig outs in total.

Skinner Towers Attacked!

Fair play to the boys in blue. Perhaps they aren't all the keystone cops and corrupt Donegal shysters I took them for, after all.

Last night, some scumbags tried to break into my house. I heard them before they got in, thankfully, and warned them off, calling the plod for good measure.

While I waited in the darkened house, mobile in one hand and huge knife in the other, watching the shitheads trying to make their next move, the local Gardai arrived within a mere fifteen minutes.

By that stage, the cunts had fucked off to try some house that didn't have an irate, awake Northerner with a huge knife in it, but the plod took a description, had a word with another neighbour whose gaff they'd tried to break into, and circled the neighbourhood for a good hour looking for them.

I don't know if they caught them in the end, but fair play for the effort.

I really hope the boys in blue did catch them, though, because if I ever see them again, my knife hand is very twitchy.

Ryanair are thieving scumbags

We all know that Michael O'Leary's reign of terror has led to a complete breakdown in the concept of customer service in air travel.

Ryanair's business model includes cramming so many seats on a plane as to make them utterly uncomfortable for anyone but a midget to sit in. It also involves charging people extortionate taxes and additional levies for 'luxury extras' like baggage and wheelchairs.

They are known in the aviation industry as 'Ryanscare - a fright with every flight' for their fast and loose attitudes to safety procedures during their terrifyingly short turnarounds at poorly equipped regional airports.

And their policy of blaring adverts for crap like scratchcards during red-eye flights is definitely going to result in some sleep-deprived passenger assaulting staff one of these days.

But their latest wheeze is an attempt to steal money which they are not authorised to take from their own customers.

Ryanair have sent out an email to any customers who booked a flight out of the UK before the 7th of December for travel after the 1st of February this year. I've included its full text below.

Basically, because Gordon Brown doubled UK Air Passenger Duty in the last budget, Ryanair are now attempting to levy a further unauthorised charge on these customers.

I booked and paid for such a flight. But now, because Ryanair's business environment was changed in the budget, they want to try and up the price of my flight. Sorry, O'Leary, you thieving scumbag, but we had a deal. You offered a price and I took it.

Just because your business climate changes doesn't give you the right to renege on an agreed price and levy further charges at a later date.

My credit card company has been warned to reject any attempt by you to take any further payment from me for my flight. And if you attempt to do so, I'll be in touch with the Consumer Association and my lawyer.

I urge anyone else who received a similar email to behave likewise.

Here's the text:

Dear Customer,

In his budget speech on 6th December 2006, the UK Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown MP, announced his decision to DOUBLE “UK Air Passenger Duty”. This tax grab which is applicable to every passenger departing from a UK airport will generate £1bn. in tax revenues for the UK Government, but will do nothing for the environment.

Unfortunately, as you booked your flight - confirmation number DELETED before the 7th December 2006 with a travel date after the 1st February 2007 (see the below flight details), we have no alternative, in this instance, but to act as the UK Chancellor’s tax collector.

In accordance, with Article 4.2.2 of Ryanair’s General Conditions of Carriage, the additional tax amount required by the UK government will automatically be charged to the credit card or debit card used to pay for this flight booking. These credit/debit card transactions will automatically take place over the next 2 weeks

UK Air Passenger Duty Rates – applicable per person for each departing flight from a UK airport which was booked before the 7th December 2006 for travel from the 1st February 2007 onwards.

£10*(GBP) per person for each UK domestic flight (£20 on a return UK domestic flight)
£10* (GBP) per person for flights from the UK to an EU/EEA airport
£40* (GBP) per person for flights from the UK to an airport outside the EU/EEA – e.g. Morocco

*or local currency equivalent

Ryanair condemns the UK Chancellor’s unfair and regressive tax on ordinary passengers. And we urge you to write to Gordon Brown MP at ministers@hm-treasury.gsi.gov.uk indicating your opposition to this tax grab which will generate £1bn. in tax revenues for the UK Government, but will not do nothing for the environment.