The Singing Stranger

Well, it’s only 1290 days (give or take a month) until we have to elect them, so why not start now?

When I arrived home earlier, Mum was already in full swing. “Did you see the Late Late last night?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Did you see Liz O’Donnell on it? Very good about that stuff in Liberia.”

“Yeah, was quite impressed, I must say.”

“I reckon she’ll run for President.” She said it almost as if we were having a long-running row and she was trying to be vindictive.

“Eh… maybe. Though she’d need the PD nomination and Adrian Hardiman from the Supreme Court bench will probably get it.”

“Oh, really?” And that was pretty much it.

Then cut to my mum’s parents visiting us earlier this evening. It turns out my Grandad is a little more dyed-in-the-wool as an FFer than I would have thought. He went off on an (admittedly logical) rant about how if Bertie had lodged £15k into his account, the statements would have showed up that he’d lodged £15k, and not the IR£16,500-odd that that probably would have converted into. He’s right - if you lodge $100 in the bank, your statement will say you lodged $100 USD, and then give the conversion rate before putting the credit in the right column. According to Grandad the statements only list the IR£ lodgements - begging the question as to why you would convert it just to lodge it, or whether he maybe got it converted in Manchester before returning. Either way, despite the tangent about how “the tribunal was set up to cover planning; how is Bertie’s back accounts anything to do with planning?!”, we eventually hit the same subject again.

“Sure if there’s nothing in Europe before then, he’ll end up as President anyway, sure.”

Enter Mum: “I dunno about that, I think if his bib is dirtied at all he won’t get it.”

And then me. “Nah. To be honest there’s too many people in Fianna Fáil who’ve been biding their time, getting everything ready for ages, and waiting in the background, for Bertie to just decide he wants a better job once he’s not in the Dáil any more.”

Which I thought was a fair point. Then Mum pipes in with her Liz O’Donnell again, and then I recall how when Ciara came back from Brussels she was convinced Brian Crowley MEP would be a great choice and was almost being groomed for the job.

Then I recalled Mary Davis, who was involved in Special Olympics and who addressed us at USI Congress last year as a keynote speaker. Easily flaggable as an option - and then there’s Senator Mary White (at least I think that’s her name - not a great sign if she’s not known by everyone) who’s already declared her interest.

There was Bob Geldof! Maybe even Gerry Adams! And who, pray tell, would get the FG nomination?!

It’s a weird one. But who needs Obama or Clinton when you’ve got a whole three-and-a-half years left of the McAleeses and the world is getting electoral itchy feet?!

It’s not all that often that I use this blog to indulge a particularly intense pet hate of mine; in fact, it’s not all that often that I actually write to this blog, full stop - but this morning, I got a bit of an inkling of job satisfaction of the type that would make for a particularly heart-cockle-warming episode of The West Wing.

Some of you may or may not be familiar with the Student Travel Card. Basically, the Student Travel Card offers holders the privilege of travelling on Iarnród Éireann, Dublin Bus and Luas services at specially discounted rates, as well as other discounts such as student concessions for GAA tickets and cut-rate deals on 3, among other benefits.

Which, you might find, is all well and good. And you’d be somewhat right to - those students getting stuff cheaper than the rest of us, when they’re going to be earning thousands more than us in a few years, etc etc. Well, the problem with Student Travel Card is that it’s a complete scam.

You see, Student Travel Card is an arm of Stylemark Holdings Ltd, a completely private company based in Coolmine, Dublin 15. And Student Travel Card seem to have - somehow - muscled their way into a position where they’re CIE’s sometime official agent for proof of student status.

So Stylemark Holdings Ltd, under their STC arm, are in a position where students have to pay them €12 - or €15 if they need a photo taken - to take possession of a completely unofficial student ID which they need then to present to CIE whenever they’re looking for a student fare on the train or buying a Student 7-Day ticket for Dublin Bus.

That might not sound very emphatic, so I’ll borrow an analogy I used earlier when explaining this to my mother.

Imagine, if in the [Company X] canteen, there was a special rate for staff and you could get your meals for half-price as a staff member, but in order to prove that you’re staff, they wouldn’t accept your work ID, and instead you had to pay a random private company €15 and get them to prove you’re actually an employee there. Does that not seem a bit daft?

Now, USI, the national Union of Students in Ireland, have had mandates to campaign against Iarnród Éireann’s policy of using the STC (as outlined on pages 63 and 64 of the 2006-07 Policy Manual) which for some reason haven’t been acted upon in a couple of years. A fuss has also been kicked up by Young Fine Gael among others in the past, although YFG managed to make a particular balls of their effort. They started off well:

This situation means that if a student in college in Galway, who doesn’t usually use Irish Rail to travel to Galway from her home, wishes to make a one-off journey to Dublin then her options are:
• Pay the full adult fare of €35/€38;
OR
• Buy a €15 ‘National Student Travel Card’ and pay the Students fare of €24.50 costing a total of €39.50

• i.e. no discount is available to that student!

…but go on to suggest that the alternative would be a ‘new €5 National Student Travel Card’. Uuuuuh.

It should be pointed out at this stage that Bus Éireann are saints in this regard and do pretty much as they should - they accept the student card issued by a third-level institution as valid student ID.

Anyway, USI didn’t seem to be budging on their responsibility, so the Council at UCDSU (of which I’m Chair) passed a mandate (page 7) of its own encouraging a campaign at more local level.

Today, having lodged a query with the National Consumer Agency, we received a reply which included this:

We have looked at your query and we do consider Iarnród Éireann to be breaching consumer legislation by asking for this specific method of ID from students.

We were encouraged to get in touch with Minister Noel Dempsey (God love him) on the issue - so we did, emailing him at all three of his public addresses. If he doesn’t get back to us sometime soon, he’ll be getting a very, very hard time from students who he’s already almost completely fucked over by stopping them driving to college unaccompanied.

I look forward to booking a constituency clinic with him in the near future.

The leading story right now on politics.ie:

Mary Harneys’ leadership of the Progressive Democrats was unanimously formalised tonight by the PD Parliamentary Party.

As a a result, she will no longer be ‘interim’ leader of the Progressive Democrats and it is not clear now whether or not there will be an leadership contest.

The PD review committee have been asked to make proposals for the future election of a PD leader, however, sources have told Politics.ie there may not be an election contest until 2009, meaning that Mary Harney may stay on for 2 years as leader.

To be honest, I was going to wax lyrical about everything here but RetiredProvo beat me to the point with his comment:

PD Parliamentary Party - Ha Ha.

Did she vote for herself ?

I see Noel Grealish was elected chairman of the Parliamentary Party aswell. Who will get all the other plush jobs on offer.

Excellent stuff - and after that, the biggest question that remains is how much more regressive can the party actually become? Having a leader who openly doesn’t want the job and who actually quit it before? Says an awful lot for their enthusiasm in their roles.

Oh, and John Gormley’s the Green Party leader. Buh.

The GAA have drawn Meath’s next upcoming footballing and hurling fixtures and fixed the venues for all of them.

The footballers will be playing Galway next Saturday at 4pm, in Portlaoise, in Round 3 of the Bank of Ireland All-Ireland SFC Qualifiers. Louth’s game against Cork will open the programme at 2pm.

The hurlers, meanwhile, will face Kildare in Tullamore, also next Saturday, at 7pm, in the semi-final of the Christy Ring Cup. The other semi-final, Westmeath vs Carlow, will precede the game at 5pm.

Their relative chances really couldn’t be much more different: the hurlers are unbeaten in the group stages of the Christy Ring tournament and will be gunning towards the idea of a final with neighbours Westmeath - especially as the two battled out a draw against each other earlier in the competition.

The footballers, meanwhile, look like they’re living on borrowed time. Only the sheer ability of Stephen Bray and Shane O’Rourke has gotten them through their games against Down and Fermanagh; a test of Galway’s stature will surely put an end to their breathtakingly long navigation through this year’s All-Ireland, bringing them to the last 12 in the country for the first time since 2002. And even if they do manage to fight off the Galweigans and gain revenge for the All-Ireland mauling of 2001, Meath will be up against… Tyrone.

Ah well. It was good while it lasted.

In hurling, briefly, Kilkenny’s tie against Galway and Wexford’s clash with Tipp will form a double-header in Croke Park next Sunday, with the latter game throwing in at 2pm. It’s actually a triple-header with Kilkenny’s minor game against Antrim underway at 12:15pm. The other two hurling quarter-finals will also take place in Croker the following Sunday - odd, considering all four of the teams involved are from Munster.

The fixtures news in full can be read here.

A quicker one today, because the news today is basically boring as hell. Watch it all if you like.

Joe O’Reilly’s phone records further exposed as alibi conflict
(watch it)

Joe O’Reilly’s phone records were far removed from his alibi. If he’d been at home, as was his story, it was impossible - in the opinion of an o2 technician - for his phone to have been picked up where it was.

Guilty.

Tom Parlon leaves the PDs and politics to lead construction federation
(watch it)

Parlon’s out, and won’t seek a Seanad nomination or the PD leadership. Some reports say he’s even left the party altogher. This is the guy who led the OPW; now he’s going to be leading the construction lot. Wow.

So who for the PDs now? It seems like Colm O’Gorman, who’s only been a member for the last year or so, is now going to be the only candidate left to lead them. But what odds he’ll say no, given that - like Parlon - he is, in essence, only a celebrity candidate for the party?

Parlon defends any accusations of a conflict of interests by saying all he did in the OPW was sign their stuff, and had no policy steering role as Minister. He goes on to fill three minutes of airtime with whingespeak that nobody actually gives a toss about. He does, though, worm out well from a Dobbo question about whether it’s ethical that somebody with his OPW familiarity be free to take up such a role.

The Sports News with Colm! Murray!
(watch it)

GAA: Graham Geraghty’s coming back to the Meath panel, after leaving last week over a training now. Of course, it never happened, because Geraghty ultimately never showed for training. Meanwhile, RTÉ have confirmed they’ll be showing Cork v Tipp on Saturday evening, with a 7pm throw-in. The losers get Waterford, the winners get Cork.

Soccer: Brendan Rea leaves Kilkenny City; Roy Keane is expected to sign up to five people in the next week; and West Ham buy Craig Bellamy for a club record €7.5m.

Craig Bellamy’s not worth €7.5m. How many clubs has he had in the last five years now?!

Wes Houlihan’s Scottish move is on hold.

Leeds United might be dead. Again. Expressions of interest, blah blah.

Cycling: Swiss bloke in Tour de France leads by 33 seconds. Blah.

Horse Racing: Some horses or other. The ground in the Curragh has a particular condition of some sort. I don’t know what it is. I fast-forwarded through.

Cricket: the ‘Quadrangular’ (?!) Series kicked off in Clontarf. The Windies beat the shite out of Holland with 10 wickets to spare. Wow. Ireland play the Dutch next.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m not opinionated enough. If I was, I probably wouldn’t have as much trouble writing a blog.”
“What do you mean? Of course you’re opinionated. Sure when we watch the news, you always have something to say about something.”

Opening thoughts: Good that Dobbo and Shaz are back. It was weird last week with Finnerty and O’Hagan for a while.

Joe O’Reilly’s mobile records clash with alibi
(watch clip in Real Player)

Now, generally I’m not one to assume guilt until its proven. But I think with all the odd behaviour reported previously in the trial - like apologising to the Gardaí for moving the body because “I’m probably after ruining it on you now” - when you say you’re supposed to be in a Phibsboro bus depot, and your phone says that you went from the Airport to Balbriggan, and passed down the road from your gaff, your number is up.

He’d “had an affair”, but it was over. And he lied to her about playing softball when he’d been off schmoozing. Well. North along the M1, towards a mast near their home, and then back to the bus depot.

And then there’s the talk about the voicemail - a month after her death, Joe left a voicemail on Rachel’s phone at 8am, saying “Hiya Rach [...] now you’re so cold. The sun was out, it was a normal day, but you had two hours left to live.”

Frankly, not even O.J. could buy his way out of this one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Following on from earlier, I was walking out of the library room in the Law building at the Uni just a few minutes ago, and went in briefly to the cloakroom to check my bag was still there (oddly, you’re not allowed bring bags in with you to the library itself - an overelaborate security measure to stop people stealing books).

While in the cloakroom I heard a girl speaking in an usually stereotyped English accent, in English, on her phone, telling her friend to “sit back… relax… enjoy the evening…”. When I walked past her on the way out, she then burst right back into life, and told her conversational partner (in German)  the verbatim German equivalent of an “OMG! A dude just walked past in a Fratellis t-shirt!”.

Strange what some people will go for. I’ll bet the waft of vinegar coming from the shirt is what did it for her.

I have a Fratellis t-shirt. I’m wearing it today.

And it smells of the vinegar you get in a chip shop.

Bear in mind that I haven’t been at a chip shop since April and this t-shirt has been worn and washed at least four times since then.

Any suggested explanations would be most welcome.

blaa n. a type of bread roll in one of three varieties i.e. floury, chewy and crusty: “Mammy… make sure you put loads of red lead in me blaa today, there wahent a bit in it yesterday girl boy!”

boi n. boy: Waterford word, normally put at the end of each sentence,said when waterfordonian is speaking to a male.

baytin’ vb. the act of striking or giving blows; punishment or chastisement by blows: “I’ll give you some baytin’ boy for saying my mudder has a face like a blaa.” [syn: yer go, thrashing]

bayeg n. bag - “Shove me over me bayeg boi an I see…” = “Please pass me my bag and I’ll check!”

cat adj. distasteful, unattractive, revolting. e.g. “Dat yung wan is cat.” = “That girl is rather unattractive.”

gawk vb. to look with fixed eyes wide open, as through fear, wonder, surprise, impudence: “What are you gawkin at boy, do you want yer go boy, I’ll dig the head off of ya!” [syn: stare, gander]

girl boy n. a female. Used in speech when addressing a female, e.g. “Willa shift me friend, girl boy?” Not to be confused with ladyboy, a misleading solicitation agent found in Bangkok.

go, yer n. to fight. “Do ye want yer GO, boi, I’ll puck de head off ya,
boi!” = “Do you wish to fight over the matter? I’ll hit about the head, sir!”

horrars, de def n. the state of being drunk, NOT a local establishment in Waterford, a common mistake by Cork people.

hiden n. a good beating, see baytin’. Not to be confused with Haydn, an Austrian composer of the Classical era.

happent neg vb. haven’t; “I happent a clue, boi.” = “I haven’t a clue, sir.”

lack n. [taboo] female companion or girlfriend; derogatory term for a female date: “I’m maytin’ me lack for a few bottles down in Breens’ layter on boy, wanna come?”

Munstaar, de n., pub the Munster Express, the local newspaper, also known as the Munster. “Twas in de Munstaar, boi.”

‘No boddar’ phrase No bother: “Dat was no boddar, boi.” = “That was no problem, sir.”

ossified vb., past participle pissed.

red lead n. a particularly colourful variety of luncheon sausage. A product of the Clover Meats factory in Christendom, and delicious with a “floury blaa”. [Thanks to Pat!]

shellakybooky biol. n. any of numerous aquatic or terrestrial mollusks of the class Gastropoda, typically having a spirally coiled shell, broad retractile foot, and distinct head “Did you see de size of that shellakybooky, he had feelers the size of me nob boy!” [syn: snail]

slots, de pl. n. Automated coin-operated amusement machines usually found in Tramore. e.g. “I lost all me blaa money on de slots, boi. Feckin’ starvin’ for de want of de red lead.” - “Through automated gambling I have caused financial impoverishment upon myself and shall go without bread this evening. Oh, the shame.”

Spot on adj., phrase an expression of agreement: “Alright so, spot on no bodder boi, on de ball!” [syn: alright, ok, on de ball]

well qn., interr., adj. an expression of greeting, can be used in conjunction with boy and girl depending on the sex of the recipient: “Well boy (for female replace with ‘girl boy’), luvly day out dayer ihin’t it boy?” [syn: hello, hi, howdy]

willa qn., interr. Will you? e.g. “Get us a packet a Tayyyyyyto, boi, willa?” = “Can you please purchase a packet of Tayto crisps for me, my friend?”

yung wan n. a girl.

I won’t lie. Yesterday, while the Dáil was in session, I tried to blog about the goings on between John ‘The Bull’ O’Donoghue, our gracious Ceann Comhairle, and some of the members on the right-hand (physical) side of Dáil Éireann, before giving up because (a) there was no way I could possibly capture the lunacy of goings-on, and (b) I was confused as hell about what really was going on with Standing Orders.

However, Nat King Coleslaw has pretty much come to the rescue…

Behold, the Gong Clanger!! (CurryChips.com)

Meanwhile, the official Dáil transcript of yesterday’s goings-on is worth a nice read. It all kicks off with the Election of a Leas-Cheann Comhairle…

Michael Ring: You are making it up as you go along.

The Bull: Deputy Ring will withdraw that statement.

Ring: I will not withdraw it.

The Bull: If the Deputy will not withdraw that statement, he will leave the House.

Ring: You are making up the rules as you go along. I will not withdraw it.

The Bull: Then Deputy Ring, you will leave the House.

Ring: I will not leave the House. You may put me out, but I will not leave the House. I am elected to this House and not selected like you are.

The Bull: You must withdraw the statement you have made.

Ring: I will not withdraw the statement. You are making up the rules as you go along.

The Bull: That is a disgraceful statement and completely untrue. The Deputy will force me to name him.

John Deasy: Will he be treated like Deputy Morgan?

Ring: Tell me, under what rule—–

Iiinda Kenny: Name the Standing Order.

Ring: Quote the Standing Order.

The Bull: [clannnnnging!] I move: “That Deputy Ring be suspended from the service of the Dáil.”

Update: thanks to Shane Hegarty for linking to me in his Present Tense blog at ireland.com.

Further Update: Twenty Major has posted the video of the RTE News bit. Great stuff.

[YouTube=http://ie.youtube.com/watch?v=_wZX_Jfvm_Y]

As soon as the Dáil Playback system gets the video online, never you fear, I’ll be pointing you right to it.