heelers defies the swastika

It was the eve of the Johnston Press takeover of the Leinster Leader newspaper.
The mighty Heelers was breaking bread in a cafe with two other journalists.
One of the journalists was Paul O'Meara, familiar to students of my writings as the tame trade unionist.
I had never put much store in O'Meara's trade unionism. (Nor in his journalism for that matter.)
I thought he was working for the man.
But he was one of the few people who would be key to any fight back I might organise if the journalistic staff ever woke up to the threat to our lives and careers represented by the advent of the Johnston Press.
The other man sharing a coffee with us was Henry Bauress, a genial socialist idiot who strangely and uniquely managed to represent for me all that's good and all that's pisspoor in Irish journalism.
Decent and well motivated, yet utterly without insight, intellect or ability.
He was a gentleman in his way.
And not a bad fellow.
But the ultimate conformist too.
A conformist who thought he was a radical.
These were the only two I held in any regard at all at the Leinster Leader.
It's not saying much is it.
So on this fateful evening I was offering them the benefit of my advice.
The coffees were on the table.
I cut to the chase immediately.
"We should demand significant financial compensation for allowing the takeover to proceed," I told them. "We shouldn't ask. We should demand. A million quid each. That way it won't matter if the Brits try to fire us to make back the cost of their investment. We should make it clear that we'll close the newspaper if we're not properly compensated. We should make it clear before the takeover goes through."
Around us the Caspo cafe in Naas clattered with the hollow cacophonies of death.
"Under the law we have no right to demand any compensation," pronounced O'Meara clinically. "Other newspapers have been taken over. In some cases the journalists received nothing. In some cases they got figures around the five thousand mark. In one case they got twenty thousand each. But the fact is under the law we have no right to demand anything."
I looked at him coldly.
The way he'd spoken was almost as if he was reading from a crib sheet.
I wondered who'd written the script.
"I don't agree with your assessment of our rights under the law," I said. "In these circumstances the law is what we say it is. Any man has the right to protect his livelihood. The Irish people will always recognise that. There will be support for us above and beyond anything that is officially mandated in the statute books. Listen to me. You may be sure Ian Stewart will receive millions of pounds for his shares in the newspaper we've written for ten, twenty and thirty years. A pissant little Scots accoutant. That's all he was. And the little old ladies who own the Leinster Leader made him Managing Director. And then he gave himself and his friends shares in the company. And then they used the company to borrow money from idiot gangster banks to take over other newspapers in order to make this newspaper more enticing as a take over target for idiot gangster Brits who themselves have never done a day's work in their lives and whose takeovers are financed with borrowings from other idiot gangster banks. Remember. Stewart and his friends didn't borrow the money themselves. They borrowed the money using our company and our jobs as security. They gambled with our futures and with the newspaper at no risk to themselves. And now they're selling it. They're selling our newspaper. And they'll all get ten million each. You've got to think of it that way. No workforce on the planet earth has to surrender its right to protest in such circumstances. I'm telling you Stewart will get ten million quid for his shares in the newspaper we've built up over the last ten years. I'm not debating with you. I'm telling you. I'm saying we don't ask anyone's permission to express our reservations about the sale of the company we work for, to a British company who don't know us from Adam and who will end up firing all of us to try and claw back the money they're going to throw away on Stewart and his friends' shares. I say we fight this from day one. And we fight to win. There is no takeover without a million dollars each for the ten journalists. Stewart and the little old ladies can make up our cut from their own ill gotten gains if they want to. But either way we should make it clear, that the Leinster Leader will cease to exist if we are not properly consulted and compensated on this issue. Everyone involved should understand the journalists at the Leinster Leader are not going to gamble on the humanitarianism of a bunch of British scruff who clearly have more money they've borrowed from idiot banks than than they have sense. We should plan for war. We've got to get mean. Even the nice guys among us. We've got be prepared to strike and strike hard. Industrial espionage. Picket lines. Staged confrontations in the workplace. Asking our friends and family in the business community to withdraw their advertising. If Stewart tries to intimidate one of us, he should be instantly facing ten of us shouting in his face: Go home to Scotland you lowlife bastard. Whatever it takes. We've got to get as bad as they are. Otherwise we'll die poor."
O'Meara leaned forward.
His bald pate gleamed sweatily in the gloom.
"The law is not on our side James," he insisted firmly.
Henry Bauress yawned.
He had been silent all through my wake up call peroration.
Clearly it hadn't moved him.
With great deliberation he turned towards me and fixed me with a mocking stare.
His words when they came were laced with heavy sarcasm.
"This is all very well," pronounced Henry Bauress drily. "We could sit around here all evening talking about how many angels might fit on the head of a pin. It's not getting us anywhere."
The comment was a sneer at the Catholic church.
And at me.
Henry apparently considered me a Catholic for some reason.
I looked at him curiously.
His comment was so ill judged, so much an act of ingratitude for the favour I had been doing both these twits by sharing my sublime insights about the nature of the reality we were facing, his comment was such a boorish clownish cretinism, that for a moment I was quite incapable of further locution.
I wasn't shocked.
Or even offended.
Just sort of curious.
I felt no need to rebut what he'd just said.
The sneer is a very old one.
Atheists have been sneering it for hundreds of years.
Marxists absolutely love it.
It's based on an apocryphal assertion that Catholic prelates sat out some famine or plague or war debating how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
Historians nowadays admit there's no real evidence such a debate ever took place among the leaders of the church.
The sneer is a lie.
I looked at Henry.
His assessment of what was going on here, his conclusion even in this eleventh hour, that James Healy needed to be cut down to size, that an upstart religionist was once more getting above himself, this conclusion was so far removed from the nature of the reality we faced, ie that a British sword of Damocles was about to throw a great many decent and a few not so decent people out of work, and that we were about to let it happen, Henry's conclusion and response to all my efforts to avert this disaster had been so crass so porcinely invidious, that now at last I understood the nature of futility, now at last I realised nothing would stem the avalanche, now at last I could no longer be bothered trying to motivate either of these cravens, Bauress or O'Meara, or anyone else, to defy the inevitable cataclysm which was engulfing our shared horizon.
They were ignorant.
And they were wilfully ingnorant.
There was nothing more I could do.
"Okay," I said.
The ghost of a smile touched my lips.
The little boy in me would have loved to debate Henry about the angels and the pin.
I stood up and walked to the door.
The die was cast.
No one at the Leinster Leader would now exercise their democratic right, nay their duty, to protect their jobs and their pension entitlements. I would not lead them.
Yeah.
I might have showed them the way.
But not now.
For whatever reason, they didn't want to know.
Bauress thought my selfless intellectual exertions on behalf of the soon to be oppressed workers had been mere vanity.
He distrusted me and the ancient religion more than he did the faceless mercantilists of the Johnston Press.
I had a feeling he'd repent at leisure.
And the question he'd suggested would be of most concern to the likes of a peasant like me: "How many angels would fit on the head of a pin?"
That was not the real question of the hour.
The real question was (and is): "How many pensions do any of you think the Johnston Press are going to pay to the journalistic staff at the Leinster Leader?"
I looked back into the half light of the cafe.
They were chatting quietly in the corner.
The realisation hit me.
I was isolated.
I had no allies.
The ghost of Walter Scott appeared beside me murmuring softly but insistently: "And ere the brig of turk was won, the headmost foeman rode alone."
Still I stared at the men I already considered former colleagues.
A wave of unworthy and unchristian contempt swept over me.
Mutt and Jeff.
Chicken Licken and Henny Penny.
Paul O'Mediocre and Henry Boneless.
I doubted the Johnston Press would have much use for either of them.
Not for long.
Their heads were almost touching above the coffee cups.
Hey Henry.
You thought I was a vile evil religionist ranting insanely about matters beyond me.
You were wrong.
At that moment I was the last law left in a world gone out of control.
And so I watched them.
The tame trade unionist and his affable radical acolyte galoot.
Earnestly waffling together in agreeable irrelevancy.
That was the last I ever saw of them.
They live now only in my memories.