august rain

Rain sleeting across the trees and ponds of Stephen Green.
I stand looking at the ducks.
A lone swan appears and moves towards me.
She is the only swan in the park.
She knows me well.
She stops right in front of me.
I bend down to her and she reaches towards my face.
I bless her.
There is a pulse in the universe.
I look up.
The prettiest Muslim girl in Dublin is taking my photograph.
I understand.
The swan was a gift to me in the rain from God.
Me and the swan are a gift from God to the Muslim girl.
And everything in the universe is rejoicing in the light of love.

do islamists dream of jihadi sheep

Heading for the Starbucks Cafe on Grafton Street.
It's the one situated above the Brown Thomas fashion store.
To get to the cafe you've got to walk through the glittering ranks of lingerie obsessed fashionistas in wondrous states of deshabille.
I mean they're in wondrous states of deshabille.
You don't have to be deshabilled to walk through them.
I'm telling you folks, Brown Thomas is like something out of Logan's Run.
These sylph like sexies wandering everywhere in skirts that barely exist.
Presumably Brown Thomas don't allow any of them to grow old.
They shoot twenty one year olds, don't they?
Passing through their paradise of the temporary, I feel wearied by the cult of youth.
It's like the whole environment and its denizens have been contrived to discommode me.
Yes.
These people are sticking it to me.
Sticking it.
I voyage to the far interior where Starbucks is posited and check that Shouty McGrew is not on duty.
Shouty McGrew is the only Irish member of staff at this particular Starbucks.
His stock in trade is shouting at the customers while clearing the tables.
He approaches a table and yells: "Do you mind if I take this cup?"
And he looks at you positively daring you to mind.
If you're in near closing time, you'll see him going to each table shouting: "We're closing in five minutes."
And then he adds in a truculent snarl as if daring anyone to oppose him: "Alright?"
Clearly he's over compensating for some deep rooted insecurity.
He should cut down on his red meat.
But I'm not his therapist.
Low life scruff.
Sticking it to me.
All this is typical Starbucks.
No sooner do I get fond of one of their cafes, than they appoint some scrote to manage it.
I mean about ninety percent of their cafes in Dublin are staffed by absolutely lovely people, ie foreign nationals, who work hard for a living and still manage to raise a smile for the customers.
But there's always about ten percent that are either Irish scruff like Shouty, or worse, resentful Arab blokes full of anger at the injustices of life which have compelled them to become waiters serving people they don't consider human.
Starbucks has a genius for recruiting these types and putting them in those of their cafes I like to frequent.
Having moved Bald Joe, their last living legend thief Paddy Whack Irish lowlife out of the Starbucks on Dawson Street, they've replaced him with a bloody Mussie.
I'm telling you these people are definitely sticking it to me.
The Mussie manager in Dawson Street has a marvellous clear cut British accent that is always one octave away from being a sneer.
He never greets me with an hello.
He always says: "Are you alright Sir?"
With a faint pitying smile and a slightly raised eyebrow.
Sticking it!
Okay okay.
I can't be completely sure.
He may just be a very polite very clear spoken fellow with a supercillious Brit accent whose favoured greeting is: "Are you alright Sir? Oh there goes my eyebrow again."
But I'll tell you what.
I think he's sticking it to me.
And I've gotten tired trying to figure out for certain.
So today I'm on Grafton Street.
Running the gamut of Irish scruff.
Here's a hint for you Starbucks.
The reason you lost five million quid last year in Ireland, at a time when hundreds of thousands of people are leaving the pubs in search of cafes, is because you're employing: (a) low life Irish scruff like Shouty McGrew and thievin Baldy Joe who shout at and/or rob your customers, or (b) you're employing Arab scruff who are sticking it to me.
Sticking it.
I banish these thoughts from my mind.
No sign of Shouty McGrew so here I stay.
Presently I'm sitting at a window seat bathing in a pool of peace amid the hubbub of afternoon coffee quaffers.
Two Black Jacket Muslims arrive and sit opposite me.
I kid you not.
The Black Jackets is a Muslim crime gang Al Qaeda franchise which has been steadily extending its grip on the streets of Dublin.
I don't like them much.
The two in Starbucks make strenuous efforts to attract my attention.
All flashing teeth, sudden bursts of loud lingo, vague hand gestures.
Since my mother died ten months ago I have enjoyed a certain spiritual detachment from the vexations of the world in general and the boorishness of young Muslim males in particular.
Now I drink my coffee slowly as a spiritual exercise.
A rueful smile gilds my rugged McGyverish features.
I can hardly blame Starbucks for the demeanour of its clientele.
But a part of me knows this is all Starbucks fault.
They're sticking it to me.
Again.
Sticking it.

fantome

rose scent night takes the house
i sit in the front room
the world was made for the shroud
i am alone
but being alone know not peace
nor loneliness if such you call
for tonight is a night of ghost
familial phantoms fill the hall

peter hayes with an outsize pig
best of breed at the county fair
middle of summer 1896
great great grandfather

john healy pale and gaunt
staring down a charging horse
bringing the wayward animal to a halt
fifty years before my birth

granny berney floury hands
mixing up chicken slops
here's tuppence for being good
now run down to the shops

all night i've sat with the ghosts
while time and tide flowed soft
knowing not where i'll go
whence i came is good enough

the way we were

(This is not the Saddam Hussein story. Not even the way he told it. This is the way it was.)
*****

Scholars agree that at some time in the early twenty first century, collossal brainbox James Healy was writing a humour column for a now defunct provincial newspaper. They remain divided however as to whether his column was truly a masterpiece of sublime artistic resonance, or merely a series of rehashed jokes lifted from old episodes of Fawlty Towers. The recent discovery of a document which some claim is a genuine Heelers column circa the year 2002, has sent shockwaves through the hallowed halls of Academe. The whole Heelers as genius/Heelers as looball debate has been reignited with an increasing polarisation of opinion forcing even the moderates in liberal arts faculties at universities across Europe to choose a side. The present document was reputedly discovered under a cushion in a Starbucks Cafe in Budapest. Its age is in doubt although it appears to have been written prior to the western intervention in Iraq. Is it genuinely the work of James Healy? Or is it a cheap forgery dreamed up by CIA spooks determined to discredit him? You the readers must decide.

SADDAM COMES CLEAN
by James Healy

Saddam Hussein let out a long low sigh of contentment.
He was sitting in a gold plated bath in a sea of bubbles with his favourite rubber duck floating nearby.
From the window he could see his Republican Guard drilling in the courtyard below. Occasionally the sound of an Islamic marching song drifted up to his ears.
It was Thursday morning in Iraq.
The great dictator had just been handed the latest copy of the Leinster Lootheramawn, freshly delivered on a gold plated tray, by a member of his palace staff who quickly withdrew.
A little known fact about Saddam is that part of his Thursday morning ritual is to sit alone in his bath reading the aforementioned periodical while smoking a big cigar.
It's the only time he truly relaxes.
As we join him he is chuckling throatily to himself and occasionally emitting little exclamations of approval.
"Ho, ho, ho, that Uncle Scutch," he says. "What a guy, him and his one liners, ho, ho, ho. And the Mammy even I wouldn't mess with her. Ha, ha, ha. I wonder will Paddy Pup be in this week's episode. He is such a scamp. Ah life is good."
Saddam's reveries might have continued thusly for quite some time if he had been left undisturbed.
But there came a sudden commotion from the corridor outside.
A shrill voice shouted "Weapons Inspectors."
Next minute the door burst open.
A group of civil servant types, sporting grey western three piece suits and clutching important looking note pads, flooded into Saddam's bathroom.
They began to peer into various nooks and crannies: the sink, the medicine cabinet, the loo.
The great dictator looked briefly aghast.
"By the beard of the prophet," he exclaimed. "I'm having a bath."
The weapons inspectors were being led by an American called Larry Boobenstein.
Larry is most notable (and this bit is true by the way) for having been a founder member of the California Sado Masochist and Leather Pleasure Society.
He is not the sort of guy you normally expect Saddam to be entertaining in his bathroom.
Larry looked at Saddam.
Saddam looked at Larry.
"Is this absolutely necessary?" growled the leader of Iraq, and you might have detected a threatening note in his voice as he said it.
"The UN resolutions entitle us to look everywhere," sniffed Larry primly sounding a bit like Benny Hill.
The weapons inspectors clustered around the bath while Saddam began to look increasingly uneasy.
"Is that a cruise missile in those suds or are you just pleased to see us?" quipped Larry mischievously.
Saddam to his lasting credit found himself quite incapable of speech.
The dictator of Iraq is a genuine macho man but like many ex Newbridge College students he's also mildly homophobic.
Larry's innuendos were pushing him to the limit.
Suddenly Saddam remembered the pearl handled assassin's dagger which he keeps concealed beneath his left testicle for use in emergencies.
This was an emergency if ever there was one.
He reached for the dagger but decided against.
Whatever about wiping out whole villages in Kurdistan with poison gas while the world looks on, there might be complications if he despatched a team of weapons inspectors in his own bathroom.
Some dead bodies can't be swept under the carpet.
The moment passed.
The UN team departed from the bathroom.
Somewhat sheepishly it must be said, and clearly disappointed to have found nothing more deadly than a rubber duck. (They didn't realise the duck contained Saddam's personal stash of enriched uranium.)
The supreme ruler prepared to return to his newspaper.
A gold plated phone beside the bath trilled insistently.
The great dictator answered it.
An agitated panicky voice instantly assailed his eardrums.
It was Kareem Abdul Jabber, commander of an anti aircraft radar installation in the northern no fly zone.
"Greetings excellency," babbled Jabber. "The American and British imperialists have just bombed us again."
"What happened this time?" sighed Saddam.
"Well," said Jabber, "I put on the kettle to make a cup of tea. The American and British imperialists were flying overhead and detected it. They thought we had switched on our radar to target their planes. When the smoke cleared I found myself sitting in a kitchen without any roof or walls. The electricity is gone as well. I can't even boil the bloody kettle."
Saddam did his best to soothe the nerves of his shattered commander, promising him a medal for bravery and whatnot.
Then he hung up and returned to his newspaper.
He was just starting to relax again when something drew his attention to the window.
He could still hear the Republican Guardsmen singing but the words no longer sounded like an Islamic marching song.
From his bath Saddam peered over the window ledge.
The cigar fell out of his mouth.
Larry Boobenstein was dancing with the Republican Guards in a semi circle.
The dance involved lots of body twisting and high kicks sort of like a Can Can.
They were singing a song that had been first released a decade earlier by those British imperialist actors Patrick McNee and Diana Rigg from the old Avengers television series.
Saddam could scarcely believe his ears.
The Republican Guard were singing: "All we've got are kinky boots, kinky boots, kinky boots."
As Saddam watched, Larry climbed to his feet and strolled towards the stables where at that moment Prime Minister Tariq Aziz (Who he? Ed) was trying to conceal an atomic bomb under some horse manure.
The great dictator could hear the conversation clearly.
"You can't go in there," said Tariq.
"Why not?" said Larry.
"Er, the horses have anthrax, I mean botulism, I mean, er, the flu," blustered Tariq with a note of desperation in his voice.
Larry slapped him playfully on the shoulder. (Very much the way the old British imperialist comedian Dick Emery used to slap people in his TV show.) The slap sent the Iraqi PM flying backwards into the manure heap.
"You are awful," said Larry. "But I like you."
From his vantage point at the window Saddam groaned in disbelief and sank back into the bath.
He reached for his gold plated phone.
A moment's feverish dialling and he was through to his old pal Colonel Muammar Quaddaffi.
"Howya Muammar, it's Saddam here," he said. "Have you read this week's Heelers column yet?"
Colonel Quaddaffi thought for a second.
"Is it the one where he contacts the girl in the Evening Herald lonely hearts ad and she turns out to be a prostitute?" he wondered.
"No, no, no, this week's," expostulated Saddam impatiently.
Colonel Quaddaffi admitted that he hadn't read it.
"I only get the Leader for the sports pages," he said apologetically.
Saddam got to the point.
"The axis of evil has a bad image," he declared. "But we can change that. We need to get Heelers to put us in his column and to portray us as funny quirky guys. If we get the public to like us, we can take some of the heat out of these insufferable weapons inspections."
There was a moment's silence.
"But how could we arrange such a thing?" murmured Muammar. "Heelers is a known imperialist sympathiser. They call him the CIA's man in Kildare. He is said to be incorruptible."
Saddam almost crowed with delight.
"I'm way ahead of you," he enthused. "I will despatch ten of my trained female agents to Ireland. My daughters of the golden dawn. They are the most seductive and deadly women in Iraq. I'm telling you Muammar what they can't do in a Burka isn't worth doing. They will make Heelers an offer he cannot refuse. And if he does refuse they'll kill him."
Colonel Quadaffi immediately assented to the plan and it was barely two hours later that Saddam found himself at Baghdad airport bidding farewell to the Daughters of the Golden Dawn as they set out on their latest mission.
"Go my daughters of darkness," he told them. "Seduce this Heeler the Peeler. Lure him with sensual delights so that he puts Muammar and me in his humour column and makes us seem like funny guys. Turn Heeler the Peeler into your slave. Nyah, ha, ha, ha, ha, ho, ho, ho, ho, hee, hee, hee, hee!"

what dreams may come

A dream.
My mother came to me.
She was crying.
She didn't speak.
Just cried.
In the dream I had no awareness that she had died ten months ago.
And she just kept crying.
Next minute she was gone and Tom Bermingham was standing there.
He is from a few miles outside my home town and is more recently deceased.
I barely knew him.
Maybe talked to him four or five times in my life.
In the dream I realized he had died a few months ago.
He seemed dapper and vibrant in a grey suit. His appearance was that of a particularly energetic old man.
I was quite pleased at the chance to interrogate him about the afterlife.
"You died," I began.
"Yes," he said.
"Is heaven real?" I enquired.
"It is," said he.
"Is Jesus real?" I pressed.
"He is," answered Tom Bermingham and then continued in colloquial Irelandese, "Sure haven't I just been talking to him! Sure amn't I talking to him every day!"
"Can you tell me anything else?" I pleaded.
"Not at the moment," said he.
I woke up.
I thought about the Mammy crying.
What on earth was going on?
I had no clear feeling that the dream was anything other than the workings of my imagination.
Maybe the subconscious yanking my chain.
Of course I've heard tales about people getting visits from dead relatives in order to give them some reassurance or comfort or advice.
Or according to a story told by the news reader Anne Doyle whose brother claimed to have met his dead mother walking down the fields, as a kind of preparation for something tough, in this case the brother's death by cancer.
In truth I very quickly knew what mine might mean, whether real or imagined.
She was crying about my growing estrangement from various family members.
"Ah Mammy why couldn't you have given me a bit of a sign if this is anything more than a dream?" I groaned out loud.
And in the recesses of my imagination I heard: "Didn't I bring Tom Bermingham!"

the last law left in a world gone out of control

Browsing through the newspaper rack at the Topaz garage on the Dublin road outside Naas.
I give a sudden shudder.
My eye has fallen on The Leinster Leader.
So they're still publishing it.
Five years after its takeover by collapsing Brit conglomerate The Johnston Press, and four years after the monumentally buffoonish decision to fire me.
The presses are still rolling.
Meaning the bankrupt banks are still lending em public money to keep the doors open.
With no real ill will, I calmly place a copy of Motor Cycle Weekly on top of the Leinster Leader pile.
Let's see if we can bring down the non existent readership another few copies.
For old time's sake!
I turn.
My eye falls on the top row of the magazine shelf.
Three porno mags are posited in plain view.
Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler.
Well who would have thunk it.
So there are afterall publications I hold in lower regard than the Leinster Leader.
With a faint fantastical smile playing about my handsome preraphaelite features, I gently remove a Leinster Leader from below Motor Cycle Weekly, and place it on the magazine rack so that it completely covers Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler.
You know what folks.
Mad Max was right.
One man can make a difference.

book review

Do not buy the pretentiously titled "25th December 1991, The Last Day Of The Soviet Union," by former Irish Times editor Conor Clery, who received a trophy Russian wife courtesy of the KBG and whose newspaper itself was a KGB run operation from at least the 1970's and whose contempt for both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, casting Gorby as hopelessly vain and Yeltsy as a pathetic drunk, is based on nothing more than Clery's own regret as a Soviet agent about the demise of atheistic Communism worldwide.

life's a riot at sky news

Watching the coverage of the England riots on Sky News.
A bunch of street gangs have broken cover and are laying waste large segments of the Capital and other cities.
The coverage is top heavy with respectful fawning omosach interviews with the looters, rioters, and burners of London.
I am reminded of the writer PJ O'Rourke's remarks viz a vis Northern Ireland, where he claimed that the IRA supporters were the most journalised bunch of people he'd ever met.
O'Rourke warmed to the Northies as people (Something I never did) but he reckoned every one of them, from the children, to the hoodlums, to the mafia godfathers, to the aged crones, every last one, had been trained by decades of media exposure to present themselves as the paragons of sociological victimhood.
So too with Sky's presentation of the rioters of London.
Pattycake interviews.
"Do you feel deprived by the injustices of our unfeeling capitalist society?"
"Yeah Man. That's it. I'm, like, so angry about society and stuff that I rape women, break people's jaws, shoot police officers, burn down hundred year old businesses, raze whole communities to the ground. Honest Man. I'm more of a victim than anybody."
Well folks, obviously it's time for Sky News to put its money where it's left wing principles are.
Presumably we'll be seeing hoodies on internships at Sky HQ any time now.
There'll be hoodies reading the news.
Hoodies presenting the weather.
Hoodies phoning in interviews with rioters.
Hoodies reporting from Libya.
And Hoodies making Sky's owner Rupert Murdock his morning cup of tea.
Personally I can't wait.

an open letter to martyn turner cartoonist with the hundred million dollar a year loss making irish times

Dear Martyn Turner.
A cartoon of yours was published in the Irish Times recently claiming that Hitler was Catholic.
For your information at no time in his adult life was Hitler a practicing Catholic.
He was in fact, like you, a practicing atheistic pseudo humanist who believed that Charles Darwin had completely explained reality and that Darwin's notion of survival of the fittest, and Karl Marx's notion that there is no God, entitled him to kill anyone he wanted to.
He didn't officially style himself a communist but atheistic Nazism is merely the flipside of your own atheistic Communism, both deriving their absolute authority for mass murder from Marx's contention that religion is the opium of the people.
Don't you agree?
Hitler, in terms of his philosophical and ideological mindset, was indistinguishable from you and most of the current staff members and board members at the Irish Times.
Your claim in your cartoon that Hitler was Catholic was obviously meant to imply that Catholocism somehow was responsible for his behaviour when it came to mass murder and the enslavement of nations.
Surely his behaviour must be correctly, completely, honestly and truly explained by recognising his absolute repudiation of Catholicism throughout his adult life and his advocacy of the same notions of reality that you advocate.
Your assertion that Hitler was Catholic smacks of gross dishonesty Martyn Turner.
If you can attribute any mass murderer's actions to the vestigial millieu into which he was born, why then you need never accept any criticism of your own atheistic pseudo humanism or  indeed accept any accountability accruing to that same atheistic pseudo humanism for the wholesale slaughters it has unleashed on this planet and continues to unleash to this day through abortion culture in the West and the continuance of various barbaric Communisms in Africa, South America, Burma, Vietnam, Laos and China in the East.
Every Commie was born into a culture, isn't that right Martyn Turner?
So you need never accept that the espoused Communism of Communists is responsible for their predilection for slaughter.
Isn't that what's going on here Martyn Turner?
Now you can dismiss Chairman Mao's mass murders, as nothing to do with his lifelong atheistic pseudo humanist communism.
You can ignore Chairman Mao's espousal of your own atheisms and blithely claim that Chairman Mao was a Buddhist.
After all, he was born one.
Nor need you ever admit that Josef Stalin's mass murders of Christians and others had anything to do with his atheistic Communism.
You can insist he did it all because in some strange way he was a Christian.
Afterall he too was born into a vaguely Christian millieu, Eastern Orthodox to be precise, so according to the standard of your grotesquely mendacious Hitler cartoon, you can claim that Stalin's murders, oppressions and enslavements, all occurred because of his Christianity.
Nothing to do with his rejection of God, the Bible, and Jesus.
No.
According to the great Martyn Turner, Joe Stalin was still a Christian because his parents had him baptised.
I repeat Stalin was never a Christian in his adult life or during his active political life.
He espoused through five decades of slaughter the precise Marxian Darwinian atheistic pseudo humanist Communism which is your own code of life Martyn Turner.
I put you on your honour to retract the malicious falsehood you sought to perpetrate against the ancient and beautiful Catholic Church by seeking to associate it with Hitler's demented atheism in your cartoon.
James Healy

meet the frizzles

I met Yvonne Frizell in the kitchen of an old communist friend of mine.
His home is in the dulcet heartland of South Kildare.
He has interesting friends.
Not just me.
This Mrs Frizell would qualify as interesting by anybody's standards.
Very interesting.
I had never met her before but my communist friend had mentioned her.
She runs a self styled charity out of Pakistan and is a personal friend of one of Izzat Khan, a Muslim ruler in a region of that country.
Years ago she adopted the Khan's special needs son and obtained an Irish passport for him.
I was fascinated to be meeting her.
My handsome preraphaelite features veritably glowed when I was shown into the sitting room and introduced.
I sensed good fooling in the offing.
She didn't know me from Adam.
I'd heard of her husband Old Man Frizzle too.
The great Irish painter James Flack who is also a Protestant pastor, once told me about a religious discussion he'd had with Old Man Frizzle, which had ended when Mr Flack remarked ironically: "It is a pleasure to meet a genuine anti Christ."
Old Man Frizzle wasn't here today.
Just the charity running wife and an adult son JJ.
To begin with, when Mrs Frizzle offered, I let her make me a cup of coffee.
It's always good for these fembos to start on the right note.
Let em know who's boss.
Arf arf.
Then I began to ask her the gentlest of questions about Pakistan.
It was a privilege for me to meet someone who knows the country from the ground up.
Even if she was misguided and wrong in her every analysis.
I could see she was enjoying my ever so subtle challenges.
"Well who do you think killled Benazir?" she cried suddenly.
I thought she had been trying to imply that her own husband or President Musharaff might have done it.
I answered gently: "Those who killed her were the people who could never hope to beat her in an election, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Nahwaz Shariff and your friends the Khans."
The conversation became momentarily quite intense.
When the air cleared I tried a new tack.
"What motivates you to run your charity?" I wondered. "Is it love of God? Love of humanity? Love of Karl Marx?"
"Well I'm not a communist," she replied.
"Really?" I grinned.
"I'm a humanist atheist," she insisted.
"Ah, the rebranded communists," I rejoined.
Mrs Frizzle is as British and as left wing as Tony Benn but I'd been told she was Irish.
My debate with her was direct enough but polite enough.
We both talked.
We both listened.
"You don't believe in God?" I said.
"No," she answered.
"You don't believe in anything at all?" I persisted.
"Nothing," she shot back.
I laughed warmly.
She eyed me keenly.
"That's a strange thing to do," she mused. "To laugh when someone tells you there beliefs."
"There's no badness in it," I told her. "I'm only trying to inspire you to greater frankness."
We talked some more about Pakistan.
"How can you an intellectual atheistic communist humanist tolerate the way Muslims treat women?" I probed.
Her turn to laugh.
"You believe too much of what you see on television," she told me. "In Pakistan, the woman comes home, throws off the Burka, and runs the house."
I held the silence for a moment.
"No she doesn't," I said softly.
"Actually she does," replied Mrs Frizell.
"No," I said. "In Pakistan women live in abject slavery to a barbaric and depraved and demeaning Islamic culture. The men there murder thousands of women every year. They murder them rather than divorce them. And the favoured method of murder is burning them alive in accidents staged with heating stoves."
Me and Mrs Frizell were really getting to know each other.
I was becoming more and more fascinated by what she was teaching me.
How could a leftist intellectual consort with Muslims and not see the inherent barbarity of their society?
How could she encounter that society directly yet insist that my criticisms stemmed from misinformation gleaned off some mythical television programme.
If there is anti Muslim reportage on any television station in Ireland, Britain, America, Europe, Russia or China, I've yet to see it.
But my question stands.
How and why have liberal left wing communists, now styling themselves atheistic humanists, how and why, I say, have they been willing to turn a blind eye to the murderous psychoses of Muslim society.
Yes.
I was astonished and privileged to meet Mrs Frizell.
I'd have talked to her for hours.
And though you wouldn't know it from this account, she gave as good as she got.
Our conversation was interrupted by her twenty year old son JJ.
He had witnessed my bearding of his mother in a communist den with growing unease.
Presently I went a tease too far.
I said: "I can never understand how you communists can hold your heads up to sneer at the Catholic Church when you yourselves have been responsible in a few short years for more mass murders than any religion, tribe, culture or ethnicity.in the history of humanity. In the twentieth century alone you gave us Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot. so many hundreds of millions of murders. How on earth do you look at yourselves in the mirror?"
A primeval roar erupted from Mrs Frizell's son.
JJ was on his feet.
"That is the greatest nonsense I have ever heard in my life," he screamed calmly.
It was a Kodak moment.
It didn't end there either.
He kept shouting.
It is not easy to nonplus me gentle readers. But in that moment the noble Heelers looked a tad above mildly nonplussed.
"Hitler was a Catholic," roared JJ somewhere in the midst of his other roars.
Apparently my egotism outweighs any of my other qualities because after weighing up my options for a few moments, I answered him just as loudly.
"At no time in his adult life was Hitler a Catholic," I asserted. "You might as well say Chairman Mao was a Buddhist or Joe Stalin was Eastern Orthodox or that you yourself are some sort of Christian because you happen to have been born in a Christian milieu. Hitler's rise to power took place solely because Stalin was sponsoring a Communist revolution in Germany. Whoever won the civil war was either going to be Communist or more violent than the Communists. That's the social dynamic that created Hitler. A society where two groups are trying to shoot their way to power will tend to generate a rulership from the most ruthless group. Stalin the Communist created the societal dynamic which stampeded the Germans into the arms of Hitler the Nazi. And Hitler's Naziism was a specifically anti Catholic creed. The ideological foundations that inspired Hitler came specifically from Karl Marx and Charlie Darwin. Hitler took Marx's atheism and socialism and Darwin's notion of survival of the fittest, and came up with the cult of the master race."
None of this was audible.
My protagonist was still shouting.
I'd get out a sentence.
He'd shout as though I hadn't spoken.
Still I was eager to let him know he was in a ball game.
"Hitler was Catholic," he insisted again. "He said he was going to throw the serpents out of the temple. It's in Mein Kampf. I read it."
"The phrase throw the serpents out of the temple is not an accepted measure of Catholicity anywhere on the planet earth outside of your head," I thundered back, sounding no doubt like Mini Mouse.
Abruptly the room emptied.
My commie hosts and another leftist who had been silently watching the shenannigans, or discussion as we call it in Ireland, took fright and exited post haste.
It was an elegiac and moving scene.
The hardened communists departed that room like startled fawns bounding up the mountain path.
All that was left was me, Mrs Frizell, and JJ.
I began to feel a bit lonely.
I was wondering why everyone had exited.
More specifically, I was wondering was I in some danger.
I am too good looking to get beaten up by people I don't know over debating points they haven't understood.
JJ was still shouting.
"Hitler was a Catholic," seemed to be the running theme.
Good show old bean.
In truth he had me.
Hitler was indeed born and baptized into the Catholic faith.
In the same way that Chairman Mao was born a Buddhist.
And Joe Stalin was born Eastern Orthodox.
Of course all of them committed their mass murders after rejecting all religious conceptions of reality and converting to various forms of atheistic humanism, whether Nazi, Commie, or Maoist/Nazi/Commie.
No way I could make the kid listen.
Reluctantly, I decided to exit the battlefield.
There was no longer any audience.
No hearts and minds to win.
JJ himself hadn't heard a word I'd said.
Mrs Frizell grabbed my arm as I got up to go.
"What about the crusades?" she said.
She said it gently, almost with regret, as if she too would have liked the conversation to go on longer.
I smiled beatifically.
The crusades would have to wait for another day.
I stepped smartly from the room and from there into the street.
Walking quickly.
I was a bit disappointed that I hadn't landed any intellectual punches on the young man.
He had stopped me in my tracks.
I had indeed quit the field.
Ah yes.
Truly I'm an egotist.
Egotist first.
Seeker after truth second.
I hadn't the slightest concern for JJ's immortal soul.
I only wanted to beat him in the shouting match.
God forgive me.
I walked the streets of old Athy.
Smiling ruefully.
Regrets.
I had a few.
I might have learned some more about Pakistan if I'd been able to extend the conversation with his mother.
But the young man had seen me off.
A thought struck me.
There's greatness there.
Greatness in the young man.
Greatness in JJ Frizell.
Of course there was.
No one else has ever shut me up.
In my whole life.
Seriously folks.
I don't know when I've ever withdrawn from a debate, or even from a shouting match, without at least forcing an honorable draw.
Yet I withdrew from this one.
It means something.
What had the kid done to make me run away?
Nothing much.
A bit of shouting.
Megaphone on broadcast, not on listen.
I'd adjudged there was no point continuing because I had no fanbase in the room.
There had to be more.
Normally I'd have continued for the hell of it.
The suspicion crystallised.
I had the clearest feeling now.
I had just played a walk on part in the life of a great man.
And some part of me had sensed the greatness and  walked away.
A walk on part in the life of a great man while he was still a young unknown.
Hilarious no.
I grinned into the sleety rain of Main Street.
What will he be?
A villain or a saint.
One of these.
Destiny had not yet decided when I crossed swords with him.
Back at the ranch (The Chateau De Healy surely - Ed note) I flicked on the sexevision.
Sky News were sneering about the Muslim President of Egypt who is facing an insurrection from Muslim terrorists at the moment.
I watched bemused.
Not for the first time I wondered why on earth these guys at Sky were rooting for the Jihadi's.
A penny dropped.
I thought of Mrs Frizell insisting women in Pakistan were bosses in their own homes.
I thought of her friendship with a Muslim feudal despot, a despot who derides the elected President of Pakistan while gleefully perpetuating the enslavement of his own people to a 1500 year old barbarism which declares him Khan.
I thought of her lifelong commitment to humanist atheism.
You know what.
She's not so different from the average leftist journalist at Sky News, CNN, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Times Of London, The Irish Times. Time Magazine, Newsweek, BBC, Channel Four or any other near bankrupt readerless viewerless media group you care to mention.
They're all card carrying humanist atheists too.
It seems that all these humanist atheists, once they stop believing in God, are still possessed of an innate need to worship something.
Anything.
Most of them spent the Cold War rooting for the Russians.
And when the fascists were in vogue, fascist atheistic humanists all over Europe were worshipping the German superman.
How on earth can their modern successors, all these card carrying leftist atheists in the media and among the pseudo intelligentsia, have switched so smoothly from trying to hand us over to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, to trying to hand us over to the Muslim Caliphate?
I stared at Sky News as realisation dawned.
"My God," I breathed. "They've found a new master race."