a satire on the reporting style of independent newspapers

the pope looked old
the pope looked very old
he walked with a stick
he is a frail old pope
he is a doddery frail old pope
the pope looked old walked with a stick and was doddery
the pope will die soon
he will be an ex pope
the pope is old and dying and walking with a stick
how long more can he last
how much longer must we put up with him
he wearies us

not like tony o reilly
that gay young thruster
with his shock of golden hair
glinting in the sun
and those brilliant stories about his rugby playing days
written for him by hal roach
that never get tiring no matter how many times he tells them
and his wondrous humanitarianism
and and and
loved by millions

courtroom ireland

Gavin O'Reilly takes the stand.
He is a handsome, striking, figure of a man with piercing blue eyes and a shock of golden hair.
There is an odd nobility about him which is not lost on the packed courtroom.
One thinks immediately of some great storybook hero of old.
A swashbuckler.
Or a saint maybe.
A sense of morality.
Sublime personal charm.
An integrity beyond compromise.
Here is a lover of life.
But no less a lover of spiritual values
He exudes an aura of otherworldly glamour.
A strong man, he always but always, speaks in gentle tones.
He gives the impression of one who in spite of endless provocations is still struggling to believe that there is good in everyone.
He tells the Judge: "This has all been very trying for me. My cat isn't even called Tiddles. And my mistresses have up to now been able to pretend to be unaware of each other. As for BMW's. I wouldn't be seen dead in a BMW. Neither would my mistresses or my cat Tiddles or my wives or my progeny or my accomplices, I mean business associates, for that matter. And cocaine. Cocaine is so passe. Me and my friends use high grade crystal meth. The Heelers Diaries has hurt us deeply."

the news

Here is the news.
Every twenty years  or so in Ireland, some gangster announces that he has found oil off the western seaboard.
The gangster du jour thus obtains billions of dollars in public money from our useless and subverted government.
Members of the public are additionally gypped by a cadre of corrupt banks and stock brokers who with criminal mendacity and malice aforethought, advice ordinary citizens to put their retirement funds and other lump sum cash savings into the worthless oil shares issued by the gangster in question.
Everyone loses their money.
Except the gangster who has been paying himself and his family and his mistresses and his cat Tiddles, executive salaries out of all the investment capital his accomplices in government, the banks and the stock brokers have dishonestly persuaded honorable citizens to divvy up.
It's the perfect blag.
But these characters can only pull it off about once every twenty years.
It takes that long for people to forget the last time they were bankrupted by a criminal conspiracy disguised as an oil exploration company.
The family name of the gangsters claiming to find oil off our coast is inevitably O'Reilly.
The first name of the given member of the O'Reilly family may change.
In the 1980's, it was a certain Tony O'Reilly who impoverished a broad age range of Irish citizens, to wit a youthful generation of honorable potential entrepreneurs and a retirement age generation of decent elderly folk who were all equally gypped by the same Tony O'Reilly whose so called oil exploration company announced astonishing preliminary results from some oil prospect where of course no oil was.
The people got rode.
The O'Reillys got BMW's.
(And mansions and private islands and cocaine, the poor hoors. I wouldn't wish cocaine on my worst enemy. Which the O'Reillys very nearly are.)
The bankruptcy of the citizens of Ireland whose funds were invested by the corrupt government, stockbrokers and banks of this country in a worthless gangster shell company styling itself with malign mendacious optimism Atlantic Resources, that bankruptcy I say, did at least keep the O'Reilly family in pin money, providing as I've noted above, BMW's, islands, etc etc, for their wives, mistresses and cats Tiddles.
To be quite clear.
I am saying that the chief fake oil exploration company gangster of the 1980's was Tony O'Reilly.
And this year's gangster is called Gavin O'Reilly.
Ah yes.
The conjobs of the father will be visited upon the peasantry by the conjobs of the son.
That old gag.
Gavin O'Reilly's fake exploration company is called Providence Resources.
This week the O'Reillys are announcing in their bankrupt Irish Independent newspaper, that they have found oil off the coast of Ireland.
I would counsel the entire human race to take any such announcement from any company with any such link to the O'Reillys, with a pinch of salt.
Here's an idea,
Just once, let's all tell the O'Reillys to get lost.
I mean, tell em to get lost in the one way that really matters, ie by establishing a political party which they do not own and which does not serve their interests and which will not allow the Irish people or nation to ever again be reduced to the level of farm animals merely to keep hideous saville row suit wearing scruff like the O'Reillys in the style to which they have become accustomed.
I mean I don't want to go casting no aspoyshuns.
Let's not let our current corrupt national socialist Fine Gael Labour Party combo government, fresh from closing Ireland's embassy to the Vatican, seizing Catholic Church run schools, instructing Irish pharmacies to give abortion pills to children no questions asked and right this moment introducing legislation to compel Irish doctors to perform abortions in Irish hospitals, let's not let this shower I tells ee, remortgage our nation in order to borrow additional billions of dollars against all our futures or impose every skyrocketting levels of taxation on Irish households, merely to finance the O'Reillys latest fake oil exploration company or their collapsed newspaper group, or their BMW's, or their islands, or their cocaine, or the lifestyles of their wives, or their mistresses or their cats Tiddles.

an open letter to russian president vladimir putin about the mysterious death in london of russian billionaire boris berezovszky

God is watching you.



***
cf: David Belinski writing in his book The Devils Delusion.
In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of  Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.
Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. "God is watching what you are doing," he said.
And then he was shot dead.

does monica leech dream of electric hundred grands

Yes.
Yes she does.

graveyard

the fronded chestnut tree
rears over long grass
shadows flit and whisper
of what is and what is past
and in the field of souls
my grandfather rests at last

i will be seeing him still
some time the city crowds upon me
he'll raise a walking stick to a thistle
call his dog to heels
cry glory and whistle
whistle down the years

can you feel the softness
of the mist upon your face
or sense the shadows brooding
when the twilight whispers peace
then know that ancient mysteries
lie hidden in the trees

independent newspapers conversion to catholicism

This week's coverage in the virulently anti Catholic Irish Independent newspaper of Christian celebrations of the festival of Easter were so twee as to beggar belief.
No seriously.
It was all cutesy cutesy niceness and sweet sweet sweet pious faux faux faux Catholic apple pie.
For the first time in forty years the Irish Independent has apparently decided it can mention the Catholic Church without immediately trying to label it a progenitor, harbourer and concealer of sex abuse.
Nice of them I'm sure.
The Irish Independent still publishes a photo every day of bigoted anti Catholic Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny.
It does this because Enda Kenny, a weak vacuous haistyle of a bigot, now controls the bankrupt banks to which the Irish Independent owes a billion dollars.
By not collecting the debt Independent Newspapers owes to the banks, the same bankrupt worthless banks which Enda Kenny has used our money to nationalise, the same worthless morally bankrupt Enda Kenny ensures that we all continue to live in poverty while paying the mortgage on mansions occupied by Independent Newpapers robber baron proprietors Denis O'Brien and Tony O'Reilly, esquires.
Yes Enda Kenny is daily inventing new and more extortionate taxes for the citizenry to pay merely in order to keep the neo feudalist O'Reillys and the politician bribing O'Briens in mansions.
(And to put petrol in their BMW's. - Ed note.)
Still.
That's democracy I suppose.
We all pay the bills for corrupt bankrupt media tycoons.
Hoo baby.
But the Irish Independent has indeed ceased its own culture war against the Catholic Church.
Or more correctly stated: The Irish Independent has recalibrated its culture war against the Catholic Church.
There ya go.
The Irish Independent has adopted a new corporate strategy of posing Catholic.
After forty years of all out war against the faith, forty years trying to murder the reputations of venerable priests and nuns and bishops, forty years of elevating thoroughgoing scoundrels such as soviet era socialist infiltrator Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, after forty years of denying the very generation of young people who need the Church and her ethics most any access whatsoever to those ethics, after forty years championing sex culture, euthanasia culture, whoredom culture, and the wanton killing of unborn babies, after forty years of atheising Ireland, halleluiah, praise the lord, and pass the ammunition, we are now treated to the spectacles of fervourless dessicated clapped out readerless Independent Newspaper harridans like Miriam O'Donohoe, Fiona Looney et al (Particularly Al. I hate her.) proclaiming in print their proprietorship of the faith of our fathers through such cosmically insincere oleaginous mendacious fripperies as: "my church," "the church I love," "the church of my heart" and so on.
Show me the way to the vomitorium.
The Irish Independent is posing Catholic.
The Sunday Independent, traditionally the most hatefilled anti clerical rag of Independent Newspapers crassly anti Catholic publications, last week even lifted a story idea from this very blog warning about the louche sexual activities being promoted for teenagers by a government sponsored health board using public money on a website styled Spun Out.
I kid you not.
I say it here, it comes out there.
(Incidentally the Spun Out webite's advice to teenagers re staging orgies has not led to the removal of its adverts from the teenagers noticeboard which I recently vandalised in Kilcullen Parish Centre. Strange days indeed. The anti Catholic Sunday Independent wishes to pose as agreeing with me on these issues but the local yokels are just too cool to care.)
And Independent Newspapers is posing Catholic.
Who wudda thunk it.
You know what folks.
Personally I preferred it when the bigoted abortionist contrareceiving divorcenik hedonist child corrupting sex abuse concealing atheistic freemasonic bolshevick Tony O'Reilly worshipping anti Catholic heroes of Independent House were doing their utmost to destroy our ancient beautiful and true religion from without.
I am much more disquieted by their current attempts to destroy the Catholic Church from within.

kilcullen easter

the lambing time
evanescent leaves
provincial poets stitching worn out ryhymes
into patchwork quilted semaphores of praise
all of these
mist like matting on muddy fields
old men rejoicing in campaniles
all of these
everything that breathes is on its knees
for the coming of the lord
peace