an open letter to to american film maker michael moore

How's that film coming on about Barack Obama bombing the Boston Marathon?

today they said

Enda Kenny: "I am a Catholic. But I am not a Catholic Taoiseach."

James Healy: "Enda Kenny is wrong on both counts. He is neither a Catholic, nor is he a Taoiseach (ie Prime Minister) of Ireland. Enda Kenny is a Denis O'Brien-a-lic. And he is the Prime Minister of Denis O'Brien Land. That is to say although he is de facto Prime Minister of Ireland, he is so solely on behalf of Denis O'Brien. He is the Prime Minister who refuses to take action against Denis O'Brien on foot of a Judicial Enquiry which found that Denis O'Brien had founded his multi billion dollar fortune by bribing a member of Enda Kenny's Fine Gael party called Michael Lowry while Michael Lowry was a Minister in a previous Fine Gael government. Through million dollar bribes to Michael Lowry, Denis O'Brien was able to obtain, effectively free of charge, licences to provide mobile phone services in Ireland which should have cost him ten billion dollars. I kid you not. So Enda Kenny is the Prime Minister who protects Denis O'Brien's interests while impoverishing the nation. Enda Kenny is the Prime Minister who simply ignores the fact that his major sponsor Denis O'Brien obtained his multi billion dollar fortune by stealing it from the Irish people. Enda Kenny is the Prime Minister who refuses to arrest Denis O'Brien and seize the assets Denis O'Brien stole from Ireland. Enda Kenny is the Prime Minister who turns a blind eye to Denis O'Brien's infamous subverting of the Irish parliamentary system through inducements to Michael Lowry to give him mobile phone contracts for a few dollars that should have cost him a few billion dollars. And  Enda Kenny is the Prime Minister who used public money to nationalise collapsed gangster banks which had gone bust lending money to Denis O'Brien's so called Independent Newspapers company and having nationalised those worthless banks supposedly on behalf of you and me, and certainly using our money and our country's capital and borrowings drawn against the next hundred generations of our citizenry, to do it, Enda Kenny is the Prime Minister who then promptly permitted those same collapsed gangster banks to write off hundreds off millions of dollars that Denis O'Brien's Independent Newspapers company owed them. I kid you not. And Enda Kenny's inaction on all Denis O'Brien's myriad criminal activities, is the sole reason Denis O'Brien's bankrupt readerless anti Catholic Irish Independent Newspaper (part owned admittedly by another equally corrupt Fine Gael financier called Tony O'Reilly) prints a photograph of Enda Kenny every day and usually two or three, along with a folksy cartoon at least once a week and often two or three times a week, portraying Enda Kenny, this risible weak vacuous venal hairstyle of a man, as a Statesmanlike Prime Minister, a Taoiseach mar dhea, of the Republic of Ireland. I say it again. He is a Taoiseach of the Republic of Denis O'Brien. Nothing more. Nothing less. These people are reducing us to the level of farm animals."

jabberwonky

Twas brillig and the slimeball Irish Independent newspaper
Did seek to ruin Cardinal Sean Brady for the sheer hell of it
All mimsy was the Irish government
Paying hundred thousand Euro salaries out of public money to a thousand freemasonic gangster bankers employed at worthless collapsed freemasonic gangster banks that the worthless gangster freemasonic Irish government had brought into public ownership and in so doing had spent Ireland into the Third World overnight all this while concealing the deaths, not the abuse of, the deaths of  two hundred, two hundred no less, children in government Health Board care in Ireland over the past ten years, that's two hundred that we know about, and note we're talking about the most recent ten years, not twenty years ago, not thirty years ago, not 1975, but the past ten years right up to the present day, focque me pink, you couldn't make it up

"Beware the Irish Independent son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch
Beware Paedophile Ian O'Doherty (so called because he falsely maliciously and malignly referred to the Catholic Church as a paedophile ring in the pages of the aforementioned slimeball Irish Independent) and shun
Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris' bandersnatch

He took his vorpal sword in hand
Long time the loathsome scruff he sought
So rested he by the bollocks tree
And stood a while in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood
The Irish Independent with eyes of flame
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood
And burbled as it came

One Two One Two and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker snack
He left it dead and with its head
He went gallumphing back

"And hast thou slain the Irish Independent
Come to my arms my beamish zunts
O frabjous day! Calloo! Callay!
What a shoure of useless cunz"

Twas brillig and the slimeball Irish Independent
Did casually destroy venerable men just for the hell of it
Mimsy was the Irish government
And the bankers just laughed

(First published 2013)

in an irish garden

A garden is like a poem.
You can work in it for five minutes.
You can work in it for a few hours.
You can hold it in your heart all day without doing any real work in it at all and return to it when you are ready.
You can work in it for longer.
You can work in it for days.
All week.
All month.
All year.
You can sit in it and simply savour what it is.
Weeds, buttercups, colour, sky and air
Or damnable rhodadendrons
Which languish there all year
And then flourish magnificently for a full five minutes
And don't start me on the eucalyptus
But begin.
Go find the garden that is for you.
And the time.
God will teach you while you work.
He'll show you harmonies.
And let you know you're part of his poem.
It doesn't all happen at once.
A garden is like a poem.
Sometimes you'll sow seeds and they won't grow.
You'll think I'm no good.
I can't do this.
Gardens are not my thing.
And then a few of them will grow.
And you've learnt where to plant them.
Or when.
Or that gardens bring blessings without learning.
Or something else.
Maybe you've learnt nothing but the joy of a gentle surprise.
Sometimes flowers you thought dead come back to life a year later.
Sometimes the ones that died make room for nicer ones.
You realise not all the graces come at once.
God has his own pace.
He's bringing you into his harmonies..
Rhyming, free verse, or Shakespearian.
The choice is your own.
And his.
A garden is like a poem.
My father's roses are in bloom again.

the heelers diaries in america

SERMONS AND SERMONISERS

Ireland's greatest living poet is propping up a pew in Saint John the Evangelist Church in Boston USA.
On the podium, a Padre called Brian O'Hehir is droning sermoniferously on about something.
Father O'Hehir is supposedly quite well respected in liberal left wing circles.
Yawn.
Heelers is drowsing.
The lovely light of New England drenches the wooden church.
The world is far away.
After a few minutes my reverie is disturbed by a slight change in pitch from the speaker's voice.
He's upped it a notch.
Before I can get comfortable again, I hear the priest speak these words: "John Paul was an actor. If you think I'm wrong just ask the Russian Communists. He was an actor. That's what he was. Admittedly a great actor. But an actor. And Benedict. Well Benedict, whatever else you say about him, was no manager."
The noble Heelers perks up.
I interpret these remarks as subtle criticisms of previous Popes for whom I have a certain fondness.
(Every Irishman carries in his breast pocket the mitre of the Pope in Rome. - Ed note)
My curiosity is tweaked.
"The resignation of a Pope is no big deal," continues Father O'Hehir. "It's happened before. Bear in mind that people are living longer. And being head of the Catholic Church makes being head of Citibank look like managing a corner store. Benedict was a great Pope in many ways. But he was no manager. And this is a job for a younger man."
He now has my rapt attention.
Because it seems to me that he is reacting to a criticism re Benedict's resignation that no one has made.
It seems to me he is trying to head off any public perception that a coterie of leftists in the Curia had forced Benedict to resign.
No ouster here.
Move along now folks.
"Maybe after all these thousands of years," says Father O'Hehir, "what the Catholic Church needs is a few MBA's at its head intsead of more guys with degrees in Theology."
I smile thinly.
So that's it.
The letters MBA indicate in this instance a person who has obtained a university qualification in Masters of Business Administration.
So Father O'Hehir thinks we need more people with MBA's running the Vatican.
You can understand his point of view.
After all they've done such  marvellous jobs running the banks and our countries into near absolute perdition.

signs of the times

The noble Heelers is sitting in an alcove at the chateau browsing through a Christian magazine styled The Curate's Diary.
He is reading an article in which the editor of The Curate's Diary suggests that the lightning which struck the Vatican at the moment Pope Benedict resigned was a sign of God's power and support for his church through a time of transition.
Now this one is a pickle.
Well bold readers.
I don't know much about much.
Initially I thought the lightning strike had probably been faked by someone using the Photoshop computer programme in an attempt to make idiots out of believing Christians by having them speculate as I am now speculating.
But if it really happened.
Lemme tell ya.
If it really happened and if it really was more than just coincidence.
Er.
Here is the news.
The tradition among believing Christians is that lightning striking a church may be a sort of celestial tip off that the church is under attack by satan,
There is no real tradition of interpreting a lightning strike on a church as a thumbs up.
One recent precedent immediately springs to mind.
In the 1980's lightning struck Durham Cathedral in England after a curiously relativist cleric was appointed Bishop within the Anglican Communion.
The Bishop of Durham later revealed that he did not believe in Jesus as God.
He referred to the Resurrection as "a conjuring trick with bones."
As for the lightning strike on the Vatican.
If it really happened and if it was more than just a coincidence..
The smart money would be on it being a sign that the Christian Church itself is under renewed attack.